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Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +00007What's New in Python 2.5 alpha 1?
8=================================
9
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
Guido van Rossumd0641422005-02-03 15:01:24 +000050- Applied a security fix to SimpleXMLRPCserver (PSF-2005-001). This
51 disables recursive traversal through instance attributes, which can
52 be exploited in various ways.
53
Martin v. Löwis1d11de62005-01-29 13:29:23 +000054- Bug #1110478: Revert os.environ.update to do putenv again.
55
Thomas Hellerd6c6e222005-01-20 19:20:16 +000056- Bug #1103844: fix distutils.install.dump_dirs() with negated options.
57
Martin v. Löwis22b457e2005-01-16 08:40:58 +000058- os.{SEEK_SET, SEEK_CUR, SEEK_END} have been added for convenience.
59
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +000060- Enhancements to the csv module:
61
62 + Dialects are now validated by the underlying C code, better
63 reflecting it's capabilities, and improving it's compliance with
64 PEP 305.
65 + Dialect parameter parsing has been re-implemented to improve error
66 reporting.
67 + quotechar=None and quoting=QUOTE_NONE now work the way PEP 305
68 dictates.
69 + the parser now removes the escapechar prefix from escaped characters.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +000070 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the writer now tests for numeric
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +000071 types, rather than any object than can be represented as a numeric.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +000072 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the reader now casts unquoted fields
73 to floats.
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +000074 + reader now allows \r characters to be quoted (previously it only allowed
75 \n to be quoted).
Andrew McNamarac89f2842005-01-12 07:44:42 +000076 + writer doublequote handling improved.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +000077 + Dialect classes passed to the module are no longer instantiated by
78 the module before being parsed (the former validation scheme required
79 this, but the mechanism was unreliable).
80 + The dialect registry now contains instances of the internal
81 C-coded dialect type, rather than references to python objects.
82 + the internal c-coded dialect type is now immutable.
83 + register_dialect now accepts the same keyword dialect specifications
84 as the reader and writer, allowing the user to register dialects
85 without first creating a dialect class.
86 + a configurable limit to the size of parsed fields has been added -
87 previously, an unmatched quote character could result in the entire
88 file being read into the field buffer before an error was reported.
Andrew McNamara31d88962005-01-12 03:45:10 +000089 + A new module method csv.field_size_limit() has been added that sets
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +000090 the parser field size limit (returning the former limit). The initial
91 limit is 128kB.
Andrew McNamara7f2053e2005-01-12 11:17:16 +000092 + A line_num attribute has been added to the reader object, which tracks
93 the number of lines read from the source iterator. This is not
94 the same as the number of records returned, as records can span
95 multiple lines.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +000096 + reader and writer objects were not being registered with the cyclic-GC.
97 This has been fixed.
98
Brett Cannone6539c42005-01-08 02:43:53 +000099- _DummyThread objects in the threading module now delete self.__block that is
100 inherited from _Thread since it uses up a lock allocated by 'thread'. The
101 lock primitives tend to be limited in number and thus should not be wasted on
102 a _DummyThread object. Fixes bug #1089632.
103
Raymond Hettinger97db05d2005-01-07 08:15:41 +0000104- The imghdr module now detects Exif files.
105
Raymond Hettinger6065d322004-12-20 23:51:53 +0000106- StringIO.truncate() now correctly adjusts the size attribute.
107 (Bug #951915).
108
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000109- locale.py now uses an updated locale alias table (built using
110 Tools/i18n/makelocalealias.py, a tool to parse the X11 locale
111 alias file); the encoding lookup was enhanced to use Python's
112 encoding alias table
113
Raymond Hettinger3557f422004-12-07 12:02:02 +0000114- moved deprecated modules to Lib/lib-old: whrandom, tzparse, statcache.
115
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000116- the pickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
117 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
118
Brett Cannon84667c02004-12-07 03:25:18 +0000119- optparse now optionally imports gettext. This allows its use in setup.py.
120
Raymond Hettinger3489cad2004-12-05 05:20:42 +0000121- the pickle module no longer uses the deprecated bin parameter.
122
Raymond Hettinger1bc82f82004-12-05 03:58:17 +0000123- the shelve module no longer uses the deprecated binary parameter.
124
Raymond Hettinger6c92d762004-12-05 03:28:00 +0000125- the pstats module no longer uses the deprecated ignore() method.
126
Raymond Hettingerf3fa9462004-12-05 01:58:09 +0000127- the filecmp module no longer uses the deprecated use_statcache argument.
128
Raymond Hettinger664347b2004-12-04 21:21:53 +0000129- unittest.TestCase.run() and unittest.TestSuite.run() can now be successfully
130 extended or overridden by subclasses. Formerly, the subclassed method would
131 be ignored by the rest of the module. (Bug #1078905).
132
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000133- heapq.nsmallest() and heapq.nlargest() now support key= arguments with
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000134 the same meaning as in list.sort().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000135
Walter Dörwald36733692004-12-22 12:50:50 +0000136- Bug #1076985: ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` now calls ``read()`` only
137 once when a size argument is given. This prevents a buffer overflow in the
138 tokenizer with very long source lines.
139
Andrew M. Kuchling3b585b32004-12-28 20:10:48 +0000140- Bug #1083110: ``zlib.decompress.flush()`` would segfault if called immediately
141 after creating the object, without any intervening ``.decompress()`` calls.
142
Skip Montanaro05885812005-01-16 20:48:27 +0000143- The reconvert.quote function can now emit triple-quoted strings. The
144 reconvert module now has some simple documentation.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000145
146Build
147-----
148
Brett Cannon516592f2004-12-07 00:42:59 +0000149- setup.py now uses the directories specified in LDFLAGS using the -L option
150 and in CPPFLAGS using the -I option for adding library and include
151 directories, respectively, for compiling extension modules against. This has
152 led to the core being compiled using the values in CPPFLAGS. It also removes
153 the need for the special-casing of both DarwinPorts and Fink for darwin since
154 the proper directories can be specified in LDFLAGS (``-L/sw/lib`` for Fink,
155 ``-L/opt/local/lib`` for DarwinPorts) and CPPFLAGS (``-I/sw/include`` for
156 Fink, ``-I/opt/local/include`` for DarwinPorts).
157
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000158
159C API
160-----
161
Raymond Hettinger66517482004-12-03 11:45:13 +0000162- Removed PyRange_New().
163
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000164
165Tests
166-----
167
Martin v. Löwis4d394df2005-01-23 09:19:22 +0000168- In test_os, st_?time is now truncated before comparing it with ST_?TIME.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000169
170Mac
171---
172
173
174
175Tools/Demos
176-----------
177
178
179
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000180What's New in Python 2.4 final?
181===============================
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000182
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000183*Release date: 30-NOV-2004*
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000184
185Core and builtins
186-----------------
187
188- Bug 875692: Improve signal handling, especially when using threads, by
189 forcing an early re-execution of PyEval_EvalFrame() "periodic" code when
190 things_to_do is not cleared by Py_MakePendingCalls().
191
192
Anthony Baxter4277ed82004-11-30 11:53:10 +0000193What's New in Python 2.4 (release candidate 1)
194==============================================
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000195
Anthony Baxter5cc727a2004-11-18 12:32:27 +0000196*Release date: 18-NOV-2004*
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000197
198Core and builtins
199-----------------
200
Tim Petersfb1ffb02004-11-08 04:30:21 +0000201- Bug 1061968: Fixes in 2.4a3 to address thread bug 1010677 reintroduced
202 the years-old thread shutdown race bug 225673. Numeric history lesson
203 aside, all bugs in all three reports are fixed now.
204
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000205
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000206Library
207-------
208
209- Bug 1052242: If exceptions are raised by an atexit handler function an
210 attempt is made to execute the remaining handlers. The last exception
211 raised is re-raised.
212
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000213- ``doctest``'s new support for adding ``pdb.set_trace()`` calls to
214 doctests was broken in a dramatic but shallow way. Fixed.
215
Tim Petersbbc0d442004-11-13 16:18:32 +0000216- Bug 1065388: ``calendar``'s ``day_name``, ``day_abbr``, ``month_name``,
217 and ``month_abbr`` attributes emulate sequences of locale-correct
218 spellings of month and day names. Because the locale can change at
219 any time, the correct spelling is recomputed whenever one of these is
220 indexed. In the worst case, the index may be a slice object, so these
221 recomputed every day or month name each time they were indexed. This is
222 much slower than necessary in the usual case, when the index is just an
223 integer. In that case, only the single spelling needed is recomputed
224 now; and, when the index is a slice object, only the spellings needed
225 by the slice are recomputed now.
226
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000227- Patch 1061679: Added ``__all__`` to pickletools.py.
Tim Peters90cf2122004-11-06 23:45:48 +0000228
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000229Build
230-----
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000231
Brett Cannon7d28e962004-11-07 01:19:00 +0000232- Bug 1034277 / Patch 1035255: Remove compilation of core against CoreServices
233 and CoreFoundation on OS X. Involved removing PyMac_GetAppletScriptFile()
234 which has no known users. Thanks Bob Ippolito.
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000235
236C API
237-----
238
Raymond Hettinger39e92ea2004-11-18 09:41:45 +0000239- The PyRange_New() function is deprecated.
240
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000241
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000242What's New in Python 2.4 beta 2?
243================================
244
Anthony Baxter9f41f3a2004-11-03 06:21:37 +0000245*Release date: 03-NOV-2004*
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000246
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000247License
248-------
249
250The Python Software Foundation changed the license under which Python
251is released, to remove Python version numbers. There were no other
252changes to the license. So, for example, wherever the license for
253Python 2.3 said "Python 2.3", the new license says "Python". The
254intent is to make it possible to refer to the PSF license in a more
255durable way. For example, some people say they're confused by that
256the Open Source Initiative's entry for the Python Software Foundation
257License::
258
259 http://www.opensource.org/licenses/PythonSoftFoundation.php
260
261says "Python 2.1.1" all over it, wondering whether it applies only
262to Python 2.1.1.
263
264The official name of the new license is the Python Software Foundation
265License Version 2.
266
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000267Core and builtins
268-----------------
269
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +0000270- Bug #1055820 Cyclic garbage collection was not protecting against that
271 calling a live weakref to a piece of cyclic trash could resurrect an
272 insane mutation of the trash if any Python code ran during gc (via
273 running a dead object's __del__ method, running another callback on a
274 weakref to a dead object, or via any Python code run in any other thread
275 that managed to obtain the GIL while a __del__ or callback was running
276 in the thread doing gc). The most likely symptom was "impossible"
277 ``AttributeEror`` exceptions, appearing seemingly at random, on weakly
278 referenced objects. The cure was to clear all weakrefs to unreachable
279 objects before allowing any callbacks to run.
280
Raymond Hettinger561fbf12004-10-26 01:52:37 +0000281- Bug #1054139 _PyString_Resize() now invalidates its cached hash value.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000282
283Extension Modules
284-----------------
285
Raymond Hettinger9047c8f2004-10-24 00:10:06 +0000286- Bug #1048870: the compiler now generates distinct code objects for
287 functions with identical bodies. This was producing confusing
288 traceback messages which pointed to the function where the code
289 object was first defined rather than the function being executed.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000290
291Library
292-------
293
Barry Warsaw8c72eae2004-11-01 03:52:43 +0000294- Patch #1056967 changes the semantics of Template.safe_substitute() so that
295 no ValueError is raised on an 'invalid' match group. Now the delimiter is
296 returned.
297
Raymond Hettinger2ef7e6c2004-10-24 00:32:24 +0000298- Bug #1052503 pdb.runcall() was not passing along keyword arguments.
299
Raymond Hettingerc64aab82004-10-20 08:21:57 +0000300- Bug #902037: XML.sax.saxutils.prepare_input_source() now combines relative
301 paths with a base path before checking os.path.isfile().
302
Raymond Hettingere54e7262004-10-20 07:17:16 +0000303- The whichdb module can now be run from the command line.
304
Brett Cannon8abcc5d2004-10-18 01:37:57 +0000305- Bug #1045381: time.strptime() can now infer the date using %U or %W (week of
306 the year) when the day of the week and year are also specified.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000307
Andrew M. Kuchling0d19bae2004-10-19 19:54:41 +0000308- Bug #1048816: fix bug in Ctrl-K at start of line in curses.textpad.Textbox
309
Andrew M. Kuchling66e80ba2004-10-20 11:56:15 +0000310- Bug #1017553: fix bug in tarfile.filemode()
311
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000312- Patch #737473: fix bug that old source code is shown in tracebacks even if
Hye-Shik Chang182ac852004-10-26 09:16:42 +0000313 the source code is updated and reloaded.
314
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000315Build
316-----
317
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000318- Patch #1044395: --enable-shared is allowed in FreeBSD also.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000319
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000320What's New in Python 2.4 beta 1?
321================================
322
Anthony Baxter6a587c12004-10-15 08:07:21 +0000323*Release date: 15-OCT-2004*
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000324
325Core and builtins
326-----------------
327
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000328- Patch #975056: Restartable signals were not correctly disabled on
Anthony Baxtere4f8a482004-10-13 14:55:56 +0000329 BSD systems. Consistently use PyOS_setsig() instead of signal().
330
Tim Peters263091e2004-10-10 01:58:44 +0000331- The internal portable implementation of thread-local storage (TLS), used
332 by the ``PyGILState_Ensure()``/``PyGILState_Release()`` API, was not
333 thread-correct. This could lead to a variety of problems, up to and
334 including segfaults. See bug 1041645 for an example.
335
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000336- Added a command line option, -m module, which searches sys.path for the
337 module and then runs it. (Contributed by Nick Coghlan.)
338
Raymond Hettinger2c31a052004-09-22 18:44:21 +0000339- The bytecode optimizer now folds tuples of constants into a single
340 constant.
341
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000342- SF bug #513866: Float/long comparison anomaly. Prior to 2.4b1, when
343 an integer was compared to a float, the integer was coerced to a float.
344 That could yield spurious overflow errors (if the integer was very
345 large), and to anomalies such as
346 ``long(1e200)+1 == 1e200 == long(1e200)-1``. Coercion to float is no
347 longer performed, and cases like ``long(1e200)-1 < 1e200``,
348 ``long(1e200)+1 > 1e200`` and ``(1 << 20000) > 1e200`` are computed
349 correctly now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000350
351Extension modules
352-----------------
353
Tim Peterscf8997f2004-10-01 02:13:16 +0000354- ``collections.deque`` objects didn't play quite right with garbage
355 collection, which could lead to a segfault in a release build, or
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000356 an assert failure in a debug build. Also, added overflow checks,
357 better detection of mutation during iteration, and shielded deque
358 comparisons from unusual subclass overrides of the __iter__() method.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000359
360Library
361-------
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000362
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000363- Patch 1046644: distutils build_ext grew two new options - --swig for
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000364 specifying the swig executable to use, and --swig-opts to specify
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000365 options to pass to swig. --swig-opts="-c++" is the new way to spell
366 --swig-cpp.
367
Anthony Baxter22dcf662004-10-13 15:54:17 +0000368- Patch 983206: distutils now obeys environment variable LDSHARED, if
369 it is set.
370
Andrew M. Kuchling518d3932004-10-12 15:32:10 +0000371- Added Peter Astrand's subprocess.py module. See PEP 324 for details.
Fredrik Lundh5b3687d2004-10-12 15:26:28 +0000372
Brett Cannon4f35c712004-10-06 02:11:37 +0000373- time.strptime() now properly escapes timezones and all other locale-specific
374 strings for regex-specific symbols. Was breaking under Japanese Windows when
375 the timezone was specified as "Tokyo (standard time)".
376 Closes bug #1039270.
377
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000378- Updates for the email package:
Brett Cannon06a30b02004-10-22 06:22:54 +0000379
Barry Warsaw418de1f2004-10-11 14:32:47 +0000380 + email.Utils.formatdate() grew a 'usegmt' argument for HTTP support.
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000381 + All deprecated APIs that in email 2.x issued warnings have been removed:
382 _encoder argument to the MIMEText constructor, Message.add_payload(),
383 Utils.dump_address_pair(), Utils.decode(), Utils.encode()
384 + New deprecations: Generator.__call__(), Message.get_type(),
385 Message.get_main_type(), Message.get_subtype(), the 'strict' argument to
386 the Parser constructor. These will be removed in email 3.1.
387 + Support for Python earlier than 2.3 has been removed (see PEP 291).
388 + All defect classes have been renamed to end in 'Defect'.
389 + Some FeedParser fixes; also a MultipartInvariantViolationDefect will be
390 added to messages that claim to be multipart but really aren't.
391 + Updates to documentation.
392
Raymond Hettinger596ba4d2004-09-24 03:41:05 +0000393- re's findall() and finditer() functions now take an optional flags argument
394 just like the compile(), search(), and match() functions. Also, documented
395 the previously existing start and stop parameters for the findall() and
396 finditer() methods of regular expression objects.
397
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000398- rfc822 Messages now support iterating over the headers.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000399
Martin v. Löwisf3c56112004-09-18 09:08:52 +0000400- The (undocumented) tarfile.Tarfile.membernames has been removed;
401 applications should use the getmember function.
402
Martin v. Löwis39a31782004-09-18 09:03:49 +0000403- httplib now offers symbolic constants for the HTTP status codes.
404
Tim Peters528ca532004-09-16 01:30:50 +0000405- SF bug #1028306: Trying to compare a ``datetime.date`` to a
406 ``datetime.datetime`` mistakenly compared only the year, month and day.
407 Now it acts like a mixed-type comparison: ``False`` for ``==``,
408 ``True`` for ``!=``, and raises ``TypeError`` for other comparison
409 operators. Because datetime is a subclass of date, comparing only the
410 base class (date) members can still be done, if that's desired, by
411 forcing using of the approprate date method; e.g.,
412 ``a_date.__eq__(a_datetime)`` is true if and only if the year, month
413 and day members of ``a_date`` and ``a_datetime`` are equal.
414
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000415- bdist_rpm now supports command line options --force-arch,
416 {pre,post}-install, {pre,post}-uninstall, and
Martin v. Löwis23c48a12004-09-10 06:32:54 +0000417 {prep,build,install,clean,verify}-script.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000418
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000419- SF patch #998993: The UTF-8 and the UTF-16 stateful decoders now support
420 decoding incomplete input (when the input stream is temporarily exhausted).
421 ``codecs.StreamReader`` now implements buffering, which enables proper
422 readline support for the UTF-16 decoders. ``codecs.StreamReader.read()``
423 has a new argument ``chars`` which specifies the number of characters to
424 return. ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` and
425 ``codecs.StreamReader.readlines()`` have a new argument ``keepends``.
426 Trailing "\n"s will be stripped from the lines if ``keepends`` is false.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000427
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000428- The documentation for doctest is greatly expanded, and now covers all
429 the new public features (of which there are many).
430
Walter Dörwald5011d0c2004-09-13 08:53:15 +0000431- ``doctest.master`` was put back in, and ``doctest.testmod()`` once again
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000432 updates it. This isn't good, because every ``testmod()`` call
433 contributes to bloating the "hidden" state of ``doctest.master``, but
434 some old code apparently relies on it. For now, all we can do is
435 encourage people to stitch doctests together via doctest's unittest
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000436 integration features instead.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000437
Skip Montanaro82d0eec2004-09-14 17:58:31 +0000438- httplib now handles ipv6 address/port pairs.
439
David Goodger68a1abd2004-10-03 15:40:25 +0000440- SF bug #1017864: ConfigParser now correctly handles default keys,
441 processing them with ``ConfigParser.optionxform`` when supplied,
442 consistent with the handling of config file entries and runtime-set
443 options.
444
David Goodger1cbf2062004-10-03 15:55:09 +0000445- SF bug #997050: Document, test, & check for non-string values in
446 ConfigParser. Moved the new string-only restriction added in
447 rev. 1.65 to the SafeConfigParser class, leaving existing
448 ConfigParser & RawConfigParser behavior alone, and documented the
449 conditions under which non-string values work.
450
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000451Build
452-----
453
Brett Cannonbfef8692004-09-28 04:08:11 +0000454- Building on darwin now includes /opt/local/include and /opt/local/lib for
455 building extension modules. This is so as to include software installed as
456 a DarwinPorts port <http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/>
457
Tim Peters862f0592004-09-23 19:11:32 +0000458- pyport.h now defines a Py_IS_NAN macro. It works as-is when the
459 platform C computes true for ``x != x`` if and only if X is a NaN.
460 Other platforms can override the default definition with a platform-
461 specific spelling in that platform's pyconfig.h. You can also override
462 pyport.h's default Py_IS_INFINITY definition now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000463
464C API
465-----
466
Tim Peters7f468f22004-10-11 02:40:51 +0000467- SF patch 1044089: New function ``PyEval_ThreadsInitialized()`` returns
468 non-zero if PyEval_InitThreads() has been called.
469
470- The undocumented and unused extern int ``_PyThread_Started`` was removed.
471
Tim Peters84705582004-10-10 02:47:33 +0000472- The C API calls ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
473 are two of the very few advertised as being safe to call without holding
474 the GIL. However, this wasn't true in a debug build, as bug 1041645
475 demonstrated. In a debug build, Python redirects the ``PyMem`` family
476 of calls to Python's small-object allocator, to get the benefit of
477 its extra debugging capabilities. But Python's small-object allocator
478 isn't threadsafe, relying on the GIL to avoid the expense of doing its
479 own locking. ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
480 call the platform ``malloc()`` directly now, regardless of build type.
481
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000482- PyLong_AsUnsignedLong[Mask] now support int objects as well.
483
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000484- SF patch #998993: ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF8Stateful`` and
485 ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF16Stateful`` have been added, which implement stateful
486 decoding.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000487
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000488Tests
489-----
490
491- test__locale ported to unittest
492
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000493Mac
494---
495
Just van Rossumdd3c8372004-10-03 16:27:09 +0000496- ``plistlib`` now supports non-dict root objects. There is also a new
497 interface for reading and writing plist files: ``readPlist(pathOrFile)``
498 and ``writePlist(rootObject, pathOrFile)``
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000499
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000500Tools/Demos
501-----------
502
Tim Peters130e37f2004-10-03 19:03:19 +0000503- The text file comparison scripts ``ndiff.py`` and ``diff.py`` now
504 read the input files in universal-newline mode. This spares them
505 from consuming a great deal of time to deduce the useless result that,
506 e.g., a file with Windows line ends and a file with Linux line ends
507 have no lines in common.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000508
509
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000510What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
511=================================
512
Anthony Baxtere13943a2004-09-02 16:37:15 +0000513*Release date: 02-SEP-2004*
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000514
515Core and builtins
516-----------------
517
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000518- SF patch #1007189: ``from ... import ...`` statements now allow the name
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +0000519 list to be surrounded by parentheses.
520
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000521- Some speedups for long arithmetic, thanks to Trevor Perrin. Gradeschool
522 multiplication was sped a little by optimizing the C code. Gradeschool
523 squaring was sped by about a factor of 2, by exploiting that about half
524 the digit products are duplicates in a square. Because exponentiation
525 uses squaring often, this also speeds long power. For example, the time
526 to compute 17**1000000 dropped from about 14 seconds to 9 on my box due
527 to this much. The cutoff for Karatsuba multiplication was raised,
528 since gradeschool multiplication got quicker, and the cutoff was
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000529 aggressively small regardless. The exponentiation algorithm was switched
530 from right-to-left to left-to-right, which is more efficient for small
531 bases. In addition, if the exponent is large, the algorithm now does
532 5 bits (instead of 1 bit) at a time. That cut the time to compute
533 17**1000000 on my box in half again, down to about 4.5 seconds.
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000534
Tim Petersc8854432004-08-25 02:14:08 +0000535- OverflowWarning is no longer generated. PEP 237 scheduled this to
536 occur in Python 2.3, but since OverflowWarning was disabled by default,
537 nobody realized it was still being generated. On the chance that user
538 code is still using them, the Python builtin OverflowWarning, and
539 corresponding C API PyExc_OverflowWarning, will exist until Python 2.5.
540
Martin v. Löwis336e85f2004-08-19 11:31:58 +0000541- Py_InitializeEx has been added.
542
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +0000543- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
544 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
545
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +0000546- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
547 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
548 modified the list.
549
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +0000550- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
551 functions is now writable.
552
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +0000553- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
554 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
555 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
556 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
557
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000558- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
559 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
560 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
561 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
562 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +0000563
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +0000564- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
565 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
566
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000567Extension modules
568-----------------
569
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000570- difflib now supports HTML side-by-side diff.
571
Martin v. Löwisdc3883f2004-08-29 15:46:35 +0000572- os.urandom has been added for systems that support sources of random
573 data.
574
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000575- Patch 1012740: truncate() on a writeable cStringIO now resets the
576 position to the end of the stream. This is consistent with the original
577 StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was
578 supposed to have been truncated away.
579
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +0000580- Added socket.socketpair().
581
Dave Cole3203efb2004-08-26 00:37:31 +0000582- Added CurrentByteIndex, CurrentColumnNumber, CurrentLineNumber
583 members to xml.parsers.expat.XMLParser object.
584
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000585- The mpz, rotor, and xreadlines modules, all deprecated in earlier
Andrew M. Kuchling00873432004-08-31 13:50:43 +0000586 versions of Python, have now been removed.
587
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000588Library
589-------
590
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000591- Patch #934356: if a module defines __all__, believe that rather than using
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000592 heuristics for filtering out imported names.
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000593
Johannes Gijsbersae882f72004-08-30 10:19:56 +0000594- Patch #941486: added os.path.lexists(), which returns True for broken
595 symlinks, unlike os.path.exists().
596
Raymond Hettinger356a4592004-08-30 06:14:31 +0000597- the random module now uses os.urandom() for seeding if it is available.
598 Added a new generator based on os.urandom().
599
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000600- difflib and diff.py can now generate HTML.
601
Martin v. Löwiscae9e672004-08-25 13:04:53 +0000602- bdist_rpm now includes version and release in the BuildRoot, and
603 replaces - by ``_`` in version and release.
Martin v. Löwiscf525242004-08-25 13:00:34 +0000604
Martin v. Löwis9f5c0c42004-08-25 11:37:43 +0000605- distutils build/build_scripts now has an -e option to specify the
606 path to the Python interpreter for installed scripts.
607
Barry Warsaw8bee7612004-08-25 02:22:30 +0000608- PEP 292 classes Template and SafeTemplate are added to the string module.
609
Martin v. Löwis75b9da42004-08-18 13:57:44 +0000610- tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
611
Martin v. Löwisdeacce22004-08-18 12:46:26 +0000612- HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
613
Johannes Gijsbersc473c992004-08-18 12:40:31 +0000614- Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
615 Percivall.
616
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +0000617- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
618 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
619
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000620- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
621 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
622 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000623 than creating a new one.
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000624
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000625- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
626 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
627 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
628 and exponent.
629
630- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
631
632- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
633 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatability and atexit
634 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
635
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000636- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
637 to the readline module.
638
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000639- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000640 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
641 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000642
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +0000643- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
644 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
645 contains symlinks.
646
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +0000647- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
648 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
649
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +0000650- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
651 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
652 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
653
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000654- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
655 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
656 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
657 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
658 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
659 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
660 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
661 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
662 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
663 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
664 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
665 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
666 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
667
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +0000668- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
669
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000670Tools/Demos
671-----------
672
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000673- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
674 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
675
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +0000676- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
677
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000678Build
679-----
680
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000681- Backward incompatibility: longintrepr.h now triggers a compile-time
682 error if SHIFT (the number of bits in a Python long "digit") isn't
683 divisible by 5. This new requirement allows simple code for the new
684 5-bits-at-a-time long_pow() implementation. If necessary, the
685 restriction could be removed (by complicating long_pow(), or by
686 falling back to the 1-bit-at-a-time algorithm), but there are no
687 plans to do so.
688
Brett Cannoncc8a4f62004-08-26 01:44:07 +0000689- bug #991962: When building with --disable-toolbox-glue on Darwin no
690 attempt to build Mac-specific modules occurs.
691
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +0000692- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
693 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
694
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000695- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
696 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
697
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +0000698- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
699 GNU/k*BSD systems.
700
Hye-Shik Chang3ba5bfc2004-08-19 17:52:37 +0000701- bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings
702 found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64.
703
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000704C API
705-----
706
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000707..
708
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000709Documentation
710-------------
711
Neal Norwitz5268c392004-08-21 15:13:52 +0000712- patch #1005936, bug #1009373: fix index entries which contain
713 an underscore when viewed with Acrobat.
714
715- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if
716 it contains symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment
717 since 1992, but is now in the library reference as well.
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +0000718
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000719New platforms
720-------------
721
Hye-Shik Changf64700a2004-08-18 15:13:41 +0000722- FreeBSD 6 is now supported.
723
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000724Tests
725-----
726
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000727..
728
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000729Windows
730-------
731
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +0000732- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
733 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
734 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
735 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
736 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
737 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
738 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
739 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
740 the problem.
741
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000742Mac
743---
744
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000745..
746
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000747
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000748What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
749=================================
750
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000751*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000752
753Core and builtins
754-----------------
755
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +0000756- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
757 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
758 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
759 sensitive code.
760
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000761- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000762 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so::
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000763
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000764 @staticmethod
765 def foo(bar):
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000766
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000767 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000768
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000769- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
770 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
771 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
772 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
773 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
774 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
775 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
776 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
777 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
778 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
779 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
780
781 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
782 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
783 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
784 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
785 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
786 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
787 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
788
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +0000789- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
790 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
791
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000792- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000793 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000794
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000795- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000796 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000797 which was missing for no apparent reason.
798
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000799- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000800 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
801 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
802
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000803- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
804 types that support garbage collection.
805
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +0000806- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
807
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +0000808- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
809 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
810 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
811 Jython.
812
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000813- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
814
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +0000815- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
816 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
817
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +0000818- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
819 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
820 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +0000821
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +0000822- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
823 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
824 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
825
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000826Extension modules
827-----------------
828
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +0000829- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
830
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000831Library
832-------
833
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +0000834- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
835 TIS-620
836
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +0000837- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
838 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
839 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
840 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
841 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
842 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
843 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
844 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
845 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
846 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
847
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +0000848- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
849
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +0000850- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
851 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
852 same as when the argument is omitted).
853 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
854
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +0000855- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
856
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +0000857- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
858 schemes are offered.
859
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +0000860- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
861
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +0000862- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
863 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
864 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
865
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +0000866- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
867
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +0000868- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
869 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
870
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +0000871- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
872 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
873 when dummy_threading is being used.
874
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +0000875- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
876 from a tarfile.
877
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000878- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000879 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000880
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +0000881- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
882 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
883 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
884 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
885
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +0000886- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
887 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
888
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +0000889- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
890 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
891 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
892 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
893 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
894 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
895 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
896 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
897 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
898 by some other method in progress).
899
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000900- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
901 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
902 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +0000903
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +0000904- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
905
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +0000906- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
907 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
908 AM Kuchling.
909
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +0000910- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
911 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
912 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
913
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +0000914- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
915 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
916 instead of unsigned.
917
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000918- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +0000919 no longer part of the public API.
920
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +0000921- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
922 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
923 string methods of the same name).
924
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000925- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +0000926 SF patch 945642.
927
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000928- doctest unittest integration improvements:
929
930 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
931
932 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
933 DocTestSuites.
934
935- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
936 that provide thread-local data.
937
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000938- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
939 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
940
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000941- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
942
943- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
944 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
945 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
946
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000947- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
948
949 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
950 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
951 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000952
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000953 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
954 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
955 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
956 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
957
958 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
959 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
960
961 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
962 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
963 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
964 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
965
966 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
967 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
968 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
969 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
970 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
971
972 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
973 wrapping help output.
974
975 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
976 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
977 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000978
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000979C API
980-----
981
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000982- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
983 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
984 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
985 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
986 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
987 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
988 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
989 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
990 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
991 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
992 its visible semantics have not changed.
993
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000994- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
995 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
996
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000997Documentation
998-------------
999
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001000- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001001
1002 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +00001003 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001004
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +00001005 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001006
1007 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
1008
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001009- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001010
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001011Tests
1012-----
1013
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001014- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +00001015 platforms that use the Makefile.
1016
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001017- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
1018 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
1019 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
1020
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001021
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001022What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
1023=================================
1024
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +00001025*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001026
1027Core and builtins
1028-----------------
1029
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +00001030- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
1031 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
1032 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
1033 objects now (one object instead of three).
1034
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +00001035- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
1036 Windows DLLs.
1037
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +00001038- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
1039 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +00001040
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +00001041- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
1042 a new .pyc magic.
1043
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +00001044- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
1045 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
1046 be there.
1047
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +00001048- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
1049 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
1050 the LC_NUMERIC category.
1051
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +00001052- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
1053 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
1054 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
1055
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +00001056- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
1057
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +00001058- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
1059 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
1060 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +00001061
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +00001062- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
1063 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
1064
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +00001065- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
1066
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001067- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001068 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001069
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +00001070- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
1071
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +00001072- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
1073
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +00001074- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
1075 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
1076
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +00001077- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
1078 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
1079 Fixes bug #858016 .
1080
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +00001081- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
1082 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
1083 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
1084
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +00001085- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
1086 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
1087 improves their performance (about 35%).
1088
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +00001089- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
1090 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
1091 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
1092
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +00001093- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
1094 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
1095 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
1096 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
1097
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001098- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
1099 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
1100 list comprehensions, and the list contructor (when the input iterable
1101 length is not known).
1102
1103- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
1104 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +00001105 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
1106 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001107 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
1108
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +00001109- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
1110 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
1111
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +00001112- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
1113 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
1114 keyword arguments.
1115
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +00001116- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
1117 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
1118 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
1119
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +00001120- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
1121 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
1122 cases.
1123
1124- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
1125 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
1126 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
1127 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
1128 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
1129 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
1130 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
1131 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
1132 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
1133 a release build.
1134
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +00001135- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
1136 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
1137
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001138- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001139 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001140
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +00001141- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
1142 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
1143 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
1144 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
1145 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
1146 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
1147 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
1148 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
1149 destroyed.
1150
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +00001151- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
1152 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
1153 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
1154 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
1155 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
1156 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
1157 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
1158 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
1159
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +00001160- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
1161 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
1162 character other than a space.
1163
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +00001164- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
1165 by the function object or by the method object, the function
1166 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
1167 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
1168 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
1169 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
1170 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
1171 attributes with the same name.
1172
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001173- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
1174 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
1175 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
1176 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
1177 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
1178 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
1179 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
1180 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
1181 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
1182 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
1183 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
1184 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
1185 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
1186 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +00001187
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +00001188- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
1189 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
1190 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
1191 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
1192 This has been repaired.
1193
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001194- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
1195
1196- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
1197
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +00001198- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
1199 over a sequence.
1200
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001201- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001202 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001203
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +00001204- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
1205
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +00001206- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
1207 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
1208 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
1209 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
1210 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
1211 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
1212 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
1213 records with equal keys is unchanged).
1214
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +00001215- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
1216 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
1217 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
1218
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +00001219- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
1220 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
1221 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
1222 freelist.
1223
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +00001224- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
1225 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
1226
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +00001227- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
1228 number.
1229
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +00001230- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
1231 a TypeError exception.
1232
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +00001233- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
1234 820195.
1235
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +00001236- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
1237 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
1238 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
1239
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001240- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001241 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
1242 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +00001243
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +00001244- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
1245 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
1246 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
1247
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001248- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
1249 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001250 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001251
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001252- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +00001253 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
1254 the first call.
1255
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001256
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001257Extension modules
1258-----------------
1259
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +00001260- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
1261 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
1262
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001263- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
1264 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
1265 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
1266 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
1267 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
1268 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
1269 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +00001270
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +00001271- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
1272
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +00001273- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
1274
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +00001275- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
1276 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
1277
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +00001278- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
1279 fewer false positives.
1280
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +00001281- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
1282 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
1283
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001284- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +00001285 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
1286
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +00001287- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001288 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +00001289 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
Raymond Hettinger6ab78cd2004-08-29 07:50:43 +00001290 Also, array.array() and array.extend() now accept any iterable argument
1291 for repeated appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +00001292
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +00001293- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
1294 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
1295 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
1296 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
1297
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +00001298- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
1299 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
1300 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
1301 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
1302 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
1303 #897625.
1304
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +00001305- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
1306 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
1307
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +00001308- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
1309 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
1310 and pops on either side of the deque.
1311
1312- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
1313 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
1314
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +00001315- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
1316 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
1317 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
1318 other functions that expect a function argument.
1319
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +00001320- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
1321
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001322- os.getsid was added.
1323
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +00001324- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
1325 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
1326 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
1327
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +00001328- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
1329
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +00001330- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
1331
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +00001332- readline.clear_history was added.
1333
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +00001334- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
1335
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +00001336- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
1337
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +00001338- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
1339
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +00001340- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
1341
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +00001342- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
1343
1344- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
1345
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +00001346- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
1347
1348- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
1349
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001350- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
1351 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
1352 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
1353
1354- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
1355 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
1356 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
1357 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
1358 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
1359 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
1360 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
1361
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +00001362- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
1363 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
1364 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
1365 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001366
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001367- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001368 iterators from a single iterable.
1369
1370- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
1371 of raising a TypeError exception.
1372
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +00001373- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
1374 as parameter.
1375
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001376Library
1377-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001378
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +00001379- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
1380 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
1381 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001382
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +00001383- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
1384 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
1385 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +00001386
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +00001387- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +00001388
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +00001389- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
1390 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +00001391
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +00001392- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
1393 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1394
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001395- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
1396
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001397- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001398 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001399
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001400- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001401 that generate a -debuginfo.rpm
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001402
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +00001403- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
1404
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +00001405- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
1406 on cygwin and mingw32.
1407
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +00001408- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
1409
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +00001410- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
1411 module.
1412
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +00001413- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
1414 installation scheme for all platforms.
1415
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001416- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +00001417 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001418
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001419- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
1420 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
1421 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
1422
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +00001423- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
1424 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
1425 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
1426
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +00001427- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
1428
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +00001429- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
1430
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +00001431- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
1432 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
1433
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +00001434- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
1435 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
1436 type pattern with the same value exists.
1437
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +00001438- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
1439 when run from the command prompt).
1440
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001441- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
1442 not taken into consideration when caching value.
1443
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +00001444- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
1445 default sort).
1446
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +00001447- Added global runctx function to profile module
1448
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +00001449- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
1450
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +00001451- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
1452
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +00001453- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
1454
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001455- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +00001456 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
1457 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
1458 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
1459 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
1460 accordingly.
1461
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +00001462- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
1463 decoding standards.
1464
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +00001465- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
1466 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
1467 called for all requests.
1468
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +00001469- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
1470 they are passed to the compiler.
1471
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +00001472- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
1473 indent, width and depth.
1474
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +00001475- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
1476 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
1477
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +00001478- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
1479 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
1480
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +00001481- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
1482
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +00001483- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
1484
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001485- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
1486
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +00001487- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
1488 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
1489
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +00001490- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +00001491 for better performance.
1492
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001493- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +00001494
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +00001495- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
1496 a string).
1497
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +00001498- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
1499
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +00001500- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
1501
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +00001502- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
1503
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +00001504- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
1505
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +00001506- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
1507 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
1508 list of fieldnames.
1509
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +00001510- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
1511 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
1512
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +00001513- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
1514
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +00001515- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
1516 empty lists.
1517
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +00001518- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
1519 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
1520 and shelves.
1521
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +00001522- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
1523 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
1524
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001525- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +00001526 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
1527 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001528
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +00001529- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
1530 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +00001531 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +00001532
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001533- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +00001534 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
1535 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
1536
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001537- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
1538 and removed in Py2.4.
1539
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +00001540- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
1541
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +00001542- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
1543
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001544Tools/Demos
1545-----------
1546
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +00001547- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
1548 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
1549
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +00001550- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
1551
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +00001552- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
1553 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
1554 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
1555 destination in situations where both files are given.
1556
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +00001557- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
1558 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
1559 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
1560 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
1561
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +00001562- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
1563
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +00001564- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
1565 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
1566 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
1567 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
1568 now.
1569
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001570- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
1571 in effect
1572
1573- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
1574 C-c C-h
1575
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +00001576- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
1577 -d option was given.
1578
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001579Build
1580-----
1581
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +00001582- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
1583 build under OS X.
1584
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +00001585- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
1586 --enable-profiling.
1587
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +00001588- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
1589 is configured --with-tsc.
1590
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +00001591- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
1592 on AMD64.
1593
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +00001594- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
1595 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
1596
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00001597- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
1598 removed.
1599
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00001600- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
1601 supported (see PEP 11).
1602
1603- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
1604
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00001605- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
1606
1607- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
1608 (see PEP 11).
1609
1610- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
1611 sizeof(char) must be 1.
1612
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001613C API
1614-----
1615
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00001616- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
1617 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
1618 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
1619
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001620- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
1621 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
1622 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
1623 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
1624
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00001625- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
1626 generator objects.
1627
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001628- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
1629 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00001630 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
1631 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001632
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00001633- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
1634 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
1635
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00001636- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
1637 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
1638 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
1639 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
1640 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
1641
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00001642- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
1643 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
1644 about 10% faster.
1645
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00001646- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
1647 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
1648
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00001649- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
1650 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
1651 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
1652 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
1653
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001654Windows
1655-------
1656
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00001657- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
1658 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
1659 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
1660 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
1661
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00001662- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
1663 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
1664 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
1665
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001666
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001667What's New in Python 2.3 final?
1668===============================
1669
1670*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
1671
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001672IDLE
1673----
1674
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00001675- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
1676 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
1677 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
1678 context-menu actions.
1679
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001680- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
1681 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
1682 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
1683 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
1684 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
1685 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
1686 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
1687 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
1688 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
1689
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001690
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001691What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
1692=============================================
1693
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00001694*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001695
1696Core and builtins
1697-----------------
1698
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001699- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001700 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001701 comment at the end are still unsupported.
1702
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001703Extension modules
1704-----------------
1705
1706- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
1707 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
1708 than once. This has been fixed.
1709
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00001710- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
1711 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
1712 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
1713 call.
1714
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001715- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
1716
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001717Library
1718-------
1719
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001720- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
1721 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
1722
1723- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
1724 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
1725 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
1726 restored.
1727
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001728IDLE
1729----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001730
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001731- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001732
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001733Build
1734-----
1735
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001736- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
1737 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
1738
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001739C API
1740-----
1741
1742Windows
1743-------
1744
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00001745- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
1746 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
1747
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001748- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
1749
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001750Mac
1751---
1752
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001753- Various fixes to pimp.
1754
1755- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
1756
1757- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
1758 more problems than it solves.
1759
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001760
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001761What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
1762=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001763
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00001764*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
1765
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001766Core and builtins
1767-----------------
1768
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00001769- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
1770 by sys.setcheckinterval().
1771
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001772- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
1773 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001774 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001775
1776- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
1777 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
1778 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001779 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001780
1781- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
1782 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001783
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001784- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
1785 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
1786 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
1787
1788- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001789 770247.
1790
1791- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001792
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001793Extension modules
1794-----------------
1795
1796- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
1797 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
1798
1799- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
1800
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001801- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
1802
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00001803- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
1804 contained within the _strptime module.
1805
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001806- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
1807 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
1808
1809- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001810 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
1811
1812- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
1813 the find_class attribute, if present.
1814
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001815- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001816
1817 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
1818 (SF bug 763298).
1819
1820 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00001821 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
1822 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
1823 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001824
1825 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
1826
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001827Library
1828-------
1829
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001830- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
1831
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00001832- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
1833 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
1834 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
1835 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
1836 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
1837 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
1838 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
1839 or Tester().
1840
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001841- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
1842 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
1843 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
1844 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
1845 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
1846 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
1847 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
1848 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
1849 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00001850
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001851 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00001852
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00001853- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
1854 weren't before was an oversight.
1855
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001856- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
1857 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
1858
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00001859- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
1860 when there are no lines.
1861
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00001862- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
1863 which could occur with Tk 8.4
1864
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001865- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
1866 to child processes.
1867
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001868- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
1869
1870- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
1871
1872- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
1873 xmlrpclib.
1874
1875- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
1876 responses.
1877
1878- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
1879 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
1880
1881- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
1882 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
1883 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
1884
1885- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
1886 used as patterns.
1887
1888- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
1889 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
1890 than Tk 8.3.
1891
1892- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
1893
1894- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001895
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001896Tools/Demos
1897-----------
1898
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001899- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
1900
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00001901- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
1902
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001903- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001904
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001905Build
1906-----
1907
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001908- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
1909
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001910- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
1911
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001912- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
1913 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001914
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001915- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
1916 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
1917 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001918
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001919C API
1920-----
1921
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001922- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
1923 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
1924
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001925Windows
1926-------
1927
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001928- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
1929 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
1930 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
1931 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
1932 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
1933 Python exception ::
1934
1935 thread.error: can't start new thread
1936
1937 is raised now.
1938
1939- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
1940 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
1941 instead of from DLL teardown.
1942
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001943Mac
1944---
1945
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001946- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00001947 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001948 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
1949 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
1950 the executable in the bundle.
1951
1952- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001953
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00001954- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
1955
1956- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
1957 on Panther.
1958
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001959What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
1960================================
1961
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001962*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001963
1964Core and builtins
1965-----------------
1966
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00001967- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
1968 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
1969 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
1970 with the -i option.
1971
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00001972- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
1973 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
1974
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001975- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
1976 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
1977
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00001978- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
1979 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
1980 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
1981 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
1982 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
1983 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
1984 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
1985 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
1986 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
1987 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
1988 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
1989 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
1990 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00001991
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001992- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
1993 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
1994 embedded in a lambda expression.
1995
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00001996- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
1997 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
1998 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
1999 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
2000 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
2001
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002002- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
2003 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
2004 matches the restriction on classic classes.
2005
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00002006- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
2007 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
2008
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00002009- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
2010 It's writable again.
2011
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002012- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
2013 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
2014 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002015 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002016
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002017- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
2018 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
2019 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
2020
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002021Extension modules
2022-----------------
2023
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00002024- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
2025 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
2026
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002027- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
2028 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
2029 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
2030 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
2031
2032- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
2033 collection.
2034
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00002035- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
2036 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
2037 unique within a single program run.
2038
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00002039- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
2040 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
2041
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00002042- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
2043 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
2044
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00002045- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
2046 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00002047
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00002048- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
2049
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00002050- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
2051 Fixes SF bug #730685.
2052
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00002053- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
2054 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
2055 for many BSD-derived systems.
2056
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002057
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002058Library
2059-------
2060
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00002061- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
2062 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
2063 primary ones:
2064
2065 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
2066 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
2067 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
2068
2069 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
2070 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
2071 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
2072 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
2073 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
2074 framework features (which doctest lacks).
2075
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00002076- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
2077 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
2078 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
2079 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
2080 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
2081 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
2082 argument.
2083
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002084- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
2085 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
2086 in the archive.
2087
2088- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
2089 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
2090
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00002091- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
2092 569574).
2093
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002094- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
2095 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
2096 no more.
2097
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002098- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
2099 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
2100 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
2101 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
2102 code coverage.
2103
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002104- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
2105 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
2106 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002107 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
2108 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002109
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002110- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
2111 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
2112 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00002113 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002114
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00002115- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
2116
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00002117- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
2118 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
2119 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
2120 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
2121
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00002122- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
2123 handling.
2124
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00002125- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
2126 __doc__ of data descriptors.
2127
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00002128- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
2129 in socket.py.
2130
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00002131- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
2132
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00002133- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
2134 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
2135 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
2136 opener with proxy support.
2137
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002138- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
2139
2140- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
2141
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002142Tools/Demos
2143-----------
2144
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00002145- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
2146
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002147- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
2148
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002149- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
2150 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00002151
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00002152- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
2153 files.
2154
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002155Build
2156-----
2157
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002158- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00002159 different root directory.
2160
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002161C API
2162-----
2163
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00002164- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
2165 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
2166 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
2167 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
2168 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
2169 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
2170 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
2171 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
2172 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
2173 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
2174
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002175- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
2176 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
2177 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
2178 from Python.
2179
2180
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002181New platforms
2182-------------
2183
2184None this time.
2185
2186Tests
2187-----
2188
2189- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
2190 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
2191
2192Windows
2193-------
2194
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00002195- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
2196
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00002197- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
2198 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
2199 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
2200 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
2201 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
2202 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
2203 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
2204 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
2205 that's what it's for.
2206
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002207Mac
2208---
2209
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00002210- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
2211 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
2212 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
2213 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00002214- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
2215 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
2216- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002217
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002218SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
2219------------------------------------
2220
2221430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
2222598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
2223622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
2224661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
2225683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
2226697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
2227713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
2228724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
2229727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
2230729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
2231730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
2232731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
2233732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
2234733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
2235735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
2236740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
2237744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
2238745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
2239747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
2240749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
2241751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
2242753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
2243755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
2244757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
2245760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
2246
2247
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002248What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
2249================================
2250
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00002251*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002252
2253Core and builtins
2254-----------------
2255
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00002256- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
2257 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
2258
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00002259- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
2260 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
2261 and cannot be strings).
2262
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00002263- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
2264 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
2265 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
2266 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
2267
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00002268- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
2269 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
2270 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
2271 Python itself.
2272
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00002273- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
2274 the referenced object, if it has one.
2275
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00002276- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
2277 the thread started at
2278 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
2279
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00002280- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
2281 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
2282 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
2283 placed on a list index.
2284
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00002285- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
2286 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
2287 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
2288 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
2289
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002290- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
2291 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
2292 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
2293 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
2294 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
2295 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
2296 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
2297
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00002298- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
2299 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
2300 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
2301 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
2302 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
2303
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00002304- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
2305 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00002306
2307- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
2308 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
2309 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
2310 #693195.)
2311
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00002312- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
2313 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002314
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002315- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00002316 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002317 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
2318 interpreter executions, would fail.
2319
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002320- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00002321 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00002322 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002323
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002324Extension modules
2325-----------------
2326
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00002327- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
2328 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
2329 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
2330 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
2331
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00002332- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
2333 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
2334
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00002335- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
2336 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
2337 and Greg Chapman.)
2338
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002339- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
2340 recursively.
2341
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00002342- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00002343 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
2344 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
2345 leaks.
2346
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00002347- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
2348
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00002349- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
2350 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
2351 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
2352 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
2353 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
2354 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
2355 #705836.
2356
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002357- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00002358 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
2359
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00002360- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
2361 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
2362 See SF bug #692416.
2363
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00002364- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
2365 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
2366
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00002367- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
2368 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
2369 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002370
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002371- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00002372 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
2373 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
2374
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00002375- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
2376 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
2377 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
2378 timeouts to work properly.
2379
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002380Library
2381-------
2382
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002383- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
2384 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
2385 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
2386 future release.
2387
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00002388- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
2389 for querying platform dependent features.
2390
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00002391- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00002392
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00002393- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
2394 pickle protocol versions.
2395
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00002396- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
2397 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
2398 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
2399
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00002400- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
2401
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00002402- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
2403 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
2404 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
2405 modules.
2406
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00002407- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
2408 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
2409 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
2410
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002411- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
2412 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
2413
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00002414- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
2415 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
2416 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
2417
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002418- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00002419 MS Office extensions.
2420
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00002421- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
2422 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
2423
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00002424- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
2425 execution speed of expressions and statements.
2426
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002427- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
2428 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
2429 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
2430 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
2431 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
2432 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
2433
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002434- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
2435 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
2436 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002437
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00002438- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
2439 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
2440 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
2441
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00002442- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
2443
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00002444- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
2445 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
2446 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
2447
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002448Tools/Demos
2449-----------
2450
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00002451- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
2452 See the module docstring for details.
2453
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002454Build
2455-----
2456
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00002457- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
2458 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002459
2460C API
2461-----
2462
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002463- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
2464
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00002465- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
2466 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
2467 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
2468
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002469- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
2470 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002471
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002472 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
2473 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
2474 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00002475
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00002476- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00002477 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
2478
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00002479- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
2480 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
2481 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002482
2483New platforms
2484-------------
2485
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002486None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002487
2488Tests
2489-----
2490
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00002491- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
2492 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002493
2494Windows
2495-------
2496
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00002497- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
2498 function.
2499
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00002500- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
2501 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002502
2503Mac
2504---
2505
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002506- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
2507 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00002508
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00002509- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
2510 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002511
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00002512- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
2513 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
2514 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002515
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002516- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00002517 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
2518 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002519
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002520- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
2521 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002522
2523
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002524What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
2525=================================
2526
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002527*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002528
2529Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002530-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002531
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00002532- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
2533 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
2534 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
2535
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00002536- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
2537 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
2538 (SF patch #664376.)
2539
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002540- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
2541 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
2542 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
2543 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
2544 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
2545 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00002546 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002547
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002548- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
2549 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
2550 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
2551 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002552 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002553
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00002554- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
2555 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
2556 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
2557 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
2558 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
2559 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
2560 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
2561 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
2562 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
2563 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
2564 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
2565
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00002566- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
2567 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
2568 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
2569 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
2570 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
2571 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
2572
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00002573- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
2574 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
2575
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00002576- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
2577 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
2578 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
2579 case.)
2580
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00002581- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
2582 passed as unicode strings.
2583
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00002584- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
2585 See SF bug #683467.
2586
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00002587- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
2588 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
2589
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00002590- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
2591
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00002592- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
2593
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00002594- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
2595 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
2596 arguments.
2597
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00002598- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
2599 See SF bug #667147.
2600
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002601- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002602 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002603 See SF bug #676155.
2604
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002605- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002606 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002607 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
2608 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
2609 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
2610 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
2611 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
2612 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002613
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002614Extension modules
2615-----------------
2616
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002617- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
2618 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2619 tp_as_number pointer.
2620
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002621- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
2622 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
2623 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
2624 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
2625 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
2626
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002627- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
2628
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00002629- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
2630
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002631- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00002632 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002633 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
2634 patch #678531.)
2635
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00002636- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
2637 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
2638
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00002639- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
2640 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
2641
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00002642- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
2643
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00002644- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
2645 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
2646 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
2647
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002648- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
2649
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002650- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
2651 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
2652
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002653- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002654
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002655- datetime changes:
2656
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00002657 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
2658
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00002659 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
2660 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
2661 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
2662 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
2663 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
2664 now.
2665
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002666 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002667 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
2668 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002669
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002670 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002671 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002672 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
2673 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
2674 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
2675 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002676
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002677 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
2678 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
2679 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002680 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
2681
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002682 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
2683 by a later example coded by Guido.
2684
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002685 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002686 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
2687 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
2688 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002689 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
2690 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
2691
2692 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
2693 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
2694 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
2695 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
2696 tzinfo subclass instance.
2697
2698 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
2699 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
2700 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
2701 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
2702 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
2703 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
2704 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
2705 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002706
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002707 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
2708 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
2709 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
2710 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
2711 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002712 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
2713
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002714 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002715
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002716 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
2717 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
2718 as a naive datetime object.
2719
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00002720 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
2721 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
2722 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
2723
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00002724 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
2725 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
2726 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
2727 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
2728 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
2729 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
2730 comparison.
2731
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002732 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
2733 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
2734 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
2735 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002736 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002737
2738 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002739
2740 and ::
2741
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002742 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
2743
2744 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
2745 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
2746 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
2747 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
2748
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00002749 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
2750 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
2751 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
2752 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
2753 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
2754
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002755 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
2756 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00002757 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
2758 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002759
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002760Library
2761-------
2762
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002763- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
2764 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
2765
2766- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
2767 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
2768 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
2769 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
2770 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
2771 See PEP 307 for details.
2772
2773- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
2774 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
2775
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002776- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
2777 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002778 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002779 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
2780 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002781 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002782
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00002783- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
2784 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
2785
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002786- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
2787 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
2788 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
2789
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00002790- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
2791
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00002792- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
2793 exception.
2794
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00002795- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
2796 class.
2797
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00002798- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
2799 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
2800 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
2801
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00002802- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
2803 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
2804
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002805- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00002806 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
2807 See SF bug #659228.
2808
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00002809- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
2810 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
2811 See SF patch #651082.
2812
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00002813- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002814
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00002815- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
2816 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
2817
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002818- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002819 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002820
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00002821- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
2822 DOS paths from other platforms.
2823
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002824Tools/Demos
2825-----------
2826
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002827- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
2828 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
2829 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
2830 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
2831 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
2832 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
2833 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
2834 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
2835 example:
2836
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00002837 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
2838 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002839
2840 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
2841
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002842
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002843Build
2844-----
2845
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002846- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
2847 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
2848 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002849 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
2850
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002851 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
2852
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00002853- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
2854 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
2855 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
2856 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
2857 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
2858 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
2859 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
2860 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
2861 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
2862
2863- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
2864 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
2865 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
2866 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
2867
2868- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
2869 from the Tools/scripts directory.
2870
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002871C API
2872-----
2873
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002874- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
2875 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00002876
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002877- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
2878 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2879 tp_as_number pointer.
2880
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00002881- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
2882 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
2883 (SF #681367)
2884
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00002885- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
2886 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
2887 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
2888 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00002889
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002890Tests
2891-----
2892
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00002893- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002894 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
2895 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
2896 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
2897 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
2898 pydoc.)
2899
2900- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
2901
2902- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002903
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002904Windows
2905-------
2906
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002907- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
2908 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
2909 time).
2910
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00002911- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
2912 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
2913
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002914- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
2915 release without strong cryptography.
2916
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002917- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002918 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002919
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002920- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
2921 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
2922
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002923Mac
2924---
2925
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002926- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
2927 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002928
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00002929- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
2930 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
2931 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002932
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002933- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
2934 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002935
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002936- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
2937 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
2938 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
2939 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002940
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002941- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00002942 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
2943 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
2944 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002945
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002946
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002947What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002948=================================
2949
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00002950*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002951
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002952Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002953--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002954
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00002955- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
2956
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002957- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
2958 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002959 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002960 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002961 a different meaning than before.
2962
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002963- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002964 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002965 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002966
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002967- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002968 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002969 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002970
2971- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
2972 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
2973 and deallocation.
2974
2975- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
2976 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
2977
2978- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
2979 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
2980 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
2981 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
2982 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
2983
2984- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
2985 now detected by the garbage collector.
2986
2987- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
2988 [SF bug 519621]
2989
2990- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
2991 identifier.
2992
2993- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
2994 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
2995 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
2996 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
2997 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
2998 [SF bug 563060]
2999
3000- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
3001 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
3002 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
3003 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
3004 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
3005
3006- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
3007 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
3008 not called. [SF bug #537450]
3009
3010- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
3011
3012- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
3013 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
3014 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
3015 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
3016 state of the slots would be lost.)
3017
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003018Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003019-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003020
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003021- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003022 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
3023 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
3024 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
3025 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003026 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
3027 Jython 2.1.
3028
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003029- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003030 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003031 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
3032 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
3033 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
3034 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
3035 these, see PEP 302.
3036
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003037- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
3038 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
3039 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
3040
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00003041- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
3042 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
3043 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
3044
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00003045- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
3046 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
3047 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
3048
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003049- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
3050 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
3051 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
3052 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
3053 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
3054 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
3055 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
3056 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
3057 releases or implementations.
3058
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003059- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003060 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
3061 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003062
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00003063- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
3064 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
3065
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003066- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
3067 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
3068 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
3069
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00003070- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
3071 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
3072
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003073- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
3074 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003075 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
3076 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003077
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00003078- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
3079 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
3080 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
3081 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
3082 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
3083
3084 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
3085 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
3086 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
3087 pattern.
3088
3089 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
3090 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
3091 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
3092 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
3093
3094 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
3095 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
3096 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
3097 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
3098 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
3099 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
3100
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00003101- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
3102 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
3103 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
3104 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
3105 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
3106 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
3107 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
3108 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00003109
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00003110- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
3111 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
3112 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
3113 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
3114 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003115 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
3116 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
3117 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
3118 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
3119 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
3120 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
3121 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003122
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003123- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
3124 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
3125
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00003126- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
3127 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
3128 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
3129 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
3130 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
3131 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
3132 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
3133 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
3134 to Zack Weinberg!
3135
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00003136- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
3137 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
3138 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
3139 type. This has been fixed now.
3140
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00003141- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
3142 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
3143 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
3144
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003145- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
3146 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
3147 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
3148 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
3149 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
3150 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
3151 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
3152 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00003153 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003154
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00003155- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
3156 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
3157 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00003158
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003159- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
3160 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
3161 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
3162 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
3163 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
3164 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
3165 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
3166 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003167 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003168 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
3169 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
3170
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00003171- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
3172 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
3173 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
3174 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
3175 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
3176 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
3177 this.)
3178
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003179- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
3180 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003181 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003182 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003183 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
3184 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00003185 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
3186 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003187
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003188- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
3189 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
3190 currently running.
3191
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00003192- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
3193 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
3194 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
3195 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
3196
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00003197- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
3198 as directory names.
3199
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00003200- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
3201 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
3202
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00003203- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
3204 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
3205
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003206- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00003207 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
3208 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003209
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00003210- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
3211 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
3212 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
3213 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
3214 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
3215
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003216- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
3217 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
3218 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
3219 removed.
3220
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00003221- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
3222 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
3223 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
3224
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00003225- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
3226 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
3227 to __debug__.
3228
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00003229- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
3230 string to the left with zeros. For example,
3231 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
3232
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00003233- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
3234 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
3235 deprecated now.
3236
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00003237- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
3238 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
3239 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00003240
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00003241- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
3242 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
3243 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
3244 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
3245 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00003246
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00003247- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
3248 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
3249
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003250- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
3251 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
3252 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003253 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003254 is backward compatible.
3255
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00003256- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
3257 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
3258 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
3259 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
3260 could access a pointer to freed memory.
3261
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00003262- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
3263 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
3264 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
3265 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
3266 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
3267 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003268
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00003269- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
3270 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
3271
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003272- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
3273 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
3274
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003275- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
3276 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
3277 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
3278 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
3279 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
3280
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00003281- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
3282 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
3283 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
3284
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003285- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00003286 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
3287
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00003288- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
3289 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
3290 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00003291
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00003292- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
3293 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
3294
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00003295- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
3296 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
3297 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
3298
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00003299- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
3300
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003301Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003302-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003303
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00003304- Added three operators to the operator module:
3305 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
3306 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
3307 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
3308
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00003309- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
3310
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003311- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
3312 archives.
3313
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003314- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
3315 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
3316 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
3317
3318 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
3319
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003320- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
3321 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
3322 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00003323 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003324
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00003325- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
3326 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
3327 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
3328 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003329 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
3330 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
3331 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
3332 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00003333
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00003334- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
3335 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00003336
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00003337- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
3338
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00003339- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
3340 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
3341
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00003342- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
3343 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
3344 supported.
3345
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00003346- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
3347
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00003348- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
3349 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00003350
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00003351- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
3352 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
3353
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003354- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
3355
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003356- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
3357 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
3358
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00003359- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
3360 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
3361 functions but callable type objects.
3362
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003363- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003364 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003365 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003366
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00003367- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
3368 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00003369
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00003370- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
3371 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00003372
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00003373- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
3374 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
3375 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
3376 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
3377
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00003378- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
3379 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00003380
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00003381- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
3382 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
3383 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
3384 and __imul__.
3385
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00003386- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00003387 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
3388 is called.
3389
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00003390- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
3391 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
3392 interpreter was compiled.
3393
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003394- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
3395 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
3396 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003397 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003398 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
3399 1, not 2.
3400
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00003401- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
3402 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
3403 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
3404 limit.
3405
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00003406- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
3407 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
3408 bug #623464.
3409
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00003410- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
3411 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
3412 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
3413 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
3414
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003415Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003416-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003417
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00003418- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
3419
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00003420- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
3421 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
3422 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
3423 with Python 2.3a2.
3424
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00003425- os.path exposes getctime.
3426
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003427- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003428 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003429 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003430 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003431 unit tests of floating point results.
3432
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00003433- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
3434 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
3435 has been increased.
3436
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003437- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
3438 executed.
3439
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00003440- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
3441 postinstallation script.
3442
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00003443- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
3444 test the current module.
3445
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003446- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00003447 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
3448 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
3449 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
3450 this behavior needs to be controlled.
3451
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003452- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003453 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003454 Ward's Optik package.
3455
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003456- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
3457 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
3458 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
3459 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
3460
3461- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
3462 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003463 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003464
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00003465- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
3466 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
3467 shelf are binary pickles.
3468
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00003469- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
3470 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
3471
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00003472- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
3473 modules are iterators now.
3474
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00003475- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
3476 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
3477 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
3478 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
3479 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
3480 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003481
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00003482- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
3483 with their entity value.
3484
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00003485- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
3486
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003487- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
3488 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00003489
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003490- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
3491 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003492 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00003493
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00003494- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
3495 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
3496 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
3497 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
3498 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
3499 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
3500 main():
3501
3502 import locale
3503 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
3504
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00003505- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
3506 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
3507
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00003508- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
3509 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
3510 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
3511 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
3512 to the new standard.
3513
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00003514- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
3515 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
3516 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
3517 an extension to the database.
3518
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003519- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
3520 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
3521 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
3522 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00003523 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003524
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003525- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003526 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003527
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003528- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
3529 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
3530 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
3531 bounded integers.
3532
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00003533- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
3534 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
3535 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
3536 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
3537 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
3538 in existence.
3539
3540 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
3541 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
3542 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
3543 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
3544 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
3545 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
3546
3547 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
3548 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
3549 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
3550 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
3551
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00003552- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
3553 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
3554 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
3555
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00003556- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
3557
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003558- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
3559 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
3560 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
3561 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
3562
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00003563- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
3564 argument.
3565
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00003566- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
3567 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
3568 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
3569 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
3570 [SF patch 560794].
3571
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003572- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
3573 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
3574 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003575 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
3576 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
3577 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003578
3579- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
3580 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00003581
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00003582- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
3583 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
3584 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
3585 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00003586
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00003587- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
3588 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
3589 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
3590 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
3591 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
3592
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003593- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00003594
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00003595- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
3596
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00003597- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
3598 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
3599 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
3600 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
3601 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
3602 identical to None.
3603
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00003604- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
3605 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
3606 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
3607 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
3608 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
3609 results now.
3610
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00003611- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
3612 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
3613
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003614- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
3615 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
3616 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
3617 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
3618 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
3619 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
3620 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
3621 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
3622
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00003623- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
3624
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00003625- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
3626 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
3627
3628- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
3629 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
3630 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
3631 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
3632 and other systems.
3633
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003634- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
3635 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
3636 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
3637 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 +00003638 work well with these.
3639
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00003640- compileall now supports quiet operation.
3641
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003642- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00003643 connections.
3644
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00003645- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
3646 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
3647 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
3648
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00003649- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
3650 sets
3651
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00003652- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
3653 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
3654 name.
3655
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00003656- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
3657 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
3658 passed in.
3659
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003660- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00003661 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00003662 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
3663 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00003664
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00003665- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
3666
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00003667- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
3668
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00003669- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
3670 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
3671 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
3672
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003673- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
3674 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
3675 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
3676 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00003677 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003678
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003679- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003680 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003681 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003682
3683- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
3684 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
3685 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
3686
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003687- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00003688 the value of its expression argument.
3689
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003690- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
3691 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
3692 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
3693
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00003694- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
3695 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
3696 skipstone browser was included.
3697
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00003698- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
3699 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
3700
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003701Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003702-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003703
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00003704- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
3705 names in addition to accepting file names.
3706
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00003707- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
3708 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
3709 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
3710 still used and useful.)
3711
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00003712- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
3713 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
3714 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
3715 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00003716
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00003717- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
3718 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
3719 the generated binary.
3720
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003721Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003722-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003723
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00003724- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
3725
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003726- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
3727 except in the hands of experts.
3728
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003729- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003730 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
3731 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
3732 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00003733
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00003734- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
3735 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
3736 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
3737 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
3738 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
3739 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
3740 builds.
3741
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003742- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
3743 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
3744 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
3745 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
3746 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
3747 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
3748 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
3749 new type.
3750
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00003751- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00003752
3753 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
3754 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
3755 positive infinities.
3756
3757 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
3758 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
3759 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
3760 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
3761 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
3762 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
3763 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
3764
3765 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
3766
3767 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
3768
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00003769- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
3770 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
3771 size of the executable.
3772
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003773- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
3774 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
3775 configure script. On other platforms, remove
3776 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00003777
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00003778- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
3779
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00003780- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
3781 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
3782 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00003783
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00003784- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
3785 well as Unix.
3786
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00003787- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
3788 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
3789 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
3790 modules in the README file for details.
3791
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003792C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003793-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003794
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003795- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
3796 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003797 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00003798 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003799 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003800
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003801- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
3802 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
3803 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
3804 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
3805 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
3806 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003807 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003808 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
3809 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
3810 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
3811 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
3812 aligned.)
3813
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00003814- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
3815 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
3816 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
3817
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003818- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
3819 level.
3820
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00003821- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
3822 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
3823 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
3824 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
3825 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
3826
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00003827- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
3828 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
3829 code.
3830
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00003831- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
3832 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
3833 adjusting for negative indices.
3834
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003835- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
3836 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
3837 object.
3838
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00003839- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
3840 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
3841 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
3842
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003843- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
3844 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00003845
3846- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
3847
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00003848- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
3849 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
3850 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
3851 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
3852
3853- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
3854
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00003855- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003856
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003857- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00003858 without going through the buffer API.
3859
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003860- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00003861
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00003862- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
3863 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
3864 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
3865 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
3866
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003867- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
3868 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
3869
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003870- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003871 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
3872
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003873New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003874-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003875
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00003876- OpenVMS is now supported.
3877
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00003878- AtheOS is now supported.
3879
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00003880- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
3881
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00003882- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
3883
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003884Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003885-----
3886
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00003887- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
3888 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
3889 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003890
3891Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003892-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003893
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003894- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
3895 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
3896 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
3897 bugs.
3898 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003899 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00003900 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
3901 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003902 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003903
3904- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00003905 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003906
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00003907- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
3908 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
3909
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003910- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
3911 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003912 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003913 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
3914
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00003915- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
3916 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
3917 use files" uninstall option).
3918
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00003919- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
3920
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003921- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
3922 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
3923
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003924- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
3925 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
3926 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
3927
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003928- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
3929 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
3930 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
3931 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
3932 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003933 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
3934 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
3935 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003936
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003937- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003938 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003939 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
3940 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
3941 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
3942 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
3943 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
3944 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
3945 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
3946 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
3947 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
3948 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
3949 work around.
3950
3951- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
3952 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
3953 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
3954 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
3955 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
3956 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
3957 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
3958 specified with O_CREAT too).
3959
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003960Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003961----
3962
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003963- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003964
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00003965- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
3966 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
3967 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
3968
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003969- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
3970 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
3971 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
3972
3973- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
3974 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
3975 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
3976 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
3977 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
3978 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
3979 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
3980 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003981
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00003982- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
3983 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
3984 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003985
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003986- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
3987 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
3988 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
3989 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
3990 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003991
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003992- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
3993 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
3994 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003995
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003996- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
3997 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003998
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003999- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
4000 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
4001 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
4002 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
4003 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004004
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004005- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
4006 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
4007 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
4008
4009- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
4010 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
4011 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004012
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004013- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
4014 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
4015 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
4016 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004017 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004018
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004019- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
4020 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004021
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004022- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
4023 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00004024
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004025- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00004026 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004027 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
4028 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004029
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00004030
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004031What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004032===============================
4033
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004034*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
4035
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004036Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004037--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004038
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004039- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
4040 with a custom metaclass.
4041
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004042Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004043-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004044
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004045- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
4046 are proxies.
4047
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004048Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004049-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004050
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004051- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
4052 very short strings.
4053
4054- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
4055 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
4056 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
4057 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
4058 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
4059
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004060Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004061-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004062
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004063- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
4064 close or delete time).
4065
4066- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
4067 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
4068
4069- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
4070
4071- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004072 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004073
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004074Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004075-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004076
4077Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004078-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004079
4080C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004081-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004082
4083New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004084-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004085
4086Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004087-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004088
4089Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004090-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004091
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004092- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
4093
4094- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
4095 instances are deleted at process exit time.
4096
4097- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
4098 deleted at process exit time.
4099
4100- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
4101 in backslash.
4102
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004103Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004104----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004105
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004106- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
4107 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
4108 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
4109
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004110
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00004111What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004112===========================
4113
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004114*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
4115
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004116Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004117--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004118
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004119- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
4120 been extensively updated. See
4121
4122 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
4123
4124 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
4125
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00004126- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
4127 deleted!
4128
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00004129- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
4130 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
4131 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
4132 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
4133 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
4134
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004135- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
4136
4137 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
4138 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
4139
4140 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
4141 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
4142 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
4143 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
4144 supported anyway.
4145
4146 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
4147 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
4148
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00004149- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
4150 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
4151 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
4152 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
4153 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004154
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00004155- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
4156 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
4157 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
4158
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004159Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004160-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004161
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004162- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
4163 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
4164 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
4165 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
4166 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
4167 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00004168 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
4169 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
4170 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
4171 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004172
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00004173- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
4174 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
4175 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
4176
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004177Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004178-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004179
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004180- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
4181
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004182Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004183-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004184
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00004185- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
4186 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
4187 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
4188 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
4189 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
4190 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
4191
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00004192- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
4193
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00004194- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
4195
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00004196- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
4197
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004198- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
4199 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
4200 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
4201
4202- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
4203
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004204Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004205-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004206
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004207- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
4208 off a search on Google.
4209
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004210Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004211-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004212
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004213- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
4214 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
4215 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
4216 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
4217 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
4218 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
4219 other platforms should do likewise.
4220
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00004221- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
4222 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
4223 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
4224
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004225C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004226-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004227
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004228- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
4229 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
4230 producing key-value pairs.
4231
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004232- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004233 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004234 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
4235 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
4236 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
4237 previously went unchallenged.
4238
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004239New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004240-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004241
4242Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004243-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004244
4245Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004246-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004247
4248Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004249----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004250
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00004251- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
4252 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004253
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004254- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
4255 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
4256 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
4257 home.
4258
4259
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004260What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004261===========================
4262
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004263*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
4264
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004265Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004266--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004267
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004268- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
4269 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004270
4271 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004272 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004273
4274 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
4275 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004276 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004277 This needs to be documented.
4278
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00004279- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
4280 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
4281
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00004282- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
4283 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
4284 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
4285
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00004286- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
4287 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
4288
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004289- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
4290 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
4291 class forbids it).
4292
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00004293- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
4294 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
4295 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
4296
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004297- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
4298
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004299Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004300-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004301
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004302- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
4303 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004304 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004305
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004306- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
4307 (like 1 + '').
4308
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004309Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004310-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004311
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004312- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
4313 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
4314 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
4315 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004316 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004317 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
4318
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00004319- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
4320 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
4321 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
4322 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
4323
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004324- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
4325 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004326 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
4327 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
4328 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004329
4330- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
4331 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004332
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00004333- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
4334 bytes on its input.
4335
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004336Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004337-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004338
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004339- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00004340 convenience function.
4341
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004342- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
4343 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
4344 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004345 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
4346 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
4347 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
4348 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
4349 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
4350 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004351
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00004352- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
4353 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
4354 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
4355 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
4356
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00004357- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
4358 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
4359 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
4360
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004361- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
4362 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
4363 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
4364 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
4365
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004366- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
4367 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004368 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004369 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
4370 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
4371 new -l and -e options.
4372
4373- statcache is now deprecated.
4374
4375- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
4376 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004377 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004378 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
4379 time properly taken into account.
4380
4381- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
4382 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
4383 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
4384 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
4385
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004386Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004387-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004388
4389Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004390-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004391
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004392- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
4393 is built with libdb3 if available.
4394
4395- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
4396
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004397C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004398-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004399
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00004400- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
4401 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
4402 PySequence_Size().
4403
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004404- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
4405
4406- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
4407 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
4408 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
4409
4410- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
4411 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
4412
4413- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
4414 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
4415
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004416New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004417-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004418
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004419- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
4420 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
4421
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00004422- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
4423 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
4424
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004425- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
4426
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004427Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004428-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004429
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004430- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
4431 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
4432
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004433Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004434-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004435
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004436Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004437----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004438
4439- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
4440 removed completely in the next release.
4441
4442- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
4443 OSX.
4444
4445- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
4446 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
4447
4448- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
4449
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004450
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004451What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004452===========================
4453
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004454*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
4455
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004456Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004457--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004458
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004459- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004460 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004461 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004462 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
4463 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004464 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
4465 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004466 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
4467 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00004468
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00004469- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
4470 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
4471
4472- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
4473 class methods, static methods, and properties.
4474
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004475Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004476-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004477
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00004478- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
4479 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
4480 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
4481 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
4482 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
4483 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
4484 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
4485 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
4486
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004487- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
4488 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
4489 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
4490 example).
4491
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004492- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004493 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004494 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004495 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004496
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004497- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
4498 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
4499 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00004500 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004501
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004502- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
4503 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
4504 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
4505 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
4506 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
4507 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
4508
4509 isinstance(x, (A, B))
4510
4511 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
4512
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004513Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004514-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004515
4516- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
4517
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004518- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
4519
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004520- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
4521 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00004522
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004523- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
4524 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
4525 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
4526 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
4527 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
4528 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00004529 attributes.
4530
4531- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
4532 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
4533 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00004534
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004535- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
4536 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
4537 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004538
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004539- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
4540 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
4541 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004542 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
4543 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
4544
4545- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
4546 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004547
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004548Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004549-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004550
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00004551- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
4552 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
4553
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004554- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
4555 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
4556 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
4557 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
4558
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00004559- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
4560 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
4561 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
4562 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
4563
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00004564 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
4565 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
4566 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
4567 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
4568 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
4569 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
4570 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
4571 without losing information).
4572
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004573- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004574 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
4575 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
4576 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
4577 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
4578 module).
4579
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004580 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004581 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
4582 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
4583 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
4584 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004585
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004586- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00004587 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
4588 encoding.
4589
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00004590- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
4591 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
4592
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004593- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004594 to allow saving the message body to a file.
4595
4596- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
4597 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
4598 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
4599 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
4600
4601- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
4602
4603- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
4604 ON, and OFF.
4605
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004606- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
4607 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
4608
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004609Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004610-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004611
4612- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
4613 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
4614 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004615
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004616- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
4617 been added: -X and -E.
4618
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004619Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004620-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004621
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004622- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
4623 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
4624
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004625C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004626-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004627
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00004628- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
4629 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
4630 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
4631 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
4632 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
4633
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00004634- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
4635 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
4636 as long) arguments.
4637
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004638- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
4639 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
4640 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
4641 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
4642 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
4643 report any bugs or strange behavior).
4644
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004645- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
4646 input.
4647
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004648New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004649-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004650
4651Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004652-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004653
4654Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004655-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004656
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00004657- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
4658 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
4659 is created for .py and .pyw files.
4660
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004661- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
4662 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
4663 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004664 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004665
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004666 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
4667 # (SIGINT) behavior.
4668 import signal
4669 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004670
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004671 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004672 while 1:
4673 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004674 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004675 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
4676 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
4677 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
4678 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004679
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004680
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004681What's New in Python 2.2a4?
4682===========================
4683
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004684*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
4685
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004686Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004687--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004688
4689- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
4690 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
4691 documentation for all operations on list objects.
4692
4693- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
4694 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
4695 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
4696 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
4697 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
4698 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
4699 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004700
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004701- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004702 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004703 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
4704 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
4705 associate a docstring with a property.
4706
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004707- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
4708 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
4709 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
4710 other built-in object types.
4711
4712- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
4713 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
4714 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
4715 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
4716 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
4717
4718- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
4719 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
4720
4721- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
4722 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004723 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004724 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
4725 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
4726 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
4727 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
4728 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
4729
4730- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
4731 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
4732 class.
4733
4734- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
4735 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
4736 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
4737 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
4738
4739- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
4740 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
4741 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
4742 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
4743
4744- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
4745 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
4746
4747- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
4748 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
4749 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
4750 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
4751 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004752 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004753 with the same value as s.
4754
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00004755- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
4756
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004757Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004758----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004759
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00004760- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
4761
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00004762- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
4763 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
4764 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
4765 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
4766 objects.
4767
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004768- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
4769 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00004770 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
4771 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
4772
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004773- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
4774 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
4775 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
4776
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004777Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004778-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004779
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00004780- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4781 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
4782 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
4783 by the instances.
4784
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00004785- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
4786 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
4787 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
4788
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004789- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
4790 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
4791 before the entire comparison is complete.
4792
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00004793- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4794 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
4795 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
4796
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00004797- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
4798 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
4799 getwriter().
4800
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004801- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
4802 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
4803
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00004804- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004805 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
4806 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
4807
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00004808- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
4809 iterable object.
4810
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004811- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
4812 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004813
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004814- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
4815 authentication.
4816
4817- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
4818 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004819
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004820- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00004821 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
4822 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
4823 a sample driver.)
4824
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004825Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004826-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004827
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004828- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
4829 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
4830 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
4831 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
4832 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
4833 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
4834 kernel has large file support.
4835
4836- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
4837 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
4838 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
4839 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
4840 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
4841
4842- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
4843 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
4844 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
4845
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004846C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004847-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004848
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004849- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
4850 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
4851
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004852New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004853-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004854
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004855- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
4856 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
4857
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004858Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004859-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004860
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004861- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
4862 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
4863 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
4864 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
4865 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
4866
4867- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
4868 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
4869 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
4870 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
4871
4872- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
4873 especially in regard to reporting errors.
4874
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004875Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004876-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004877
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004878- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004879 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
4880 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004881
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004882
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004883What's New in Python 2.2a3?
4884===========================
4885
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004886*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
4887
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004888Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004889----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004890
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004891- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
4892 big to represent as a C double.
4893
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00004894- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
4895 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
4896 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
4897 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
4898 restriction).
4899
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00004900- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
4901 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
4902 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
4903 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
4904 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
4905
4906 >>> dir([])
4907 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
4908 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
4909 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
4910 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
4911 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
4912 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
4913 'reverse', 'sort']
4914
4915 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
4916
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004917- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004918 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
4919 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
4920 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
4921 OverflowError exception.
4922
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00004923- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004924 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004925 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
4926 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
4927 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
4928 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
4929 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004930 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004931 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
4932 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
4933
4934 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
4935 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
4936 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
4937 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004938
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004939- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004940 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
4941 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
4942 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
4943 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
4944 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
4945 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
4946 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
4947 once it is created.
4948
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00004949- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
4950 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
4951 (key, value) pairs.
4952
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004953- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004954 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
4955 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
4956
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00004957- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
4958 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
4959 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
4960 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
4961 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004962
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004963- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004964 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
4965 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
4966
4967 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
4968
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004969- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00004970 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
4971
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004972Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004973-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004974
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004975- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00004976 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
4977 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004978
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00004979- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
4980 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
4981 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
4982 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
4983 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
4984 in this area anymore).
4985
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00004986- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
4987 threading.Timer.
4988
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00004989- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
4990 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
4991
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004992- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004993 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
4994
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004995- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00004996 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
4997 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
4998 converted to Python longs.
4999
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005000- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005001 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
5002
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00005003- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
5004 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
5005 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
5006
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005007Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005008-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005009
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005010- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
5011 division operators as per PEP 238.
5012
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005013Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005014-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005015
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005016- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
5017 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
5018 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
5019 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
5020
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005021C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005022-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005023
5024- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005025
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005026- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
5027 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005028 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005029
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005030 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
5031 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005032 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005033 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005034
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005035- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005036 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
5037 module:
5038
5039 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005040
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005041 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
5042 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005043
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005044 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
5045 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005046
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005047 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
5048
5049 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
5050
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005051- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005052 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
5053 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
5054 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005055
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005056New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005057-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005058
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00005059- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
5060 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
5061 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
5062 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
5063 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005064
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005065Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005066-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005067
5068Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005069-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005070
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005071- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
5072 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
5073 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
5074 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00005075 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
5076 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
5077 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
5078 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
5079 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005080
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005081- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00005082 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
5083
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005084
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005085What's New in Python 2.2a2?
5086===========================
5087
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005088*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
5089
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005090Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005091-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005092
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00005093- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
5094 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
5095
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005096- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
5097 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
5098 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005099
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00005100- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
5101 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
5102 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
5103 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005104
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005105- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
5106
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005107- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005108
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005109Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005110-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005111
5112- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00005113 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005114 the module docstring for details.
5115
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005116Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005117-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005118
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005119- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005120 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
5121 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
5122 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005123
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005124- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
5125 Nick Mathewson.
5126
5127Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005128----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005129
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005130- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
5131 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
5132 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
5133 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
5134 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
5135 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
5136 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
5137 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
5138
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00005139- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
5140 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
5141 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
5142 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
5143
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00005144- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
5145 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
5146 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
5147 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
5148 come a long way).
5149
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005150- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
5151 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
5152 write filters for these warnings).
5153
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00005154- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
5155 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
5156 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
5157 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
5158 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
5159
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00005160- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
5161 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
5162 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
5163 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
5164 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
5165 older distribution.
5166
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005167Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005168-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005169
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005170- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
5171 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005172 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005173
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005174- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
5175 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
5176 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
5177
5178- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
5179
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005180- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
5181
5182- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
5183
5184- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
5185
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005186- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005187
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00005188- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
5189
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005190New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005191-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005192
5193C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005194-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005195
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005196- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
5197 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
5198 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
5199 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
5200 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
5201 against buffer overruns.
5202
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005203- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005204 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
5205 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005206 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
5207 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
5208 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
5209
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005210- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
5211 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
5212 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
5213 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
5214 deprecated.
5215
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005216Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005217-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005218
5219- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
5220 relevant is found.
5221
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005222
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005223What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005224===========================
5225
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005226*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
5227
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005228Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005229----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005230
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005231- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
5232 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
5233 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
5234 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
5235 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
5236 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
5237 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
5238 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005239 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005240 repaired.
5241
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005242- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00005243 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005244 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
5245 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
5246 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
5247 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
5248 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
5249 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
5250 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
5251 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
5252
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00005253- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
5254 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
5255 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
5256 leading BMO character).
5257
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005258- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
5259 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
5260 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
5261
5262 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
5263 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
5264 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005265
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005266 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
5267 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
5268 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
5269 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
5270 for various simple to use conversions.
5271
5272 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
5273 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
5274
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005275 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5276 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
5277 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
5278 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
5279 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5280 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
5281 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5282 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
5283 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5284 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
5285 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5286 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
5287 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5288 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
5289 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005290
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005291- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
5292 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
5293 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005294 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005295 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005296
5297 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005298 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
5299 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
5300 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
5301 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
5302 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005303 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
5304 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005305
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005306 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
5307 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
5308 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005309 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005310
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00005311- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
5312 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
5313 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
5314 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
5315 floating arithmetic,
5316
5317 x = 9007199254740992.0
5318 print long(x)
5319
5320 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
5321 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
5322 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
5323 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
5324 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
5325 functions are of good quality).
5326
5327 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
5328 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
5329 algorithms to break.
5330
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00005331- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
5332 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
5333 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
5334 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
5335 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
5336 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
5337 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
5338 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
5339 order.
5340
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005341- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
5342 operation along the most common code paths.
5343
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005344- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
5345 the same as dict.has_key(x).
5346
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00005347- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
5348 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
5349 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
5350 {}.update(UserDict())
5351
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005352- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
5353 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
5354 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
5355 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
5356 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
5357 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
5358 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
5359 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
5360
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005361- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005362 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005363
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005364 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00005365 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
5366 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00005367 join() method of strings
5368 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005369 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
5370 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005371 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00005372 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005373
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00005374- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
5375 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
5376
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005377- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
5378 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
5379
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00005380- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
5381 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
5382 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
5383 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
5384
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005385- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
5386 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005387 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005388 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
5389 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00005390
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00005391- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
5392
5393
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005394Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005395-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005396
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005397- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005398 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005399 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
5400 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
5401
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00005402- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
5403 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
5404
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00005405- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
5406 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
5407 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
5408 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
5409
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00005410- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
5411 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
5412 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
5413
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00005414- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
5415
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00005416- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
5417
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00005418- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
5419 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
5420 that are still imported into string.py).
5421
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005422- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
5423
5424- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
5425 Now it does.
5426
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005427- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
5428
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005429- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
5430 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
5431 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
5432 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
5433 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005434 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
5435 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005436
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00005437- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
5438 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
5439 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
5440 'help(object)'.
5441
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005442Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005443-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005444
5445- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005446 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005447 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
5448 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
5449
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005450- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005451 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
5452 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005453
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005454C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005455-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005456
5457- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
5458 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005459
5460----
5461
5462**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**