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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.)
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Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +00007What's New in Python 2.5 alpha 1?
8=================================
9
Anthony Baxter12b6f6c2005-03-29 13:36:16 +000010*Release date: XX-XXX-2006*
11
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000012Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Martin v. Löwisd35edda2005-08-24 08:39:24 +000015- Forward UnicodeDecodeError into SyntaxError for source encoding errors.
16
Barry Warsawe2eca0b2005-08-15 18:14:19 +000017- SF bug #900092: When tracing (e.g. for hotshot), restore 'return' events for
18 exceptions that cause a function to exit.
19
Raymond Hettinger9f1a6792005-07-31 01:16:36 +000020- The implementation of set() and frozenset() was revised to use its
21 own internal data structure. Memory consumption is reduced by 1/3
22 and there are modest speed-ups as well. The API is unchanged.
23
Tim Petersde7990b2005-07-17 23:45:23 +000024- SF bug #1238681: freed pointer is used in longobject.c:long_pow().
25
Michael W. Hudson0edc7a02005-07-12 10:21:19 +000026- SF bug #1229429: PyObject_CallMethod failed to decrement some
27 reference counts in some error exit cases.
28
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +000029- SF bug #1185883: Python's small-object memory allocator took over
30 a block managed by the platform C library whenever a realloc specified
31 a small new size. However, there's no portable way to know then how
32 much of the address space following the pointer is valid, so no
33 portable way to copy data from the C-managed block into Python's
34 small-object space without risking a memory fault. Python's small-object
35 realloc now leaves such blocks under the control of the platform C
36 realloc.
37
Michael W. Hudsonb8963812005-07-05 15:21:58 +000038- SF bug #1232517: An overflow error was not detected properly when
39 attempting to convert a large float to an int in os.utime().
40
Raymond Hettinger3296e692005-06-29 23:29:56 +000041- SF bug #1224347: hex longs now print with lowercase letters just
42 like their int counterparts.
43
Michael W. Hudson188d4362005-06-20 16:52:57 +000044- SF bug #1163563: the original fix for bug #1010677 ("thread Module
45 Breaks PyGILState_Ensure()") broke badly in the case of multiple
46 interpreter states; back out that fix and do a better job (see
47 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2005-June/054258.html
48 for a longer write-up of the problem).
49
Michael W. Hudsondf888462005-06-03 14:41:55 +000050- SF patch #1180995: marshal now uses a binary format by default when
51 serializing floats.
52
Michael W. Hudsonda85a902005-06-01 11:34:22 +000053- SF patch #1181301: on platforms that appear to use IEEE 754 floats,
54 the routines that promise to produce IEEE 754 binary representations
55 of floats now simply copy bytes around.
56
Skip Montanarobbf12ba2005-05-20 03:07:06 +000057- bug #967182: disallow opening files with 'wU' or 'aU' as specified by PEP
58 278.
59
Brett Cannonc3647ac2005-04-26 03:45:26 +000060- patch #1109424: int, long, float, complex, and unicode now check for the
61 proper magic slot for type conversions when subclassed. Previously the
62 magic slot was ignored during conversion. Semantics now match the way
63 subclasses of str always behaved. int/long/float, conversion of an instance
64 to the base class has been moved the prroper nb_* magic slot and out of
65 PyNumber_*().
66 Thanks Walter Dörwald.
67
Barry Warsawc8d907c2005-04-19 23:43:40 +000068- Descriptors defined in C with a PyGetSetDef structure, where the setter is
69 NULL, now raise an AttributeError when attempting to set or delete the
70 attribute. Previously a TypeError was raised, but this was inconsistent
71 with the equivalent pure-Python implementation.
72
Michael W. Hudson774479c2005-04-18 08:46:17 +000073- It is now safe to call PyGILState_Release() before
74 PyEval_InitThreads() (note that if there is reason to believe there
75 are multiple threads around you still must call PyEval_InitThreads()
76 before using the Python API; this fix is for extension modules that
77 have no way of knowing if Python is multi-threaded yet).
78
Michael W. Hudsone3afc592005-04-07 10:11:19 +000079- Typing Ctrl-C whilst raw_input() was waiting in a build with threads
80 disabled caused a crash.
81
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +000082- Bug #1165306: instancemethod_new allowed the creation of a method
83 with im_class == im_self == NULL, which caused a crash when called.
84
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +000085- Move exception finalisation later in the shutdown process - this
Anthony Baxter12b6f6c2005-03-29 13:36:16 +000086 fixes the crash seen in bug #1165761
87
Raymond Hettinger96229b12005-03-11 06:49:40 +000088- Added two new builtins, any() and all().
89
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +000090- Defining a class with empty parentheses is now allowed
Brett Cannonf4189912005-04-09 02:30:16 +000091 (e.g., ``class C(): pass`` is no longer a syntax error).
92 Patch #1176012 added support to the 'parser' module and 'compiler' package
93 (thanks to logistix for that added support).
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +000094
Martin v. Löwis96d743e2005-03-03 23:00:26 +000095- Patch #1115086: Support PY_LONGLONG in structmember.
96
Raymond Hettingerb67cc802005-03-03 16:45:19 +000097- Bug #1155938: new style classes did not check that __init__() was
98 returning None.
99
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000100- Patch #802188: Report characters after line continuation character
Martin v. Löwis4bf108d2005-03-03 11:45:45 +0000101 ('\') with a specific error message.
102
Martin v. Löwisff232d72005-03-03 09:24:38 +0000103- Bug #723201: Raise a TypeError for passing bad objects to 'L' format.
104
Michael W. Hudson8e1afab2005-02-17 14:55:21 +0000105- Bug #1124295: the __name__ attribute of file objects was
106 inadvertently made inaccessible in restricted mode.
107
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000108- Bug #1074011: closing sys.std{out,err} now causes a flush() and
Martin v. Löwis8e3ca8a2005-01-23 09:41:49 +0000109 an ferror() call.
110
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000111- min() and max() now support key= arguments with the same meaning as in
112 list.sort().
113
Raymond Hettingerc34f8672005-01-02 06:17:33 +0000114- The peephole optimizer now performs simple constant folding in expressions:
115 (2+3) --> (5).
116
Raymond Hettingera422c342005-01-11 03:03:27 +0000117- set and frozenset objects can now be marshalled. SF #1098985.
118
Michael W. Hudsonfaa76482005-01-31 17:09:25 +0000119- Bug #1077106: Poor argument checking could cause memory corruption
120 in calls to os.read().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000121
Jeremy Hyltonab630502005-02-04 18:44:06 +0000122- The parser did not complain about future statements in illegal
123 positions. It once again reports a syntax error if a future
124 statement occurs after anything other than a doc string.
125
Neil Schemenauercf52c072005-08-12 17:34:58 +0000126- Change the %s format specifier for str objects so that it returns a
127 unicode instance if the argument is not an instance of basestring and
128 calling __str__ on the argument returns a unicode instance.
129
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000130Extension Modules
131-----------------
132
Georg Brandl38387b82005-08-24 07:17:40 +0000133- Bug #728515: mmap.resize() now resizes the file on Unix as it did
134 on Windows.
135
Martin v. Löwisebd9d5b2005-08-09 15:00:59 +0000136- Patch #1180695: Add nanosecond stat resolution, and st_gen,
137 st_birthtime for FreeBSD.
138
Michael W. Hudson8137bea2005-07-27 20:24:40 +0000139- Patch #1231069: The fcntl.ioctl function now uses the 'I' code for
140 the request code argument, which results in more C-like behaviour
141 for large or negative values.
142
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000143- Bug #1234979: For the argument of thread.Lock.acquire, the Windows
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000144 implementation treated all integer values except 1 as false.
Georg Brandlaf410b52005-07-08 22:26:13 +0000145
Georg Brandl6b95f1d2005-06-03 19:47:00 +0000146- Bug #1194181: bz2.BZ2File didn't handle mode 'U' correctly.
147
Hye-Shik Chang5f937a72005-06-02 13:09:30 +0000148- Patch #1212117: os.stat().st_flags is now accessible as a attribute
149 if available on the platform.
150
Skip Montanaro5ff14922005-05-16 02:42:22 +0000151- Patch #1103951: Expose O_SHLOCK and O_EXLOCK in the posix module if
152 available on the platform.
153
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +0000154- Bug #1166660: The readline module could segfault if hook functions
155 were set in a different thread than that which called readline.
156
Raymond Hettinger4aec61e2005-03-18 21:20:23 +0000157- collections.deque objects now support a remove() method.
158
Raymond Hettinger984f9bb2005-03-09 16:38:48 +0000159- operator.itemgetter() and operator.attrgetter() now support retrieving
160 multiple fields. This provides direct support for sorting on multiple
161 keys (primary, secondary, etc).
162
Martin v. Löwisb60ae992005-03-08 09:10:29 +0000163- os.access now supports Unicode path names on non-Win32 systems.
164
Martin v. Löwisfd78a6f2005-03-04 14:37:01 +0000165- Patches #925152, #1118602: Avoid reading after the end of the buffer
166 in pyexpat.GetInputContext.
167
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000168- Patches #749830, #1144555: allow UNIX mmap size to default to current
Martin v. Löwis7fe60c02005-03-03 11:22:44 +0000169 file size.
170
Raymond Hettinger9c323f82005-02-28 19:39:44 +0000171- Added functional.partial(). See PEP309.
172
Martin v. Löwis9533e342005-02-27 20:33:25 +0000173- Patch #1093585: raise a ValueError for negative history items in readline.
174 {remove_history,replace_history}
175
Fred Drake9c131f22005-01-23 15:16:08 +0000176- The spwd module has been added, allowing access to the shadow password
177 database.
Martin v. Löwisc3001752005-01-23 09:27:24 +0000178
Martin v. Löwisfe33d0b2005-01-16 08:57:39 +0000179- stat_float_times is now True.
180
Raymond Hettingerb0900e62004-12-16 16:23:40 +0000181- array.array objects are now picklable.
182
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000183- the cPickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
184 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
185
Raymond Hettingerb2594052004-12-05 09:25:51 +0000186- itertools.islice() now accepts None for the start and step arguments.
187 This allows islice() to work more readily with slices:
188 islice(s.start, s.stop, s.step)
189
Skip Montanaro0af3ade2005-01-13 04:12:31 +0000190- datetime.datetime() now has a strptime class method which can be used to
191 create datetime object using a string and format.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000192
193Library
194-------
195
Martin v. Löwis56066d22005-08-24 07:38:12 +0000196- Bug #1178484: Return complete lines from codec stream readers
197 even if there is an exception in later lines, resulting in
198 correct line numbers for decoding errors in source code.
199
Georg Brandl6d2b3462005-08-24 07:36:17 +0000200- Bug #1192315: Disallow negative arguments to clear() in pdb.
201
Martin v. Löwisb813c532005-08-07 20:51:04 +0000202- Patch #827386: Support absolute source paths in msvccompiler.py.
203
Georg Brandl649f8e72005-08-03 07:30:12 +0000204- Patch #1105730: Apply the new implementation of commonprefix in posixpath
205 to ntpath, macpath, os2emxpath and riscospath.
206
Guido van Rossum755149f2005-07-27 00:00:44 +0000207- Fix a problem in Tkinter introduced by SF patch #869468: delete bogus
208 __hasattr__ and __delattr__ methods on class Tk that were breaking
209 Tkdnd.
210
Georg Brandl5dbda752005-07-17 20:27:41 +0000211- Bug #1015140: disambiguated the term "article id" in nntplib docs and
212 docstrings to either "article number" or "message id".
213
Georg Brandla4a8b822005-07-15 09:13:21 +0000214- Bug #1238170: threading.Thread.__init__ no longer has "kwargs={}" as a
215 parameter, but uses the usual "kwargs=None".
216
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000217- textwrap now processes text chunks at O(n) speed instead of O(n**2).
Raymond Hettinger8bfa8932005-07-15 06:53:35 +0000218 Patch #1209527 (Contributed by Connelly).
219
Georg Brandl5c5fe2f2005-07-14 06:40:47 +0000220- urllib2 has now an attribute 'httpresponses' mapping from HTTP status code
221 to W3C name (404 -> 'Not Found'). RFE #1216944.
222
Georg Brandl9e43acf2005-07-04 17:16:07 +0000223- Bug #1177468: Don't cache the /dev/urandom file descriptor for os.urandom,
224 as this can cause problems with apps closing all file descriptors.
225
Georg Brandl5284b532005-06-26 22:54:58 +0000226- Bug #839151: Fix an attempt to access sys.argv in the warnings module
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000227 it can be missing in embedded interpreters
Georg Brandl5284b532005-06-26 22:54:58 +0000228
Georg Brandl2f210b62005-06-26 22:09:06 +0000229- Bug #1155638: Fix a bug which affected HTTP 0.9 responses in httplib.
230
Georg Brandlfbff1bc2005-06-26 21:36:25 +0000231- Bug #1100201: Cross-site scripting was possible on BaseHTTPServer via
232 error messages.
233
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000234- Bug #1108948: Cookie.py produced invalid JavaScript code.
235
Raymond Hettingerda99d1c2005-06-21 07:43:58 +0000236- The tokenize module now detects and reports indentation errors.
237 Bug #1224621.
238
Raymond Hettinger68c04532005-06-10 11:05:19 +0000239- The tokenize module has a new untokenize() function to support a full
240 roundtrip from lexed tokens back to Python sourcecode. In addition,
241 the generate_tokens() function now accepts a callable argument that
242 terminates by raising StopIteration.
243
Georg Brandl9166e1a2005-06-04 09:20:03 +0000244- Bug #1196315: fix weakref.WeakValueDictionary constructor.
245
Georg Brandl268e61c2005-06-03 14:28:50 +0000246- Bug #1213894: os.path.realpath didn't resolve symlinks that were the first
247 component of the path.
248
Skip Montanaro174dd222005-05-14 20:54:16 +0000249- Patch #1120353: The xmlrpclib module provides better, more transparent,
250 support for datetime.{datetime,date,time} objects. With use_datetime set
251 to True, applications shouldn't have to fiddle with the DateTime wrapper
252 class at all.
253
Martin v. Löwis55f1bb82005-03-21 20:56:35 +0000254- distutils.commands.upload was added to support uploading distribution
255 files to PyPI.
256
Walter Dörwalda6e8a4a2005-03-31 13:57:38 +0000257- distutils.commands.register now encodes the data as UTF-8 before posting
258 them to PyPI.
259
Raymond Hettinger267b8682005-03-27 10:47:39 +0000260- decimal operator and comparison methods now return NotImplemented
261 instead of raising a TypeError when interacting with other types. This
262 allows other classes to implement __radd__ style methods and have them
263 work as expected.
264
Raymond Hettingerbea3f6f2005-03-15 04:59:17 +0000265- Bug #1163325: Decimal infinities failed to hash. Attempting to
266 hash a NaN raised an InvalidOperation instead of a TypeError.
267
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000268- Patch #918101: Add tarfile open mode r|* for auto-detection of the
Martin v. Löwis78be7df2005-03-05 12:47:42 +0000269 stream compression; add, for symmetry reasons, r:* as a synonym of r.
270
Martin v. Löwis00a73e72005-03-04 19:40:34 +0000271- Patch #1043890: Add extractall method to tarfile.
272
Martin v. Löwisc72dd382005-03-04 13:50:17 +0000273- Patch #1075887: Don't require MSVC in distutils if there is nothing
274 to build.
275
Martin v. Löwis637431b2005-03-03 23:12:42 +0000276- Patch #1103407: Properly deal with tarfile iterators when untarring
277 symbolic links on Windows.
278
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000279- Patch #645894: Use getrusage for computing the time consumption in
Martin v. Löwisa4dac402005-03-03 11:39:45 +0000280 profile.py if available.
281
Martin v. Löwisdf37c8c2005-03-03 11:08:03 +0000282- Patch #1046831: Use get_python_version where appropriate in sysconfig.py.
283
Martin v. Löwisc5574e82005-03-03 10:57:37 +0000284- Patch #1117454: Remove code to special-case cookies without values
285 in LWPCookieJar.
286
Martin v. Löwis4ea3ead2005-03-03 10:48:12 +0000287- Patch #1117339: Add cookielib special name tests.
288
Martin v. Löwise869eb12005-03-03 09:46:07 +0000289- Patch #1112812: Make bsddb/__init__.py more friendly for modulefinder.
290
Martin v. Löwisf2a8d632005-03-03 08:35:22 +0000291- Patch #1110248: SYNC_FLUSH the zlib buffer for GZipFile.flush.
292
Martin v. Löwisdf241532005-03-03 08:17:42 +0000293- Patch #1107973: Allow to iterate over the lines of a tarfile.ExFileObject.
294
Martin v. Löwis8ed338a2005-03-03 08:12:27 +0000295- Patch #1104111: Alter setup.py --help and --help-commands.
296
Martin v. Löwis4afe1542005-03-01 08:09:28 +0000297- Patch #1121234: Properly cleanup _exit and tkerror commands.
298
Martin v. Löwisc2a0ac22005-02-24 20:22:10 +0000299- Patch #1049151: xdrlib now unpacks booleans as True or False.
300
Raymond Hettingerbab41432005-02-05 01:31:19 +0000301- Fixed bug in a NameError bug in cookielib. Patch #1116583.
302
Guido van Rossumd0641422005-02-03 15:01:24 +0000303- Applied a security fix to SimpleXMLRPCserver (PSF-2005-001). This
304 disables recursive traversal through instance attributes, which can
305 be exploited in various ways.
306
Martin v. Löwis1d11de62005-01-29 13:29:23 +0000307- Bug #1110478: Revert os.environ.update to do putenv again.
308
Thomas Hellerd6c6e222005-01-20 19:20:16 +0000309- Bug #1103844: fix distutils.install.dump_dirs() with negated options.
310
Martin v. Löwis22b457e2005-01-16 08:40:58 +0000311- os.{SEEK_SET, SEEK_CUR, SEEK_END} have been added for convenience.
312
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000313- Enhancements to the csv module:
314
315 + Dialects are now validated by the underlying C code, better
Georg Brandl7eb4b7d2005-07-22 21:49:32 +0000316 reflecting its capabilities, and improving its compliance with
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000317 PEP 305.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000318 + Dialect parameter parsing has been re-implemented to improve error
319 reporting.
320 + quotechar=None and quoting=QUOTE_NONE now work the way PEP 305
321 dictates.
322 + the parser now removes the escapechar prefix from escaped characters.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000323 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the writer now tests for numeric
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000324 types, rather than any object than can be represented as a numeric.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000325 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the reader now casts unquoted fields
326 to floats.
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000327 + reader now allows \r characters to be quoted (previously it only allowed
328 \n to be quoted).
Andrew McNamarac89f2842005-01-12 07:44:42 +0000329 + writer doublequote handling improved.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000330 + Dialect classes passed to the module are no longer instantiated by
331 the module before being parsed (the former validation scheme required
332 this, but the mechanism was unreliable).
333 + The dialect registry now contains instances of the internal
334 C-coded dialect type, rather than references to python objects.
335 + the internal c-coded dialect type is now immutable.
336 + register_dialect now accepts the same keyword dialect specifications
337 as the reader and writer, allowing the user to register dialects
338 without first creating a dialect class.
339 + a configurable limit to the size of parsed fields has been added -
340 previously, an unmatched quote character could result in the entire
341 file being read into the field buffer before an error was reported.
Andrew McNamara31d88962005-01-12 03:45:10 +0000342 + A new module method csv.field_size_limit() has been added that sets
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000343 the parser field size limit (returning the former limit). The initial
344 limit is 128kB.
Andrew McNamara7f2053e2005-01-12 11:17:16 +0000345 + A line_num attribute has been added to the reader object, which tracks
346 the number of lines read from the source iterator. This is not
347 the same as the number of records returned, as records can span
348 multiple lines.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000349 + reader and writer objects were not being registered with the cyclic-GC.
350 This has been fixed.
351
Brett Cannone6539c42005-01-08 02:43:53 +0000352- _DummyThread objects in the threading module now delete self.__block that is
353 inherited from _Thread since it uses up a lock allocated by 'thread'. The
354 lock primitives tend to be limited in number and thus should not be wasted on
355 a _DummyThread object. Fixes bug #1089632.
356
Raymond Hettinger97db05d2005-01-07 08:15:41 +0000357- The imghdr module now detects Exif files.
358
Raymond Hettinger6065d322004-12-20 23:51:53 +0000359- StringIO.truncate() now correctly adjusts the size attribute.
360 (Bug #951915).
361
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000362- locale.py now uses an updated locale alias table (built using
363 Tools/i18n/makelocalealias.py, a tool to parse the X11 locale
364 alias file); the encoding lookup was enhanced to use Python's
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000365 encoding alias table.
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000366
Raymond Hettinger3557f422004-12-07 12:02:02 +0000367- moved deprecated modules to Lib/lib-old: whrandom, tzparse, statcache.
368
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000369- the pickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
370 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
371
Brett Cannon84667c02004-12-07 03:25:18 +0000372- optparse now optionally imports gettext. This allows its use in setup.py.
373
Raymond Hettinger3489cad2004-12-05 05:20:42 +0000374- the pickle module no longer uses the deprecated bin parameter.
375
Raymond Hettinger1bc82f82004-12-05 03:58:17 +0000376- the shelve module no longer uses the deprecated binary parameter.
377
Raymond Hettinger6c92d762004-12-05 03:28:00 +0000378- the pstats module no longer uses the deprecated ignore() method.
379
Raymond Hettingerf3fa9462004-12-05 01:58:09 +0000380- the filecmp module no longer uses the deprecated use_statcache argument.
381
Raymond Hettinger664347b2004-12-04 21:21:53 +0000382- unittest.TestCase.run() and unittest.TestSuite.run() can now be successfully
383 extended or overridden by subclasses. Formerly, the subclassed method would
384 be ignored by the rest of the module. (Bug #1078905).
385
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000386- heapq.nsmallest() and heapq.nlargest() now support key= arguments with
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000387 the same meaning as in list.sort().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000388
Walter Dörwald36733692004-12-22 12:50:50 +0000389- Bug #1076985: ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` now calls ``read()`` only
390 once when a size argument is given. This prevents a buffer overflow in the
391 tokenizer with very long source lines.
392
Andrew M. Kuchling3b585b32004-12-28 20:10:48 +0000393- Bug #1083110: ``zlib.decompress.flush()`` would segfault if called immediately
394 after creating the object, without any intervening ``.decompress()`` calls.
395
Skip Montanaro05885812005-01-16 20:48:27 +0000396- The reconvert.quote function can now emit triple-quoted strings. The
397 reconvert module now has some simple documentation.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000398
Walter Dörwaldaf3b39a2005-02-18 13:22:43 +0000399- ``UserString.MutableString`` now supports negative indices in
400 ``__setitem__`` and ``__delitem__``
401
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000402- Bug #1149508: ``textwrap`` now handles hyphenated numbers (eg. "2004-03-05")
403 correctly.
404
Walter Dörwaldbc8e6422005-04-21 21:32:03 +0000405- Partial fixes for SF bugs #1163244 and #1175396: If a chunk read by
406 ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` has a trailing "\r", read one more
407 character even if the user has passed a size parameter to get a proper
408 line ending. Remove the special handling of a "\r\n" that has been split
409 between two lines.
410
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000411
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000412Build
413-----
414
Martin v. Löwis147fbe52005-08-07 21:09:30 +0000415- Bug #1189330: configure did not correctly determine the necessary
416 value of LINKCC if python was built with GCC 4.0.
417
Trent Mick8321b422005-07-26 02:29:21 +0000418- Upgrade Windows build to zlib 1.2.3 which eliminates a potential security
419 vulnerability in zlib 1.2.1 and 1.2.2.
420
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000421- EXTRA_CFLAGS has been introduced as an environment variable to hold compiler
422 flags that change binary compatibility. Changes were also made to
423 distutils.sysconfig to also use the environment variable when used during
Martin v. Löwisd7c795e2005-04-25 07:14:03 +0000424 compilation of the interpreter and of C extensions through distutils.
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000425
Bob Ippolitoed233462005-03-29 13:47:59 +0000426- SF patch 1171735: Darwin 8's headers are anal about POSIX compliance,
427 and linking has changed (prebinding is now deprecated, and libcc_dynamic
428 no longer exists). This configure patch makes things right.
429
Martin v. Löwise2713be2005-03-08 15:03:08 +0000430- Bug #1158607: Build with --disable-unicode again.
431
Brett Cannon46d96232005-02-16 00:07:19 +0000432- spwdmodule.c is built only if either HAVE_GETSPNAM or HAVE_HAVE_GETSPENT is
433 defined. Discovered as a result of not being able to build on OS X.
434
Brett Cannon516592f2004-12-07 00:42:59 +0000435- setup.py now uses the directories specified in LDFLAGS using the -L option
436 and in CPPFLAGS using the -I option for adding library and include
437 directories, respectively, for compiling extension modules against. This has
438 led to the core being compiled using the values in CPPFLAGS. It also removes
439 the need for the special-casing of both DarwinPorts and Fink for darwin since
440 the proper directories can be specified in LDFLAGS (``-L/sw/lib`` for Fink,
441 ``-L/opt/local/lib`` for DarwinPorts) and CPPFLAGS (``-I/sw/include`` for
442 Fink, ``-I/opt/local/include`` for DarwinPorts).
443
Brett Cannon43802422005-02-10 20:48:03 +0000444- Test in configure.in that checks for tzset no longer dependent on tm->tm_zone
445 to exist in the struct (not required by either ISO C nor the UNIX 2 spec).
446 Tests for sanity in tzname when HAVE_TZNAME defined were also defined.
447 Closes bug #1096244. Thanks Gregory Bond.
448
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000449
450C API
451-----
452
Raymond Hettingerbeb31012005-08-16 03:47:52 +0000453- Added a C API for set and frozenset objects.
454
Raymond Hettinger66517482004-12-03 11:45:13 +0000455- Removed PyRange_New().
456
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000457
458Tests
459-----
460
Martin v. Löwis4d394df2005-01-23 09:19:22 +0000461- In test_os, st_?time is now truncated before comparing it with ST_?TIME.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000462
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000463
464Documentation
465-------------
466
Georg Brandl79c122f2005-08-24 07:31:33 +0000467- Bug #1190204: Clarify which directories are searched by site.py.
468
Georg Brandl6f2bbd32005-08-24 07:26:55 +0000469- Bug #1193849: Clarify os.path.expanduser() documentation.
470
Georg Brandlf13c4ba2005-08-02 10:28:08 +0000471- Bug #1243192: re.UNICODE and re.LOCALE affect \d, \D, \s and \S.
472
Georg Brandl150db732005-07-18 08:53:17 +0000473- Bug #755617: Document the effects of os.chown() on Windows.
474
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000475- Patch #1180012: The documentation for modulefinder is now in the library reference.
476
477- Patch #1213031: Document that os.chown() accepts argument values of -1.
478
479- Bug #1190563: Document os.waitpid() return value with WNOHANG flag.
480
481- Bug #1175022: Correct the example code for property().
482
Georg Brandl40c71652005-06-25 21:08:46 +0000483- Document the IterableUserDict class in the UserDict module.
484 Closes bug #1166582.
485
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000486- Remove all latent references for "Macintosh" that referred to semantics for
487 Mac OS 9 and change to reflect the state for OS X.
488 Closes patch #1095802. Thanks Jack Jansen.
489
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000490Mac
491---
492
493
Hye-Shik Chang4e422812005-07-17 02:36:59 +0000494New platforms
495-------------
496
497- FreeBSD 7 support is added.
498
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000499
500Tools/Demos
501-----------
502
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000503- Bug #1072853: pindent.py used an uninitialized variable.
504
Martin v. Löwisab9ec162005-04-09 10:53:34 +0000505- Patch #1177597: Correct Complex.__init__.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000506
507
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000508What's New in Python 2.4 final?
509===============================
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000510
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000511*Release date: 30-NOV-2004*
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000512
513Core and builtins
514-----------------
515
516- Bug 875692: Improve signal handling, especially when using threads, by
517 forcing an early re-execution of PyEval_EvalFrame() "periodic" code when
518 things_to_do is not cleared by Py_MakePendingCalls().
519
520
Anthony Baxter4277ed82004-11-30 11:53:10 +0000521What's New in Python 2.4 (release candidate 1)
522==============================================
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000523
Anthony Baxter5cc727a2004-11-18 12:32:27 +0000524*Release date: 18-NOV-2004*
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000525
526Core and builtins
527-----------------
528
Tim Petersfb1ffb02004-11-08 04:30:21 +0000529- Bug 1061968: Fixes in 2.4a3 to address thread bug 1010677 reintroduced
530 the years-old thread shutdown race bug 225673. Numeric history lesson
531 aside, all bugs in all three reports are fixed now.
532
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000533
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000534Library
535-------
536
537- Bug 1052242: If exceptions are raised by an atexit handler function an
538 attempt is made to execute the remaining handlers. The last exception
539 raised is re-raised.
540
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000541- ``doctest``'s new support for adding ``pdb.set_trace()`` calls to
542 doctests was broken in a dramatic but shallow way. Fixed.
543
Tim Petersbbc0d442004-11-13 16:18:32 +0000544- Bug 1065388: ``calendar``'s ``day_name``, ``day_abbr``, ``month_name``,
545 and ``month_abbr`` attributes emulate sequences of locale-correct
546 spellings of month and day names. Because the locale can change at
547 any time, the correct spelling is recomputed whenever one of these is
548 indexed. In the worst case, the index may be a slice object, so these
549 recomputed every day or month name each time they were indexed. This is
550 much slower than necessary in the usual case, when the index is just an
551 integer. In that case, only the single spelling needed is recomputed
552 now; and, when the index is a slice object, only the spellings needed
553 by the slice are recomputed now.
554
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000555- Patch 1061679: Added ``__all__`` to pickletools.py.
Tim Peters90cf2122004-11-06 23:45:48 +0000556
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000557Build
558-----
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000559
Brett Cannon7d28e962004-11-07 01:19:00 +0000560- Bug 1034277 / Patch 1035255: Remove compilation of core against CoreServices
561 and CoreFoundation on OS X. Involved removing PyMac_GetAppletScriptFile()
562 which has no known users. Thanks Bob Ippolito.
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000563
564C API
565-----
566
Raymond Hettinger39e92ea2004-11-18 09:41:45 +0000567- The PyRange_New() function is deprecated.
568
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000569
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000570What's New in Python 2.4 beta 2?
571================================
572
Anthony Baxter9f41f3a2004-11-03 06:21:37 +0000573*Release date: 03-NOV-2004*
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000574
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000575License
576-------
577
578The Python Software Foundation changed the license under which Python
579is released, to remove Python version numbers. There were no other
580changes to the license. So, for example, wherever the license for
581Python 2.3 said "Python 2.3", the new license says "Python". The
582intent is to make it possible to refer to the PSF license in a more
583durable way. For example, some people say they're confused by that
584the Open Source Initiative's entry for the Python Software Foundation
585License::
586
587 http://www.opensource.org/licenses/PythonSoftFoundation.php
588
589says "Python 2.1.1" all over it, wondering whether it applies only
590to Python 2.1.1.
591
592The official name of the new license is the Python Software Foundation
593License Version 2.
594
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000595Core and builtins
596-----------------
597
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +0000598- Bug #1055820 Cyclic garbage collection was not protecting against that
599 calling a live weakref to a piece of cyclic trash could resurrect an
600 insane mutation of the trash if any Python code ran during gc (via
601 running a dead object's __del__ method, running another callback on a
602 weakref to a dead object, or via any Python code run in any other thread
603 that managed to obtain the GIL while a __del__ or callback was running
604 in the thread doing gc). The most likely symptom was "impossible"
605 ``AttributeEror`` exceptions, appearing seemingly at random, on weakly
606 referenced objects. The cure was to clear all weakrefs to unreachable
607 objects before allowing any callbacks to run.
608
Raymond Hettinger561fbf12004-10-26 01:52:37 +0000609- Bug #1054139 _PyString_Resize() now invalidates its cached hash value.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000610
611Extension Modules
612-----------------
613
Raymond Hettinger9047c8f2004-10-24 00:10:06 +0000614- Bug #1048870: the compiler now generates distinct code objects for
615 functions with identical bodies. This was producing confusing
616 traceback messages which pointed to the function where the code
617 object was first defined rather than the function being executed.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000618
619Library
620-------
621
Barry Warsaw8c72eae2004-11-01 03:52:43 +0000622- Patch #1056967 changes the semantics of Template.safe_substitute() so that
623 no ValueError is raised on an 'invalid' match group. Now the delimiter is
624 returned.
625
Raymond Hettinger2ef7e6c2004-10-24 00:32:24 +0000626- Bug #1052503 pdb.runcall() was not passing along keyword arguments.
627
Raymond Hettingerc64aab82004-10-20 08:21:57 +0000628- Bug #902037: XML.sax.saxutils.prepare_input_source() now combines relative
629 paths with a base path before checking os.path.isfile().
630
Raymond Hettingere54e7262004-10-20 07:17:16 +0000631- The whichdb module can now be run from the command line.
632
Brett Cannon8abcc5d2004-10-18 01:37:57 +0000633- Bug #1045381: time.strptime() can now infer the date using %U or %W (week of
634 the year) when the day of the week and year are also specified.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000635
Andrew M. Kuchling0d19bae2004-10-19 19:54:41 +0000636- Bug #1048816: fix bug in Ctrl-K at start of line in curses.textpad.Textbox
637
Andrew M. Kuchling66e80ba2004-10-20 11:56:15 +0000638- Bug #1017553: fix bug in tarfile.filemode()
639
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000640- Patch #737473: fix bug that old source code is shown in tracebacks even if
Hye-Shik Chang182ac852004-10-26 09:16:42 +0000641 the source code is updated and reloaded.
642
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000643Build
644-----
645
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000646- Patch #1044395: --enable-shared is allowed in FreeBSD also.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000647
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000648What's New in Python 2.4 beta 1?
649================================
650
Anthony Baxter6a587c12004-10-15 08:07:21 +0000651*Release date: 15-OCT-2004*
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000652
653Core and builtins
654-----------------
655
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000656- Patch #975056: Restartable signals were not correctly disabled on
Anthony Baxtere4f8a482004-10-13 14:55:56 +0000657 BSD systems. Consistently use PyOS_setsig() instead of signal().
658
Tim Peters263091e2004-10-10 01:58:44 +0000659- The internal portable implementation of thread-local storage (TLS), used
660 by the ``PyGILState_Ensure()``/``PyGILState_Release()`` API, was not
661 thread-correct. This could lead to a variety of problems, up to and
662 including segfaults. See bug 1041645 for an example.
663
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000664- Added a command line option, -m module, which searches sys.path for the
665 module and then runs it. (Contributed by Nick Coghlan.)
666
Raymond Hettinger2c31a052004-09-22 18:44:21 +0000667- The bytecode optimizer now folds tuples of constants into a single
668 constant.
669
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000670- SF bug #513866: Float/long comparison anomaly. Prior to 2.4b1, when
671 an integer was compared to a float, the integer was coerced to a float.
672 That could yield spurious overflow errors (if the integer was very
673 large), and to anomalies such as
674 ``long(1e200)+1 == 1e200 == long(1e200)-1``. Coercion to float is no
675 longer performed, and cases like ``long(1e200)-1 < 1e200``,
676 ``long(1e200)+1 > 1e200`` and ``(1 << 20000) > 1e200`` are computed
677 correctly now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000678
679Extension modules
680-----------------
681
Tim Peterscf8997f2004-10-01 02:13:16 +0000682- ``collections.deque`` objects didn't play quite right with garbage
683 collection, which could lead to a segfault in a release build, or
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000684 an assert failure in a debug build. Also, added overflow checks,
685 better detection of mutation during iteration, and shielded deque
686 comparisons from unusual subclass overrides of the __iter__() method.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000687
688Library
689-------
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000690
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000691- Patch 1046644: distutils build_ext grew two new options - --swig for
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000692 specifying the swig executable to use, and --swig-opts to specify
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000693 options to pass to swig. --swig-opts="-c++" is the new way to spell
694 --swig-cpp.
695
Anthony Baxter22dcf662004-10-13 15:54:17 +0000696- Patch 983206: distutils now obeys environment variable LDSHARED, if
697 it is set.
698
Andrew M. Kuchling518d3932004-10-12 15:32:10 +0000699- Added Peter Astrand's subprocess.py module. See PEP 324 for details.
Fredrik Lundh5b3687d2004-10-12 15:26:28 +0000700
Brett Cannon4f35c712004-10-06 02:11:37 +0000701- time.strptime() now properly escapes timezones and all other locale-specific
702 strings for regex-specific symbols. Was breaking under Japanese Windows when
703 the timezone was specified as "Tokyo (standard time)".
704 Closes bug #1039270.
705
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000706- Updates for the email package:
Brett Cannon06a30b02004-10-22 06:22:54 +0000707
Barry Warsaw418de1f2004-10-11 14:32:47 +0000708 + email.Utils.formatdate() grew a 'usegmt' argument for HTTP support.
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000709 + All deprecated APIs that in email 2.x issued warnings have been removed:
710 _encoder argument to the MIMEText constructor, Message.add_payload(),
711 Utils.dump_address_pair(), Utils.decode(), Utils.encode()
712 + New deprecations: Generator.__call__(), Message.get_type(),
713 Message.get_main_type(), Message.get_subtype(), the 'strict' argument to
714 the Parser constructor. These will be removed in email 3.1.
715 + Support for Python earlier than 2.3 has been removed (see PEP 291).
716 + All defect classes have been renamed to end in 'Defect'.
717 + Some FeedParser fixes; also a MultipartInvariantViolationDefect will be
718 added to messages that claim to be multipart but really aren't.
719 + Updates to documentation.
720
Raymond Hettinger596ba4d2004-09-24 03:41:05 +0000721- re's findall() and finditer() functions now take an optional flags argument
722 just like the compile(), search(), and match() functions. Also, documented
723 the previously existing start and stop parameters for the findall() and
724 finditer() methods of regular expression objects.
725
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000726- rfc822 Messages now support iterating over the headers.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000727
Martin v. Löwisf3c56112004-09-18 09:08:52 +0000728- The (undocumented) tarfile.Tarfile.membernames has been removed;
729 applications should use the getmember function.
730
Martin v. Löwis39a31782004-09-18 09:03:49 +0000731- httplib now offers symbolic constants for the HTTP status codes.
732
Tim Peters528ca532004-09-16 01:30:50 +0000733- SF bug #1028306: Trying to compare a ``datetime.date`` to a
734 ``datetime.datetime`` mistakenly compared only the year, month and day.
735 Now it acts like a mixed-type comparison: ``False`` for ``==``,
736 ``True`` for ``!=``, and raises ``TypeError`` for other comparison
737 operators. Because datetime is a subclass of date, comparing only the
738 base class (date) members can still be done, if that's desired, by
739 forcing using of the approprate date method; e.g.,
740 ``a_date.__eq__(a_datetime)`` is true if and only if the year, month
741 and day members of ``a_date`` and ``a_datetime`` are equal.
742
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000743- bdist_rpm now supports command line options --force-arch,
744 {pre,post}-install, {pre,post}-uninstall, and
Martin v. Löwis23c48a12004-09-10 06:32:54 +0000745 {prep,build,install,clean,verify}-script.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000746
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000747- SF patch #998993: The UTF-8 and the UTF-16 stateful decoders now support
748 decoding incomplete input (when the input stream is temporarily exhausted).
749 ``codecs.StreamReader`` now implements buffering, which enables proper
750 readline support for the UTF-16 decoders. ``codecs.StreamReader.read()``
751 has a new argument ``chars`` which specifies the number of characters to
752 return. ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` and
753 ``codecs.StreamReader.readlines()`` have a new argument ``keepends``.
754 Trailing "\n"s will be stripped from the lines if ``keepends`` is false.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000755
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000756- The documentation for doctest is greatly expanded, and now covers all
757 the new public features (of which there are many).
758
Walter Dörwald5011d0c2004-09-13 08:53:15 +0000759- ``doctest.master`` was put back in, and ``doctest.testmod()`` once again
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000760 updates it. This isn't good, because every ``testmod()`` call
761 contributes to bloating the "hidden" state of ``doctest.master``, but
762 some old code apparently relies on it. For now, all we can do is
763 encourage people to stitch doctests together via doctest's unittest
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000764 integration features instead.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000765
Skip Montanaro82d0eec2004-09-14 17:58:31 +0000766- httplib now handles ipv6 address/port pairs.
767
David Goodger68a1abd2004-10-03 15:40:25 +0000768- SF bug #1017864: ConfigParser now correctly handles default keys,
769 processing them with ``ConfigParser.optionxform`` when supplied,
770 consistent with the handling of config file entries and runtime-set
771 options.
772
David Goodger1cbf2062004-10-03 15:55:09 +0000773- SF bug #997050: Document, test, & check for non-string values in
774 ConfigParser. Moved the new string-only restriction added in
775 rev. 1.65 to the SafeConfigParser class, leaving existing
776 ConfigParser & RawConfigParser behavior alone, and documented the
777 conditions under which non-string values work.
778
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000779Build
780-----
781
Brett Cannonbfef8692004-09-28 04:08:11 +0000782- Building on darwin now includes /opt/local/include and /opt/local/lib for
783 building extension modules. This is so as to include software installed as
784 a DarwinPorts port <http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/>
785
Tim Peters862f0592004-09-23 19:11:32 +0000786- pyport.h now defines a Py_IS_NAN macro. It works as-is when the
787 platform C computes true for ``x != x`` if and only if X is a NaN.
788 Other platforms can override the default definition with a platform-
789 specific spelling in that platform's pyconfig.h. You can also override
790 pyport.h's default Py_IS_INFINITY definition now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000791
792C API
793-----
794
Tim Peters7f468f22004-10-11 02:40:51 +0000795- SF patch 1044089: New function ``PyEval_ThreadsInitialized()`` returns
796 non-zero if PyEval_InitThreads() has been called.
797
798- The undocumented and unused extern int ``_PyThread_Started`` was removed.
799
Tim Peters84705582004-10-10 02:47:33 +0000800- The C API calls ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
801 are two of the very few advertised as being safe to call without holding
802 the GIL. However, this wasn't true in a debug build, as bug 1041645
803 demonstrated. In a debug build, Python redirects the ``PyMem`` family
804 of calls to Python's small-object allocator, to get the benefit of
805 its extra debugging capabilities. But Python's small-object allocator
806 isn't threadsafe, relying on the GIL to avoid the expense of doing its
807 own locking. ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
808 call the platform ``malloc()`` directly now, regardless of build type.
809
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000810- PyLong_AsUnsignedLong[Mask] now support int objects as well.
811
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000812- SF patch #998993: ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF8Stateful`` and
813 ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF16Stateful`` have been added, which implement stateful
814 decoding.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000815
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000816Tests
817-----
818
819- test__locale ported to unittest
820
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000821Mac
822---
823
Just van Rossumdd3c8372004-10-03 16:27:09 +0000824- ``plistlib`` now supports non-dict root objects. There is also a new
825 interface for reading and writing plist files: ``readPlist(pathOrFile)``
826 and ``writePlist(rootObject, pathOrFile)``
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000827
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000828Tools/Demos
829-----------
830
Tim Peters130e37f2004-10-03 19:03:19 +0000831- The text file comparison scripts ``ndiff.py`` and ``diff.py`` now
832 read the input files in universal-newline mode. This spares them
833 from consuming a great deal of time to deduce the useless result that,
834 e.g., a file with Windows line ends and a file with Linux line ends
835 have no lines in common.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000836
837
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000838What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
839=================================
840
Anthony Baxtere13943a2004-09-02 16:37:15 +0000841*Release date: 02-SEP-2004*
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000842
843Core and builtins
844-----------------
845
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000846- SF patch #1007189: ``from ... import ...`` statements now allow the name
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +0000847 list to be surrounded by parentheses.
848
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000849- Some speedups for long arithmetic, thanks to Trevor Perrin. Gradeschool
850 multiplication was sped a little by optimizing the C code. Gradeschool
851 squaring was sped by about a factor of 2, by exploiting that about half
852 the digit products are duplicates in a square. Because exponentiation
853 uses squaring often, this also speeds long power. For example, the time
854 to compute 17**1000000 dropped from about 14 seconds to 9 on my box due
855 to this much. The cutoff for Karatsuba multiplication was raised,
856 since gradeschool multiplication got quicker, and the cutoff was
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000857 aggressively small regardless. The exponentiation algorithm was switched
858 from right-to-left to left-to-right, which is more efficient for small
859 bases. In addition, if the exponent is large, the algorithm now does
860 5 bits (instead of 1 bit) at a time. That cut the time to compute
861 17**1000000 on my box in half again, down to about 4.5 seconds.
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000862
Tim Petersc8854432004-08-25 02:14:08 +0000863- OverflowWarning is no longer generated. PEP 237 scheduled this to
864 occur in Python 2.3, but since OverflowWarning was disabled by default,
865 nobody realized it was still being generated. On the chance that user
866 code is still using them, the Python builtin OverflowWarning, and
867 corresponding C API PyExc_OverflowWarning, will exist until Python 2.5.
868
Martin v. Löwis336e85f2004-08-19 11:31:58 +0000869- Py_InitializeEx has been added.
870
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +0000871- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
872 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
873
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +0000874- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
875 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
876 modified the list.
877
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +0000878- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
879 functions is now writable.
880
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +0000881- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
882 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
883 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
884 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
885
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000886- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
887 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
888 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
889 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
890 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +0000891
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +0000892- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
893 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
894
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000895Extension modules
896-----------------
897
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000898- difflib now supports HTML side-by-side diff.
899
Martin v. Löwisdc3883f2004-08-29 15:46:35 +0000900- os.urandom has been added for systems that support sources of random
901 data.
902
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000903- Patch 1012740: truncate() on a writeable cStringIO now resets the
904 position to the end of the stream. This is consistent with the original
905 StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was
906 supposed to have been truncated away.
907
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +0000908- Added socket.socketpair().
909
Dave Cole3203efb2004-08-26 00:37:31 +0000910- Added CurrentByteIndex, CurrentColumnNumber, CurrentLineNumber
911 members to xml.parsers.expat.XMLParser object.
912
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000913- The mpz, rotor, and xreadlines modules, all deprecated in earlier
Andrew M. Kuchling00873432004-08-31 13:50:43 +0000914 versions of Python, have now been removed.
915
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000916Library
917-------
918
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000919- Patch #934356: if a module defines __all__, believe that rather than using
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000920 heuristics for filtering out imported names.
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000921
Johannes Gijsbersae882f72004-08-30 10:19:56 +0000922- Patch #941486: added os.path.lexists(), which returns True for broken
923 symlinks, unlike os.path.exists().
924
Raymond Hettinger356a4592004-08-30 06:14:31 +0000925- the random module now uses os.urandom() for seeding if it is available.
926 Added a new generator based on os.urandom().
927
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000928- difflib and diff.py can now generate HTML.
929
Martin v. Löwiscae9e672004-08-25 13:04:53 +0000930- bdist_rpm now includes version and release in the BuildRoot, and
931 replaces - by ``_`` in version and release.
Martin v. Löwiscf525242004-08-25 13:00:34 +0000932
Martin v. Löwis9f5c0c42004-08-25 11:37:43 +0000933- distutils build/build_scripts now has an -e option to specify the
934 path to the Python interpreter for installed scripts.
935
Barry Warsaw8bee7612004-08-25 02:22:30 +0000936- PEP 292 classes Template and SafeTemplate are added to the string module.
937
Martin v. Löwis75b9da42004-08-18 13:57:44 +0000938- tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
939
Martin v. Löwisdeacce22004-08-18 12:46:26 +0000940- HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
941
Johannes Gijsbersc473c992004-08-18 12:40:31 +0000942- Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
943 Percivall.
944
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +0000945- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
946 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
947
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000948- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
949 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
950 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000951 than creating a new one.
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000952
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000953- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
954 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
955 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
956 and exponent.
957
958- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
959
960- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
Georg Brandl08c02db2005-07-22 18:39:19 +0000961 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatibility and atexit
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000962 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
963
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000964- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
965 to the readline module.
966
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000967- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000968 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
969 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000970
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +0000971- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
972 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
973 contains symlinks.
974
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +0000975- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
976 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
977
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +0000978- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
979 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
980 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
981
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000982- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
983 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
984 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
985 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
986 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
987 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
988 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
989 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
990 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
991 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
992 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
993 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
994 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
995
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +0000996- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
997
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000998Tools/Demos
999-----------
1000
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001001- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
1002 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
1003
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +00001004- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
1005
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001006Build
1007-----
1008
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +00001009- Backward incompatibility: longintrepr.h now triggers a compile-time
1010 error if SHIFT (the number of bits in a Python long "digit") isn't
1011 divisible by 5. This new requirement allows simple code for the new
1012 5-bits-at-a-time long_pow() implementation. If necessary, the
1013 restriction could be removed (by complicating long_pow(), or by
1014 falling back to the 1-bit-at-a-time algorithm), but there are no
1015 plans to do so.
1016
Brett Cannoncc8a4f62004-08-26 01:44:07 +00001017- bug #991962: When building with --disable-toolbox-glue on Darwin no
1018 attempt to build Mac-specific modules occurs.
1019
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +00001020- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
1021 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
1022
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001023- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
1024 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
1025
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +00001026- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
1027 GNU/k*BSD systems.
1028
Hye-Shik Chang3ba5bfc2004-08-19 17:52:37 +00001029- bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings
1030 found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64.
1031
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001032C API
1033-----
1034
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001035..
1036
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001037Documentation
1038-------------
1039
Neal Norwitz5268c392004-08-21 15:13:52 +00001040- patch #1005936, bug #1009373: fix index entries which contain
1041 an underscore when viewed with Acrobat.
1042
1043- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if
1044 it contains symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment
1045 since 1992, but is now in the library reference as well.
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +00001046
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001047New platforms
1048-------------
1049
Hye-Shik Changf64700a2004-08-18 15:13:41 +00001050- FreeBSD 6 is now supported.
1051
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001052Tests
1053-----
1054
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001055..
1056
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001057Windows
1058-------
1059
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +00001060- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
1061 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
1062 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
1063 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
1064 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
1065 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
1066 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
1067 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
1068 the problem.
1069
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001070Mac
1071---
1072
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001073..
1074
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001075
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001076What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
1077=================================
1078
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +00001079*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001080
1081Core and builtins
1082-----------------
1083
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +00001084- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
1085 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
1086 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
1087 sensitive code.
1088
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001089- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001090 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so::
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001091
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001092 @staticmethod
1093 def foo(bar):
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001094
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +00001095 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001096
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001097- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
1098 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
1099 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
1100 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
1101 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
1102 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
1103 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
1104 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
1105 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
1106 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
1107 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
1108
1109 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
1110 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
1111 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
1112 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
1113 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
1114 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
1115 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
1116
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +00001117- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
1118 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
1119
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +00001120- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001121 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +00001122
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001123- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001124 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001125 which was missing for no apparent reason.
1126
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001127- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001128 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
1129 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
1130
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001131- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
1132 types that support garbage collection.
1133
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +00001134- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
1135
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +00001136- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
1137 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
1138 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
1139 Jython.
1140
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001141- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
1142
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +00001143- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
1144 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
1145
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +00001146- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
1147 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
1148 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +00001149
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +00001150- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
1151 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
1152 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
1153
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001154Extension modules
1155-----------------
1156
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +00001157- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
1158
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001159Library
1160-------
1161
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +00001162- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
1163 TIS-620
1164
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +00001165- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
1166 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
1167 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
1168 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
1169 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
1170 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
1171 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
1172 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
1173 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
1174 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
1175
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +00001176- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
1177
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +00001178- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
1179 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
1180 same as when the argument is omitted).
1181 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
1182
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +00001183- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
1184
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +00001185- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
1186 schemes are offered.
1187
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +00001188- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
1189
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +00001190- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
1191 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
1192 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
1193
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +00001194- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
1195
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +00001196- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
1197 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
1198
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +00001199- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
1200 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
1201 when dummy_threading is being used.
1202
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +00001203- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
1204 from a tarfile.
1205
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001206- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001207 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001208
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +00001209- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
1210 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
1211 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
1212 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
1213
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +00001214- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
1215 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
1216
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +00001217- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
1218 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
1219 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
1220 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
1221 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
1222 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
1223 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
1224 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
1225 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
1226 by some other method in progress).
1227
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001228- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
1229 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
1230 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +00001231
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +00001232- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
1233
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +00001234- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
1235 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
1236 AM Kuchling.
1237
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +00001238- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
1239 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
1240 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
1241
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +00001242- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
1243 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
1244 instead of unsigned.
1245
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001246- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +00001247 no longer part of the public API.
1248
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +00001249- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
1250 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
1251 string methods of the same name).
1252
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001253- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +00001254 SF patch 945642.
1255
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001256- doctest unittest integration improvements:
1257
1258 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
1259
1260 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
1261 DocTestSuites.
1262
1263- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
1264 that provide thread-local data.
1265
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001266- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
1267 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
1268
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001269- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
1270
1271- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
1272 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
1273 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
1274
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001275- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
1276
1277 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
1278 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
1279 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001280
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001281 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
1282 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
1283 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
1284 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
1285
1286 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
1287 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
1288
1289 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
1290 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
1291 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
1292 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
1293
1294 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
1295 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
1296 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
1297 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
1298 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
1299
1300 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
1301 wrapping help output.
1302
1303 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
1304 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
1305 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001306
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001307C API
1308-----
1309
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001310- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
1311 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
1312 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
1313 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
1314 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
1315 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
1316 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
1317 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
1318 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
1319 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
1320 its visible semantics have not changed.
1321
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001322- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
1323 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
1324
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001325Documentation
1326-------------
1327
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001328- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001329
1330 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +00001331 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001332
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +00001333 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001334
1335 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
1336
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001337- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001338
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001339Tests
1340-----
1341
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001342- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +00001343 platforms that use the Makefile.
1344
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001345- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
1346 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
1347 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
1348
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001349
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001350What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
1351=================================
1352
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +00001353*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001354
1355Core and builtins
1356-----------------
1357
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +00001358- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
1359 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
1360 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
1361 objects now (one object instead of three).
1362
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +00001363- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
1364 Windows DLLs.
1365
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +00001366- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
1367 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +00001368
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +00001369- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
1370 a new .pyc magic.
1371
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +00001372- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
1373 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
1374 be there.
1375
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +00001376- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
1377 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
1378 the LC_NUMERIC category.
1379
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +00001380- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
1381 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
1382 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
1383
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +00001384- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
1385
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +00001386- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
1387 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
1388 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +00001389
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +00001390- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
1391 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
1392
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +00001393- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
1394
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001395- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001396 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001397
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +00001398- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
1399
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +00001400- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
1401
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +00001402- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
1403 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
1404
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +00001405- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
1406 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
1407 Fixes bug #858016 .
1408
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +00001409- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
1410 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
1411 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
1412
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +00001413- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
1414 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
1415 improves their performance (about 35%).
1416
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +00001417- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
1418 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
1419 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
1420
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +00001421- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
1422 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
1423 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
1424 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
1425
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001426- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
1427 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
Walter Dörwald09515af2005-03-18 10:28:24 +00001428 list comprehensions, and the list constructor (when the input iterable
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001429 length is not known).
1430
1431- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
1432 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +00001433 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
1434 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001435 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
1436
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +00001437- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
1438 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
1439
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +00001440- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
1441 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
1442 keyword arguments.
1443
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +00001444- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
1445 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
1446 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
1447
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +00001448- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
1449 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
1450 cases.
1451
1452- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
1453 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
1454 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
1455 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
1456 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
1457 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
1458 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
1459 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
1460 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
1461 a release build.
1462
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +00001463- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
1464 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
1465
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001466- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001467 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001468
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +00001469- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
1470 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
1471 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
1472 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
1473 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
1474 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
1475 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
1476 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
1477 destroyed.
1478
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +00001479- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
1480 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
1481 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
1482 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
1483 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
1484 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
1485 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
1486 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
1487
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +00001488- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
1489 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
1490 character other than a space.
1491
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +00001492- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
1493 by the function object or by the method object, the function
1494 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
1495 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
1496 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
1497 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
1498 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
1499 attributes with the same name.
1500
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001501- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
1502 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
1503 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
1504 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
1505 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
1506 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
1507 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
1508 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
1509 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
1510 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
1511 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
1512 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
1513 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
1514 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +00001515
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +00001516- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
1517 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
1518 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
1519 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
1520 This has been repaired.
1521
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001522- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
1523
1524- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
1525
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +00001526- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
1527 over a sequence.
1528
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001529- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001530 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001531
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +00001532- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
1533
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +00001534- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
1535 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
1536 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
1537 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
1538 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
1539 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
1540 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
1541 records with equal keys is unchanged).
1542
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +00001543- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
1544 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
1545 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
1546
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +00001547- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
1548 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
1549 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
1550 freelist.
1551
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +00001552- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
1553 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
1554
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +00001555- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
1556 number.
1557
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +00001558- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
1559 a TypeError exception.
1560
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +00001561- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
1562 820195.
1563
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +00001564- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
1565 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
1566 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
1567
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001568- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001569 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
1570 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +00001571
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +00001572- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
1573 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
1574 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
1575
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001576- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
1577 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001578 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001579
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001580- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +00001581 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
1582 the first call.
1583
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001584
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001585Extension modules
1586-----------------
1587
Georg Brandl33a5f2a2005-08-21 14:16:04 +00001588- Fix bz2.BZ2File.(x)readlines() for files containing one line without
1589 newlines.
1590
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +00001591- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
1592 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
1593
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001594- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
1595 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
1596 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
1597 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
1598 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
1599 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
1600 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +00001601
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +00001602- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
1603
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +00001604- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
1605
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +00001606- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
1607 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
1608
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +00001609- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
1610 fewer false positives.
1611
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +00001612- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
1613 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
1614
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001615- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +00001616 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
1617
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +00001618- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001619 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +00001620 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
Raymond Hettinger6ab78cd2004-08-29 07:50:43 +00001621 Also, array.array() and array.extend() now accept any iterable argument
1622 for repeated appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +00001623
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +00001624- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
1625 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
1626 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
1627 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
1628
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +00001629- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
1630 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
1631 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
1632 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
1633 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
1634 #897625.
1635
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +00001636- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
1637 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
1638
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +00001639- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
1640 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
1641 and pops on either side of the deque.
1642
1643- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
1644 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
1645
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +00001646- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
1647 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
1648 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
1649 other functions that expect a function argument.
1650
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +00001651- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
1652
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001653- os.getsid was added.
1654
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +00001655- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
1656 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
1657 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
1658
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +00001659- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
1660
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +00001661- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
1662
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +00001663- readline.clear_history was added.
1664
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +00001665- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
1666
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +00001667- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
1668
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +00001669- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
1670
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +00001671- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
1672
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +00001673- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
1674
1675- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
1676
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +00001677- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
1678
1679- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
1680
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001681- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
1682 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
1683 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
1684
1685- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
1686 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
1687 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
1688 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
1689 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
1690 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
1691 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
1692
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +00001693- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
1694 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
1695 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
1696 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001697
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001698- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001699 iterators from a single iterable.
1700
1701- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
1702 of raising a TypeError exception.
1703
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +00001704- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
1705 as parameter.
1706
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001707Library
1708-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001709
Georg Brandlf0de6a12005-08-22 18:02:59 +00001710- Bug #1266283: The new function "lexists" is now in os.path.__all__.
1711
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +00001712- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
1713 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
1714 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001715
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +00001716- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
1717 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
1718 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +00001719
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +00001720- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +00001721
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +00001722- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
1723 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +00001724
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +00001725- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
1726 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1727
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001728- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
1729
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001730- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001731 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001732
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001733- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001734 that generate a -debuginfo.rpm
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001735
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +00001736- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
1737
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +00001738- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
1739 on cygwin and mingw32.
1740
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +00001741- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
1742
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +00001743- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
1744 module.
1745
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +00001746- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
1747 installation scheme for all platforms.
1748
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001749- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +00001750 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001751
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001752- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
1753 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
1754 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
1755
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +00001756- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
1757 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
1758 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
1759
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +00001760- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
1761
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +00001762- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
1763
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +00001764- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
1765 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
1766
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +00001767- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
1768 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
1769 type pattern with the same value exists.
1770
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +00001771- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
1772 when run from the command prompt).
1773
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001774- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
1775 not taken into consideration when caching value.
1776
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +00001777- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
1778 default sort).
1779
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +00001780- Added global runctx function to profile module
1781
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +00001782- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
1783
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +00001784- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
1785
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +00001786- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
1787
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001788- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +00001789 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
1790 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
1791 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
1792 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
1793 accordingly.
1794
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +00001795- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
1796 decoding standards.
1797
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +00001798- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
1799 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
1800 called for all requests.
1801
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +00001802- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
1803 they are passed to the compiler.
1804
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +00001805- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
1806 indent, width and depth.
1807
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +00001808- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
1809 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
1810
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +00001811- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
1812 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
1813
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +00001814- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
1815
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +00001816- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
1817
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001818- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
1819
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +00001820- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
1821 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
1822
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +00001823- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +00001824 for better performance.
1825
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001826- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +00001827
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +00001828- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
1829 a string).
1830
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +00001831- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
1832
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +00001833- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
1834
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +00001835- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
1836
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +00001837- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
1838
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +00001839- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
1840 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
1841 list of fieldnames.
1842
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +00001843- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
1844 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
1845
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +00001846- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
1847
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +00001848- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
1849 empty lists.
1850
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +00001851- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
1852 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
1853 and shelves.
1854
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +00001855- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
1856 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
1857
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001858- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +00001859 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
1860 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001861
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +00001862- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
1863 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +00001864 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +00001865
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001866- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +00001867 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
1868 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
1869
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001870- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
1871 and removed in Py2.4.
1872
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +00001873- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
1874
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +00001875- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
1876
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001877Tools/Demos
1878-----------
1879
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +00001880- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
1881 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
1882
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +00001883- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
1884
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +00001885- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
1886 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
1887 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
1888 destination in situations where both files are given.
1889
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +00001890- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
1891 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
1892 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
1893 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
1894
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +00001895- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
1896
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +00001897- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
1898 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
1899 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
1900 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
1901 now.
1902
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001903- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
1904 in effect
1905
1906- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
1907 C-c C-h
1908
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +00001909- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
1910 -d option was given.
1911
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001912Build
1913-----
1914
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +00001915- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
1916 build under OS X.
1917
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +00001918- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
1919 --enable-profiling.
1920
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +00001921- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
1922 is configured --with-tsc.
1923
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +00001924- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
1925 on AMD64.
1926
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +00001927- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
1928 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
1929
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00001930- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
1931 removed.
1932
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00001933- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
1934 supported (see PEP 11).
1935
1936- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
1937
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00001938- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
1939
1940- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
1941 (see PEP 11).
1942
1943- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
1944 sizeof(char) must be 1.
1945
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001946C API
1947-----
1948
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00001949- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
1950 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
1951 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
1952
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001953- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
1954 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
1955 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
1956 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
1957
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00001958- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
1959 generator objects.
1960
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001961- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
1962 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00001963 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
1964 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001965
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00001966- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
1967 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
1968
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00001969- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
1970 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
1971 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
1972 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
1973 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
1974
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00001975- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
1976 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
1977 about 10% faster.
1978
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00001979- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
1980 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
1981
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00001982- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
1983 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
1984 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
1985 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
1986
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001987Windows
1988-------
1989
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00001990- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
1991 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
1992 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
1993 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
1994
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00001995- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
1996 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
1997 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
1998
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001999
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002000What's New in Python 2.3 final?
2001===============================
2002
2003*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
2004
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002005IDLE
2006----
2007
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00002008- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
2009 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
2010 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
2011 context-menu actions.
2012
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002013- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
2014 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
2015 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
2016 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
2017 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
2018 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
2019 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
2020 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
2021 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
2022
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002023
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002024What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
2025=============================================
2026
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00002027*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002028
2029Core and builtins
2030-----------------
2031
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00002032- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002033 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00002034 comment at the end are still unsupported.
2035
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002036Extension modules
2037-----------------
2038
2039- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
2040 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
2041 than once. This has been fixed.
2042
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00002043- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
2044 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
2045 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
2046 call.
2047
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002048- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
2049
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002050Library
2051-------
2052
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002053- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
2054 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
2055
2056- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
2057 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
2058 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
2059 restored.
2060
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00002061IDLE
2062----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002063
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00002064- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002065
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002066Build
2067-----
2068
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002069- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
2070 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
2071
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002072C API
2073-----
2074
2075Windows
2076-------
2077
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00002078- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
2079 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
2080
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002081- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
2082
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002083Mac
2084---
2085
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002086- Various fixes to pimp.
2087
2088- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
2089
2090- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
2091 more problems than it solves.
2092
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002093
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002094What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
2095=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002096
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00002097*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
2098
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002099Core and builtins
2100-----------------
2101
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00002102- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
2103 by sys.setcheckinterval().
2104
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002105- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
2106 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002107 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002108
2109- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
2110 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
2111 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002112 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002113
2114- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
2115 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002116
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002117- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
2118 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
2119 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
2120
2121- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002122 770247.
2123
2124- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002125
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002126Extension modules
2127-----------------
2128
2129- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
2130 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
2131
2132- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
2133
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002134- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
2135
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00002136- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
2137 contained within the _strptime module.
2138
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002139- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
2140 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
2141
2142- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002143 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
2144
2145- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
2146 the find_class attribute, if present.
2147
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002148- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002149
2150 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
2151 (SF bug 763298).
2152
2153 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00002154 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
2155 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
2156 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002157
2158 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
2159
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002160Library
2161-------
2162
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002163- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
2164
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00002165- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
2166 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
2167 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
2168 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
2169 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
2170 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
2171 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
2172 or Tester().
2173
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002174- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
2175 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
2176 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
2177 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
2178 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
2179 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
2180 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
2181 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
2182 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00002183
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002184 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00002185
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00002186- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
2187 weren't before was an oversight.
2188
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002189- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
2190 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
2191
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00002192- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
2193 when there are no lines.
2194
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00002195- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
2196 which could occur with Tk 8.4
2197
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002198- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
2199 to child processes.
2200
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002201- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
2202
2203- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
2204
2205- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
2206 xmlrpclib.
2207
2208- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
2209 responses.
2210
2211- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
2212 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
2213
2214- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
2215 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
2216 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
2217
2218- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
2219 used as patterns.
2220
2221- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
2222 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
2223 than Tk 8.3.
2224
2225- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
2226
2227- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002228
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002229Tools/Demos
2230-----------
2231
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002232- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
2233
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00002234- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
2235
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002236- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002237
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002238Build
2239-----
2240
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002241- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
2242
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002243- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
2244
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002245- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
2246 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002247
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002248- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
2249 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
2250 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002251
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002252C API
2253-----
2254
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002255- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
2256 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
2257
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002258Windows
2259-------
2260
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002261- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
2262 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
2263 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
2264 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
2265 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
2266 Python exception ::
2267
2268 thread.error: can't start new thread
2269
2270 is raised now.
2271
2272- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
2273 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
2274 instead of from DLL teardown.
2275
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002276Mac
2277---
2278
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002279- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00002280 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002281 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
2282 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
2283 the executable in the bundle.
2284
2285- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002286
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00002287- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
2288
2289- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
2290 on Panther.
2291
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002292What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
2293================================
2294
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002295*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002296
2297Core and builtins
2298-----------------
2299
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00002300- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
2301 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
2302 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
2303 with the -i option.
2304
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00002305- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
2306 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
2307
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002308- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
2309 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
2310
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00002311- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
2312 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
2313 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
2314 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
2315 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
2316 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
2317 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
2318 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
2319 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
2320 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
2321 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
2322 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
2323 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00002324
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002325- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
2326 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
2327 embedded in a lambda expression.
2328
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00002329- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
2330 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
2331 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
2332 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
2333 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
2334
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002335- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
2336 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
2337 matches the restriction on classic classes.
2338
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00002339- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
2340 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
2341
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00002342- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
2343 It's writable again.
2344
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002345- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
2346 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
2347 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002348 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002349
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002350- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
2351 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
2352 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
2353
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002354Extension modules
2355-----------------
2356
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00002357- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
2358 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
2359
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002360- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
2361 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
2362 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
2363 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
2364
2365- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
2366 collection.
2367
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00002368- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
2369 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
2370 unique within a single program run.
2371
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00002372- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
2373 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
2374
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00002375- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
2376 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
2377
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00002378- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
2379 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00002380
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00002381- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
2382
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00002383- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
2384 Fixes SF bug #730685.
2385
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00002386- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
2387 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
2388 for many BSD-derived systems.
2389
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002390
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002391Library
2392-------
2393
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00002394- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
2395 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
2396 primary ones:
2397
2398 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
2399 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
2400 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
2401
2402 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
2403 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
2404 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
2405 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
2406 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
2407 framework features (which doctest lacks).
2408
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00002409- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
2410 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
2411 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
2412 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
2413 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
2414 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
2415 argument.
2416
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002417- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
2418 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
2419 in the archive.
2420
2421- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
2422 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
2423
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00002424- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
2425 569574).
2426
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002427- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
2428 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
2429 no more.
2430
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002431- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
2432 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
2433 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
2434 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
2435 code coverage.
2436
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002437- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
2438 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
2439 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002440 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
2441 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002442
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002443- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
2444 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
2445 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00002446 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002447
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00002448- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
2449
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00002450- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
2451 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
2452 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
2453 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
2454
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00002455- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
2456 handling.
2457
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00002458- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
2459 __doc__ of data descriptors.
2460
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00002461- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
2462 in socket.py.
2463
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00002464- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
2465
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00002466- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
2467 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
2468 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
2469 opener with proxy support.
2470
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002471- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
2472
2473- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
2474
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002475Tools/Demos
2476-----------
2477
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00002478- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
2479
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002480- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
2481
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002482- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
2483 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00002484
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00002485- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
2486 files.
2487
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002488Build
2489-----
2490
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002491- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00002492 different root directory.
2493
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002494C API
2495-----
2496
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00002497- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
2498 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
2499 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
2500 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
2501 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
2502 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
2503 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
2504 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
2505 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
2506 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
2507
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002508- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
2509 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
2510 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
2511 from Python.
2512
2513
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002514New platforms
2515-------------
2516
2517None this time.
2518
2519Tests
2520-----
2521
2522- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
2523 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
2524
2525Windows
2526-------
2527
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00002528- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
2529
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00002530- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
2531 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
2532 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
2533 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
2534 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
2535 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
2536 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
2537 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
2538 that's what it's for.
2539
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002540Mac
2541---
2542
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00002543- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
2544 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
2545 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
2546 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00002547- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
2548 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
2549- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002550
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002551SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
2552------------------------------------
2553
2554430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
2555598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
2556622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
2557661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
2558683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
2559697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
2560713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
2561724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
2562727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
2563729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
2564730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
2565731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
2566732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
2567733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
2568735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
2569740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
2570744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
2571745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
2572747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
2573749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
2574751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
2575753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
2576755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
2577757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
2578760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
2579
2580
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002581What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
2582================================
2583
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00002584*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002585
2586Core and builtins
2587-----------------
2588
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00002589- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
2590 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
2591
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00002592- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
2593 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
2594 and cannot be strings).
2595
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00002596- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
2597 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
2598 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
2599 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
2600
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00002601- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
2602 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
2603 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
2604 Python itself.
2605
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00002606- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
2607 the referenced object, if it has one.
2608
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00002609- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
2610 the thread started at
2611 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
2612
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00002613- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
2614 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
2615 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
2616 placed on a list index.
2617
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00002618- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
2619 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
2620 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
2621 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
2622
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002623- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
2624 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
2625 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
2626 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
2627 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
2628 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
2629 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
2630
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00002631- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
2632 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
2633 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
2634 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
2635 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
2636
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00002637- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
2638 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00002639
2640- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
2641 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
2642 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
2643 #693195.)
2644
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00002645- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
2646 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002647
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002648- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00002649 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002650 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
2651 interpreter executions, would fail.
2652
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002653- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00002654 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00002655 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002656
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002657Extension modules
2658-----------------
2659
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00002660- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
2661 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
2662 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
2663 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
2664
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00002665- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
2666 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
2667
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00002668- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
2669 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
2670 and Greg Chapman.)
2671
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002672- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
2673 recursively.
2674
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00002675- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00002676 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
2677 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
2678 leaks.
2679
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00002680- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
2681
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00002682- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
2683 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
2684 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
2685 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
2686 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
2687 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
2688 #705836.
2689
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002690- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00002691 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
2692
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00002693- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
2694 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
2695 See SF bug #692416.
2696
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00002697- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
2698 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
2699
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00002700- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
2701 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
2702 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002703
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002704- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00002705 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
2706 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
2707
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00002708- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
2709 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
2710 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
2711 timeouts to work properly.
2712
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002713Library
2714-------
2715
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002716- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
2717 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
2718 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
2719 future release.
2720
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00002721- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
2722 for querying platform dependent features.
2723
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00002724- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00002725
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00002726- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
2727 pickle protocol versions.
2728
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00002729- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
2730 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
2731 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
2732
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00002733- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
2734
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00002735- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
2736 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
2737 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
2738 modules.
2739
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00002740- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
2741 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
2742 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
2743
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002744- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
2745 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
2746
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00002747- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
2748 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
2749 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
2750
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002751- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00002752 MS Office extensions.
2753
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00002754- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
2755 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
2756
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00002757- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
2758 execution speed of expressions and statements.
2759
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002760- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
2761 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
2762 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
2763 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
2764 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
2765 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
2766
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002767- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
2768 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
2769 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002770
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00002771- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
2772 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
2773 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
2774
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00002775- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
2776
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00002777- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
2778 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
2779 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
2780
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002781Tools/Demos
2782-----------
2783
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00002784- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
2785 See the module docstring for details.
2786
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002787Build
2788-----
2789
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00002790- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
2791 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002792
2793C API
2794-----
2795
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002796- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
2797
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00002798- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
2799 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
2800 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
2801
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002802- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
2803 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002804
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002805 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
2806 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
2807 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00002808
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00002809- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00002810 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
2811
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00002812- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
2813 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
2814 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002815
2816New platforms
2817-------------
2818
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002819None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002820
2821Tests
2822-----
2823
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00002824- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
2825 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002826
2827Windows
2828-------
2829
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00002830- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
2831 function.
2832
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00002833- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
2834 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002835
2836Mac
2837---
2838
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002839- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
2840 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00002841
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00002842- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
2843 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002844
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00002845- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
2846 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
2847 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002848
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002849- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00002850 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
2851 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002852
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002853- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
2854 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002855
2856
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002857What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
2858=================================
2859
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002860*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002861
2862Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002863-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002864
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00002865- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
2866 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
2867 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
2868
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00002869- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
2870 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
2871 (SF patch #664376.)
2872
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002873- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
2874 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
2875 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
2876 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
2877 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
2878 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00002879 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002880
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002881- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
2882 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
2883 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
2884 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002885 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002886
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00002887- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
2888 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
2889 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
2890 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
2891 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
2892 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
2893 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
2894 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
2895 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
2896 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
2897 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
2898
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00002899- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
2900 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
2901 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
2902 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
2903 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
2904 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
2905
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00002906- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
2907 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
2908
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00002909- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
2910 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
2911 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
2912 case.)
2913
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00002914- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
2915 passed as unicode strings.
2916
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00002917- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
2918 See SF bug #683467.
2919
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00002920- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
2921 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
2922
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00002923- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
2924
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00002925- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
2926
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00002927- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
2928 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
2929 arguments.
2930
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00002931- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
2932 See SF bug #667147.
2933
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002934- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002935 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002936 See SF bug #676155.
2937
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002938- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002939 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002940 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
2941 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
2942 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
2943 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
2944 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
2945 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002946
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002947Extension modules
2948-----------------
2949
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002950- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
2951 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2952 tp_as_number pointer.
2953
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002954- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
2955 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
2956 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
2957 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
2958 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
2959
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002960- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
2961
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00002962- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
2963
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002964- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00002965 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002966 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
2967 patch #678531.)
2968
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00002969- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
2970 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
2971
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00002972- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
2973 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
2974
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00002975- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
2976
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00002977- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
2978 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
2979 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
2980
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002981- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
2982
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002983- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
2984 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
2985
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002986- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002987
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002988- datetime changes:
2989
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00002990 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
2991
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00002992 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
2993 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
2994 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
2995 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
2996 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
2997 now.
2998
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002999 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003000 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
3001 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003002
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003003 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003004 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003005 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
3006 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
3007 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
3008 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003009
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00003010 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
3011 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
3012 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003013 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
3014
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00003015 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
3016 by a later example coded by Guido.
3017
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003018 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003019 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
3020 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
3021 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003022 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
3023 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
3024
3025 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
3026 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
3027 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
3028 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
3029 tzinfo subclass instance.
3030
3031 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
3032 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
3033 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
3034 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
3035 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
3036 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
3037 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
3038 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003039
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003040 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
3041 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
3042 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
3043 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
3044 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003045 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
3046
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003047 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003048
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003049 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
3050 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
3051 as a naive datetime object.
3052
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00003053 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
3054 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
3055 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
3056
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00003057 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
3058 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
3059 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
3060 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
3061 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
3062 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
3063 comparison.
3064
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003065 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
3066 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
3067 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
3068 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003069 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003070
3071 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003072
3073 and ::
3074
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003075 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
3076
3077 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
3078 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
3079 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
3080 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
3081
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00003082 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
3083 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
3084 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
3085 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
3086 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
3087
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003088 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
3089 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00003090 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
3091 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003092
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003093Library
3094-------
3095
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003096- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
3097 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
3098
3099- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
3100 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
3101 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
3102 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
3103 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
3104 See PEP 307 for details.
3105
3106- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
3107 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
3108
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00003109- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
3110 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00003111 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003112 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
3113 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00003114 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00003115
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00003116- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
3117 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
3118
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003119- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
3120 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
3121 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
3122
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00003123- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
3124
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00003125- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
3126 exception.
3127
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00003128- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
3129 class.
3130
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00003131- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
3132 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
3133 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
3134
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00003135- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
3136 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
3137
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003138- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00003139 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
3140 See SF bug #659228.
3141
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00003142- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
3143 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
3144 See SF patch #651082.
3145
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00003146- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003147
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00003148- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
3149 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
3150
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003151- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003152 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003153
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00003154- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
3155 DOS paths from other platforms.
3156
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003157Tools/Demos
3158-----------
3159
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003160- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
3161 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
3162 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
3163 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
3164 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
3165 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
3166 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
3167 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
3168 example:
3169
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00003170 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
3171 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003172
3173 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
3174
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003175
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003176Build
3177-----
3178
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003179- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
3180 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
3181 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003182 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
3183
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003184 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
3185
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00003186- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
3187 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
3188 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
3189 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
3190 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
3191 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
3192 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
3193 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
3194 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
3195
3196- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
3197 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
3198 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
3199 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
3200
3201- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
3202 from the Tools/scripts directory.
3203
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003204C API
3205-----
3206
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003207- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
3208 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00003209
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00003210- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
3211 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
3212 tp_as_number pointer.
3213
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00003214- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
3215 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
3216 (SF #681367)
3217
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00003218- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
3219 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
3220 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
3221 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00003222
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003223Tests
3224-----
3225
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00003226- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003227 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
3228 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
3229 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
3230 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
3231 pydoc.)
3232
3233- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
3234
3235- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003236
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003237Windows
3238-------
3239
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00003240- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
3241 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
3242 time).
3243
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00003244- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
3245 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
3246
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00003247- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
3248 release without strong cryptography.
3249
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003250- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003251 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003252
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003253- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
3254 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
3255
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003256Mac
3257---
3258
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003259- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
3260 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003261
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00003262- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
3263 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
3264 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003265
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003266- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
3267 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003268
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003269- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
3270 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
3271 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
3272 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003273
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003274- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00003275 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
3276 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
3277 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003278
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003279
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003280What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003281=================================
3282
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00003283*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003284
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003285Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003286--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003287
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00003288- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
3289
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003290- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
3291 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003292 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003293 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003294 a different meaning than before.
3295
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003296- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003297 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003298 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003299
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003300- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003301 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003302 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003303
3304- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
3305 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
3306 and deallocation.
3307
3308- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
3309 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
3310
3311- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
3312 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
3313 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
3314 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
3315 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
3316
3317- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
3318 now detected by the garbage collector.
3319
3320- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
3321 [SF bug 519621]
3322
3323- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
3324 identifier.
3325
3326- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
3327 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
3328 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
3329 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
3330 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
3331 [SF bug 563060]
3332
3333- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
3334 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
3335 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
3336 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
3337 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
3338
3339- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
3340 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
3341 not called. [SF bug #537450]
3342
3343- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
3344
3345- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
3346 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
3347 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
3348 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
3349 state of the slots would be lost.)
3350
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003351Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003352-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003353
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003354- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003355 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
3356 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
3357 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
3358 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003359 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
3360 Jython 2.1.
3361
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003362- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003363 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003364 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
3365 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
3366 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
3367 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
3368 these, see PEP 302.
3369
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003370- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
3371 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
3372 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
3373
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00003374- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
3375 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
3376 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
3377
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00003378- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
3379 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
3380 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
3381
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003382- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
3383 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
3384 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
3385 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
3386 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
3387 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
3388 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
3389 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
3390 releases or implementations.
3391
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003392- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003393 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
3394 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003395
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00003396- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
3397 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
3398
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003399- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
3400 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
3401 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
3402
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00003403- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
3404 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
3405
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003406- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
3407 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003408 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
3409 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003410
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00003411- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
3412 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
3413 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
3414 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
3415 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
3416
3417 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
3418 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
3419 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
3420 pattern.
3421
3422 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
3423 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
3424 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
3425 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
3426
3427 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
3428 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
3429 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
3430 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
3431 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
3432 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
3433
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00003434- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
3435 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
3436 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
3437 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
3438 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
3439 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
3440 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
3441 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00003442
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00003443- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
3444 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
3445 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
3446 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
3447 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003448 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
3449 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
3450 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
3451 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
3452 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
3453 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
3454 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003455
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003456- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
3457 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
3458
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00003459- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
3460 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
3461 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
3462 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
3463 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
3464 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
3465 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
3466 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
3467 to Zack Weinberg!
3468
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00003469- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
3470 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
3471 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
3472 type. This has been fixed now.
3473
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00003474- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
3475 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
3476 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
3477
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003478- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
3479 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
3480 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
3481 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
3482 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
3483 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
3484 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
3485 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00003486 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003487
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00003488- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
3489 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
3490 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00003491
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003492- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
3493 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
3494 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
3495 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
3496 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
3497 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
3498 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
3499 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003500 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003501 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
3502 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
3503
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00003504- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
3505 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
3506 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
3507 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
3508 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
3509 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
3510 this.)
3511
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003512- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
3513 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003514 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003515 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003516 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
3517 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00003518 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
3519 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003520
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003521- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
3522 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
3523 currently running.
3524
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00003525- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
3526 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
3527 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
3528 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
3529
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00003530- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
3531 as directory names.
3532
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00003533- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
3534 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
3535
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00003536- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
3537 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
3538
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003539- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00003540 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
3541 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003542
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00003543- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
3544 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
3545 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
3546 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
3547 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
3548
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003549- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
3550 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
3551 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
3552 removed.
3553
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00003554- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
3555 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
3556 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
3557
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00003558- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
3559 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
3560 to __debug__.
3561
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00003562- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
3563 string to the left with zeros. For example,
3564 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
3565
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00003566- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
3567 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
3568 deprecated now.
3569
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00003570- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
3571 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
3572 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00003573
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00003574- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
3575 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
3576 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
3577 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
3578 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00003579
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00003580- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
3581 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
3582
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003583- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
3584 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
3585 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003586 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003587 is backward compatible.
3588
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00003589- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
3590 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
3591 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
3592 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
3593 could access a pointer to freed memory.
3594
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00003595- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
3596 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
3597 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
3598 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
3599 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
3600 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003601
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00003602- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
3603 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
3604
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003605- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
3606 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
3607
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003608- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
3609 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
3610 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
3611 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
3612 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
3613
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00003614- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
3615 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
3616 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
3617
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003618- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00003619 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
3620
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00003621- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
3622 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
3623 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00003624
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00003625- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
3626 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
3627
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00003628- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
3629 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
3630 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
3631
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00003632- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
3633
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003634Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003635-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003636
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00003637- Added three operators to the operator module:
3638 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
3639 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
3640 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
3641
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00003642- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
3643
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003644- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
3645 archives.
3646
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003647- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
3648 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
3649 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
3650
3651 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
3652
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003653- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
3654 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
3655 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00003656 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003657
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00003658- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
3659 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
3660 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
3661 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003662 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
3663 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
3664 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
3665 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00003666
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00003667- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
3668 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00003669
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00003670- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
3671
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00003672- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
3673 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
3674
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00003675- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
3676 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
3677 supported.
3678
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00003679- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
3680
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00003681- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
3682 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00003683
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00003684- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
3685 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
3686
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003687- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
3688
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003689- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
3690 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
3691
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00003692- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
3693 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
3694 functions but callable type objects.
3695
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003696- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003697 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003698 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003699
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00003700- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
3701 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00003702
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00003703- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
3704 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00003705
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00003706- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
3707 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
3708 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
3709 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
3710
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00003711- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
3712 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00003713
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00003714- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
3715 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
3716 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
3717 and __imul__.
3718
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00003719- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00003720 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
3721 is called.
3722
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00003723- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
3724 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
3725 interpreter was compiled.
3726
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003727- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
3728 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
3729 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003730 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003731 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
3732 1, not 2.
3733
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00003734- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
3735 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
3736 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
3737 limit.
3738
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00003739- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
3740 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
3741 bug #623464.
3742
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00003743- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
3744 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
3745 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
3746 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
3747
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003748Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003749-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003750
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00003751- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
3752
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00003753- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
3754 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
3755 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
3756 with Python 2.3a2.
3757
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00003758- os.path exposes getctime.
3759
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003760- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003761 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003762 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003763 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003764 unit tests of floating point results.
3765
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00003766- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
3767 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
3768 has been increased.
3769
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003770- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
3771 executed.
3772
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00003773- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
3774 postinstallation script.
3775
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00003776- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
3777 test the current module.
3778
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003779- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00003780 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
3781 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
3782 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
3783 this behavior needs to be controlled.
3784
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003785- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003786 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003787 Ward's Optik package.
3788
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003789- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
3790 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
3791 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
3792 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
3793
3794- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
3795 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003796 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003797
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00003798- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
3799 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
3800 shelf are binary pickles.
3801
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00003802- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
3803 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
3804
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00003805- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
3806 modules are iterators now.
3807
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00003808- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
3809 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
3810 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
3811 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
3812 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
3813 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003814
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00003815- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
3816 with their entity value.
3817
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00003818- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
3819
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003820- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
3821 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00003822
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003823- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
3824 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003825 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00003826
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00003827- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
3828 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
3829 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
3830 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
3831 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
3832 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
3833 main():
3834
3835 import locale
3836 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
3837
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00003838- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
3839 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
3840
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00003841- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
3842 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
3843 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
3844 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
3845 to the new standard.
3846
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00003847- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
3848 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
3849 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
3850 an extension to the database.
3851
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003852- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
3853 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
3854 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
3855 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00003856 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003857
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003858- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003859 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003860
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003861- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
3862 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
3863 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
3864 bounded integers.
3865
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00003866- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
3867 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
3868 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
3869 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
3870 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
3871 in existence.
3872
3873 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
3874 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
3875 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
3876 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
3877 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
3878 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
3879
3880 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
3881 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
3882 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
3883 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
3884
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00003885- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
3886 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
3887 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
3888
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00003889- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
3890
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003891- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
3892 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
3893 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
3894 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
3895
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00003896- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
3897 argument.
3898
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00003899- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
3900 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
3901 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
3902 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
3903 [SF patch 560794].
3904
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003905- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
3906 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
3907 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003908 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
3909 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
3910 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003911
3912- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
3913 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00003914
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00003915- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
3916 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
3917 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
3918 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00003919
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00003920- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
3921 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
3922 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
3923 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
3924 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
3925
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003926- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00003927
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00003928- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
3929
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00003930- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
3931 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
3932 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
3933 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
3934 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
3935 identical to None.
3936
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00003937- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
3938 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
3939 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
3940 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
3941 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
3942 results now.
3943
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00003944- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
3945 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
3946
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003947- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
3948 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
3949 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
3950 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
3951 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
3952 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
3953 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
3954 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
3955
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00003956- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
3957
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00003958- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
3959 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
3960
3961- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
3962 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
3963 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
3964 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
3965 and other systems.
3966
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003967- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
3968 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
3969 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
3970 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 +00003971 work well with these.
3972
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00003973- compileall now supports quiet operation.
3974
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003975- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00003976 connections.
3977
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00003978- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
3979 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
3980 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
3981
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00003982- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
3983 sets
3984
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00003985- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
3986 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
3987 name.
3988
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00003989- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
3990 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
3991 passed in.
3992
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003993- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00003994 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00003995 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
3996 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00003997
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00003998- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
3999
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00004000- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
4001
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00004002- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
4003 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
4004 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
4005
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00004006- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
4007 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
4008 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
4009 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00004010 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00004011
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004012- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00004013 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004014 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00004015
4016- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
4017 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
4018 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
4019
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004020- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00004021 the value of its expression argument.
4022
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00004023- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
4024 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
4025 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
4026
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00004027- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
4028 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
4029 skipstone browser was included.
4030
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00004031- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
4032 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
4033
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004034Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004035-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004036
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00004037- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
4038 names in addition to accepting file names.
4039
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00004040- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
4041 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
4042 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
4043 still used and useful.)
4044
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00004045- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
4046 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
4047 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
4048 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00004049
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00004050- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
4051 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
4052 the generated binary.
4053
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004054Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004055-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004056
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00004057- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
4058
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00004059- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
4060 except in the hands of experts.
4061
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00004062- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00004063 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
4064 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
4065 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00004066
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00004067- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
4068 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
4069 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
4070 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
4071 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
4072 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
4073 builds.
4074
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00004075- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
4076 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
4077 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
4078 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
4079 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
4080 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
4081 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
4082 new type.
4083
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00004084- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00004085
4086 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
4087 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
4088 positive infinities.
4089
4090 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
4091 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
4092 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
4093 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
4094 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
4095 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
4096 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
4097
4098 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
4099
4100 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
4101
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00004102- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
4103 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
4104 size of the executable.
4105
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00004106- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
4107 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
4108 configure script. On other platforms, remove
4109 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00004110
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00004111- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
4112
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00004113- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
4114 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
4115 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00004116
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00004117- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
4118 well as Unix.
4119
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00004120- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
4121 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
4122 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
4123 modules in the README file for details.
4124
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004125C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004126-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004127
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004128- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
4129 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004130 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00004131 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004132 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004133
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004134- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
4135 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
4136 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
4137 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
4138 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
4139 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004140 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004141 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
4142 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
4143 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
4144 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
4145 aligned.)
4146
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00004147- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
4148 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
4149 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
4150
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00004151- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
4152 level.
4153
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00004154- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
4155 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
4156 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
4157 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
4158 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
4159
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00004160- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
4161 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
4162 code.
4163
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00004164- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
4165 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
4166 adjusting for negative indices.
4167
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00004168- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
4169 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
4170 object.
4171
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00004172- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
4173 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
4174 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
4175
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004176- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
4177 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00004178
4179- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
4180
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00004181- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
4182 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
4183 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
4184 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
4185
4186- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
4187
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00004188- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00004189
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004190- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00004191 without going through the buffer API.
4192
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004193- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00004194
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00004195- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
4196 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
4197 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
4198 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
4199
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004200- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
4201 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
4202
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004203- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00004204 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
4205
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004206New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004207-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004208
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00004209- OpenVMS is now supported.
4210
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00004211- AtheOS is now supported.
4212
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00004213- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
4214
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00004215- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
4216
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004217Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004218-----
4219
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00004220- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
4221 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
4222 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004223
4224Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004225-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004226
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004227- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
4228 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
4229 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
4230 bugs.
4231 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004232 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00004233 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
4234 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004235 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00004236
4237- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00004238 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004239
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00004240- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
4241 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
4242
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004243- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
4244 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004245 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004246 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
4247
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00004248- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
4249 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
4250 use files" uninstall option).
4251
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00004252- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
4253
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004254- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
4255 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
4256
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004257- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
4258 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
4259 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
4260
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004261- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
4262 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
4263 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
4264 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
4265 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004266 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
4267 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
4268 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004269
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004270- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004271 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004272 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
4273 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
4274 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
4275 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
4276 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
4277 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
4278 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
4279 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
4280 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
4281 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
4282 work around.
4283
4284- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
4285 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
4286 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
4287 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
4288 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
4289 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
4290 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
4291 specified with O_CREAT too).
4292
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004293Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004294----
4295
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004296- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004297
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00004298- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
4299 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
4300 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
4301
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004302- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
4303 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
4304 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
4305
4306- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
4307 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
4308 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
4309 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
4310 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
4311 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
4312 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
4313 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00004314
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00004315- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
4316 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
4317 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004318
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004319- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
4320 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
4321 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
4322 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
4323 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004324
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004325- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
4326 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
4327 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004328
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004329- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
4330 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004331
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004332- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
4333 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
4334 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
4335 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
4336 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004337
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004338- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
4339 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
4340 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
4341
4342- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
4343 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
4344 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004345
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004346- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
4347 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
4348 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
4349 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004350 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004351
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004352- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
4353 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004354
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004355- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
4356 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00004357
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004358- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00004359 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004360 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
4361 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004362
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00004363
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004364What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004365===============================
4366
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004367*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
4368
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004369Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004370--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004371
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004372- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
4373 with a custom metaclass.
4374
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004375Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004376-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004377
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004378- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
4379 are proxies.
4380
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004381Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004382-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004383
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004384- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
4385 very short strings.
4386
4387- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
4388 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
4389 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
4390 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
4391 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
4392
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004393Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004394-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004395
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004396- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
4397 close or delete time).
4398
4399- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
4400 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
4401
4402- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
4403
4404- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004405 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004406
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004407Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004408-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004409
4410Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004411-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004412
4413C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004414-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004415
4416New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004417-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004418
4419Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004420-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004421
4422Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004423-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004424
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004425- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
4426
4427- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
4428 instances are deleted at process exit time.
4429
4430- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
4431 deleted at process exit time.
4432
4433- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
4434 in backslash.
4435
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004436Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004437----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004438
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004439- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
4440 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
4441 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
4442
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004443
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00004444What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004445===========================
4446
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004447*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
4448
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004449Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004450--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004451
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004452- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
4453 been extensively updated. See
4454
4455 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
4456
4457 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
4458
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00004459- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
4460 deleted!
4461
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00004462- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
4463 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
4464 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
4465 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
4466 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
4467
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004468- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
4469
4470 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
4471 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
4472
4473 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
4474 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
4475 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
4476 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
4477 supported anyway.
4478
4479 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
4480 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
4481
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00004482- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
4483 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
4484 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
4485 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
4486 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004487
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00004488- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
4489 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
4490 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
4491
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004492Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004493-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004494
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004495- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
4496 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
4497 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
4498 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
4499 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
4500 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00004501 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
4502 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
4503 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
4504 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004505
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00004506- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
4507 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
4508 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
4509
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004510Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004511-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004512
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004513- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
4514
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004515Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004516-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004517
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00004518- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
4519 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
4520 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
4521 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
4522 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
4523 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
4524
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00004525- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
4526
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00004527- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
4528
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00004529- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
4530
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004531- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
4532 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
4533 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
4534
4535- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
4536
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004537Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004538-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004539
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004540- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
4541 off a search on Google.
4542
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004543Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004544-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004545
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004546- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
4547 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
4548 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
4549 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
4550 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
4551 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
4552 other platforms should do likewise.
4553
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00004554- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
4555 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
4556 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
4557
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004558C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004559-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004560
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004561- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
4562 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
4563 producing key-value pairs.
4564
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004565- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004566 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004567 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
4568 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
4569 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
4570 previously went unchallenged.
4571
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004572New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004573-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004574
4575Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004576-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004577
4578Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004579-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004580
4581Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004582----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004583
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00004584- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
4585 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004586
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004587- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
4588 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
4589 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
4590 home.
4591
4592
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004593What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004594===========================
4595
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004596*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
4597
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004598Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004599--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004600
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004601- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
4602 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004603
4604 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004605 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004606
4607 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
4608 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004609 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004610 This needs to be documented.
4611
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00004612- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
4613 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
4614
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00004615- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
4616 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
4617 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
4618
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00004619- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
4620 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
4621
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004622- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
4623 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
4624 class forbids it).
4625
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00004626- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
4627 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
4628 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
4629
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004630- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
4631
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004632Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004633-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004634
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004635- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
4636 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004637 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004638
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004639- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
4640 (like 1 + '').
4641
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004642Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004643-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004644
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004645- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
4646 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
4647 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
4648 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004649 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004650 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
4651
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00004652- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
4653 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
4654 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
4655 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
4656
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004657- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
4658 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004659 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
4660 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
4661 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004662
4663- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
4664 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004665
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00004666- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
4667 bytes on its input.
4668
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004669Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004670-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004671
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004672- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00004673 convenience function.
4674
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004675- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
4676 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
4677 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004678 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
4679 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
4680 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
4681 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
4682 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
4683 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004684
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00004685- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
4686 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
4687 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
4688 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
4689
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00004690- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
4691 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
4692 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
4693
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004694- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
4695 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
4696 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
4697 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
4698
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004699- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
4700 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004701 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004702 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
4703 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
4704 new -l and -e options.
4705
4706- statcache is now deprecated.
4707
4708- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
4709 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004710 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004711 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
4712 time properly taken into account.
4713
4714- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
4715 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
4716 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
4717 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
4718
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004719Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004720-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004721
4722Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004723-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004724
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004725- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
4726 is built with libdb3 if available.
4727
4728- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
4729
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004730C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004731-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004732
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00004733- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
4734 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
4735 PySequence_Size().
4736
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004737- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
4738
4739- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
4740 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
4741 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
4742
4743- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
4744 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
4745
4746- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
4747 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
4748
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004749New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004750-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004751
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004752- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
4753 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
4754
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00004755- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
4756 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
4757
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004758- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
4759
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004760Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004761-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004762
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004763- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
4764 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
4765
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004766Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004767-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004768
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004769Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004770----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004771
4772- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
4773 removed completely in the next release.
4774
4775- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
4776 OSX.
4777
4778- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
4779 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
4780
4781- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
4782
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004783
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004784What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004785===========================
4786
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004787*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
4788
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004789Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004790--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004791
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004792- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004793 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004794 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004795 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
4796 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004797 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
4798 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004799 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
4800 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00004801
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00004802- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
4803 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
4804
4805- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
4806 class methods, static methods, and properties.
4807
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004808Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004809-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004810
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00004811- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
4812 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
4813 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
4814 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
4815 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
4816 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
4817 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
4818 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
4819
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004820- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
4821 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
4822 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
4823 example).
4824
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004825- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004826 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004827 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004828 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004829
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004830- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
4831 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
4832 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00004833 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004834
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004835- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
4836 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
4837 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
4838 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
4839 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
4840 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
4841
4842 isinstance(x, (A, B))
4843
4844 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
4845
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004846Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004847-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004848
4849- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
4850
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004851- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
4852
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004853- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
4854 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00004855
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004856- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
4857 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
4858 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
4859 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
4860 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
4861 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00004862 attributes.
4863
4864- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
4865 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
4866 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00004867
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004868- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
4869 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
4870 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004871
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004872- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
4873 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
4874 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004875 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
4876 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
4877
4878- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
4879 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004880
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004881Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004882-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004883
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00004884- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
4885 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
4886
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004887- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
4888 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
4889 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
4890 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
4891
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00004892- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
4893 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
4894 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
4895 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
4896
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00004897 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
4898 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
4899 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
4900 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
4901 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
4902 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
4903 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
4904 without losing information).
4905
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004906- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004907 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
4908 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
4909 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
4910 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
4911 module).
4912
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004913 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004914 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
4915 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
4916 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
4917 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004918
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004919- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00004920 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
4921 encoding.
4922
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00004923- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
4924 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
4925
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004926- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004927 to allow saving the message body to a file.
4928
4929- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
4930 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
4931 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
4932 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
4933
4934- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
4935
4936- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
4937 ON, and OFF.
4938
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004939- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
4940 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
4941
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004942Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004943-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004944
4945- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
4946 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
4947 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004948
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004949- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
4950 been added: -X and -E.
4951
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004952Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004953-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004954
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004955- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
4956 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
4957
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004958C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004959-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004960
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00004961- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
4962 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
4963 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
4964 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
4965 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
4966
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00004967- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
4968 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
4969 as long) arguments.
4970
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004971- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
4972 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
4973 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
4974 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
4975 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
4976 report any bugs or strange behavior).
4977
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004978- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
4979 input.
4980
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004981New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004982-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004983
4984Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004985-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004986
4987Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004988-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004989
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00004990- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
4991 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
4992 is created for .py and .pyw files.
4993
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004994- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
4995 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
4996 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004997 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004998
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004999 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
5000 # (SIGINT) behavior.
5001 import signal
5002 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005003
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005004 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005005 while 1:
5006 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005007 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005008 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
5009 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
5010 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
5011 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005012
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005013
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005014What's New in Python 2.2a4?
5015===========================
5016
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005017*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
5018
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005019Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005020--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005021
5022- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
5023 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
5024 documentation for all operations on list objects.
5025
5026- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
5027 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
5028 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
5029 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
5030 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
5031 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
5032 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005033
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00005034- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005035 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00005036 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
5037 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
5038 associate a docstring with a property.
5039
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005040- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
5041 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
5042 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
5043 other built-in object types.
5044
5045- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
5046 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
5047 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
5048 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
5049 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
5050
5051- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
5052 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
5053
5054- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
5055 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005056 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005057 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
5058 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
5059 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
5060 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
5061 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
5062
5063- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
5064 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
5065 class.
5066
5067- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
5068 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
5069 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
5070 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
5071
5072- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
5073 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
5074 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
5075 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
5076
5077- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
5078 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
5079
5080- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
5081 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
5082 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
5083 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
5084 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005085 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005086 with the same value as s.
5087
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00005088- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
5089
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005090Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005091----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005092
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00005093- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
5094
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00005095- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
5096 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
5097 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
5098 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
5099 objects.
5100
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005101- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
5102 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00005103 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
5104 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
5105
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005106- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
5107 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
5108 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
5109
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005110Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005111-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005112
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00005113- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
5114 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
5115 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
5116 by the instances.
5117
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00005118- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
5119 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
5120 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
5121
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005122- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
5123 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
5124 before the entire comparison is complete.
5125
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00005126- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
5127 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
5128 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
5129
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00005130- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
5131 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
5132 getwriter().
5133
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005134- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
5135 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
5136
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00005137- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005138 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
5139 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
5140
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00005141- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
5142 iterable object.
5143
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005144- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
5145 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005146
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005147- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
5148 authentication.
5149
5150- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
5151 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005152
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005153- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00005154 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
5155 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
5156 a sample driver.)
5157
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005158Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005159-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005160
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005161- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
5162 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
5163 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
5164 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
5165 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
5166 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
5167 kernel has large file support.
5168
5169- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
5170 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
5171 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
5172 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
5173 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
5174
5175- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
5176 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
5177 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
5178
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005179C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005180-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005181
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005182- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
5183 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
5184
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005185New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005186-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005187
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005188- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
5189 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
5190
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005191Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005192-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005193
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005194- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
5195 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
5196 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
5197 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
5198 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
5199
5200- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
5201 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
5202 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
5203 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
5204
5205- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
5206 especially in regard to reporting errors.
5207
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005208Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005209-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005210
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005211- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005212 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
5213 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005214
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005215
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005216What's New in Python 2.2a3?
5217===========================
5218
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005219*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
5220
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005221Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005222----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005223
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005224- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
5225 big to represent as a C double.
5226
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00005227- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
5228 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
5229 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
5230 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
5231 restriction).
5232
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00005233- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
5234 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
5235 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
5236 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
5237 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
5238
5239 >>> dir([])
5240 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
5241 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
5242 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
5243 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
5244 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
5245 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
5246 'reverse', 'sort']
5247
5248 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
5249
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005250- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005251 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
5252 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
5253 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
5254 OverflowError exception.
5255
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00005256- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005257 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005258 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
5259 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
5260 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
5261 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
5262 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00005263 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005264 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
5265 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
5266
5267 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
5268 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
5269 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
5270 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005271
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005272- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005273 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
5274 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
5275 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
5276 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
5277 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
5278 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
5279 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
5280 once it is created.
5281
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00005282- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
5283 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
5284 (key, value) pairs.
5285
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005286- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005287 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
5288 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
5289
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00005290- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
5291 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
5292 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
5293 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
5294 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005295
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005296- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005297 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
5298 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
5299
5300 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
5301
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005302- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00005303 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
5304
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005305Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005306-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005307
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005308- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00005309 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
5310 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005311
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00005312- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
5313 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
5314 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
5315 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
5316 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
5317 in this area anymore).
5318
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00005319- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
5320 threading.Timer.
5321
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00005322- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
5323 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
5324
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005325- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005326 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
5327
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005328- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00005329 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
5330 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
5331 converted to Python longs.
5332
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005333- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005334 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
5335
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00005336- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
5337 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
5338 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
5339
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005340Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005341-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005342
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005343- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
5344 division operators as per PEP 238.
5345
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005346Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005347-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005348
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005349- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
5350 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
5351 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
5352 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
5353
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005354C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005355-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005356
5357- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005358
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005359- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
5360 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005361 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005362
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005363 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
5364 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005365 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005366 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005367
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005368- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005369 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
5370 module:
5371
5372 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005373
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005374 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
5375 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005376
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005377 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
5378 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005379
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005380 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
5381
5382 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
5383
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005384- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005385 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
5386 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
5387 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005388
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005389New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005390-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005391
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00005392- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
5393 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
5394 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
5395 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
5396 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005397
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005398Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005399-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005400
5401Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005402-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005403
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005404- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
5405 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
5406 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
5407 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00005408 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
5409 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
5410 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
5411 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
5412 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005413
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005414- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00005415 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
5416
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005417
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005418What's New in Python 2.2a2?
5419===========================
5420
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005421*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
5422
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005423Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005424-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005425
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00005426- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
5427 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
5428
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005429- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
5430 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
5431 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005432
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00005433- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
5434 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
5435 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
5436 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005437
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005438- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
5439
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005440- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005441
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005442Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005443-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005444
5445- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00005446 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005447 the module docstring for details.
5448
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005449Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005450-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005451
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005452- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005453 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
5454 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
5455 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005456
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005457- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
5458 Nick Mathewson.
5459
5460Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005461----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005462
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005463- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
5464 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
5465 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
5466 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
5467 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
5468 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
5469 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
5470 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
5471
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00005472- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
5473 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
5474 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
5475 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
5476
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00005477- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
5478 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
5479 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
5480 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
5481 come a long way).
5482
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005483- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
5484 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
5485 write filters for these warnings).
5486
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00005487- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
5488 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
5489 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
5490 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
5491 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
5492
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00005493- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
5494 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
5495 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
5496 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
5497 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
5498 older distribution.
5499
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005500Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005501-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005502
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005503- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
5504 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005505 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005506
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005507- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
5508 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
5509 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
5510
5511- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
5512
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005513- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
5514
5515- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
5516
5517- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
5518
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005519- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005520
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00005521- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
5522
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005523New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005524-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005525
5526C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005527-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005528
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005529- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
5530 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
5531 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
5532 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
5533 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
5534 against buffer overruns.
5535
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005536- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005537 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
5538 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005539 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
5540 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
5541 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
5542
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005543- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
5544 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
5545 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
5546 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
5547 deprecated.
5548
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005549Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005550-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005551
5552- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
5553 relevant is found.
5554
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005555
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005556What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005557===========================
5558
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005559*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
5560
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005561Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005562----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005563
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005564- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
5565 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
5566 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
5567 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
5568 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
5569 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
5570 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
5571 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005572 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005573 repaired.
5574
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005575- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00005576 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005577 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
5578 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
5579 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
5580 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
5581 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
5582 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
5583 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
5584 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
5585
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00005586- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
5587 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
5588 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
5589 leading BMO character).
5590
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005591- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
5592 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
5593 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
5594
5595 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
5596 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
5597 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005598
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005599 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
5600 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
5601 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
5602 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
5603 for various simple to use conversions.
5604
5605 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
5606 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
5607
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005608 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5609 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
5610 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
5611 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
5612 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5613 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
5614 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5615 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
5616 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5617 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
5618 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5619 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
5620 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5621 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
5622 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005623
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005624- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
5625 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
5626 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005627 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005628 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005629
5630 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005631 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
5632 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
5633 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
5634 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
5635 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005636 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
5637 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005638
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005639 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
5640 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
5641 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005642 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005643
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00005644- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
5645 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
5646 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
5647 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
5648 floating arithmetic,
5649
5650 x = 9007199254740992.0
5651 print long(x)
5652
5653 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
5654 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
5655 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
5656 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
5657 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
5658 functions are of good quality).
5659
5660 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
5661 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
5662 algorithms to break.
5663
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00005664- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
5665 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
5666 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
5667 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
5668 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
5669 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
5670 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
5671 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
5672 order.
5673
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005674- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
5675 operation along the most common code paths.
5676
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005677- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
5678 the same as dict.has_key(x).
5679
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00005680- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
5681 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
5682 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
5683 {}.update(UserDict())
5684
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005685- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
5686 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
5687 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
5688 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
5689 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
5690 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
5691 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
5692 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
5693
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005694- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005695 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005696
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005697 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00005698 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
5699 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00005700 join() method of strings
5701 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005702 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
5703 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005704 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00005705 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005706
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00005707- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
5708 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
5709
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005710- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
5711 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
5712
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00005713- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
5714 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
5715 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
5716 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
5717
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005718- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
5719 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005720 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005721 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
5722 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00005723
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00005724- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
5725
5726
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005727Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005728-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005729
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005730- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005731 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005732 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
5733 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
5734
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00005735- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
5736 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
5737
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00005738- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
5739 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
5740 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
5741 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
5742
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00005743- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
5744 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
5745 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
5746
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00005747- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
5748
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00005749- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
5750
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00005751- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
5752 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
5753 that are still imported into string.py).
5754
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005755- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
5756
5757- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
5758 Now it does.
5759
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005760- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
5761
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005762- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
5763 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
5764 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
5765 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
5766 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005767 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
5768 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005769
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00005770- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
5771 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
5772 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
5773 'help(object)'.
5774
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005775Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005776-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005777
5778- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005779 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005780 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
5781 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
5782
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005783- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005784 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
5785 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005786
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005787C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005788-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005789
5790- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
5791 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005792
5793----
5794
5795**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**