blob: 035bacff7886a07328ffa6b91fdf8be85828a4b0 [file] [log] [blame]
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +00007What's New in Python 2.5 alpha 1?
8=================================
9
10Core and builtins
11-----------------
12
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +000013- min() and max() now support key= arguments with the same meaning as in
14 list.sort().
15
Raymond Hettingerc34f8672005-01-02 06:17:33 +000016- The peephole optimizer now performs simple constant folding in expressions:
17 (2+3) --> (5).
18
Raymond Hettingera422c342005-01-11 03:03:27 +000019- set and frozenset objects can now be marshalled. SF #1098985.
20
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000021
22Extension Modules
23-----------------
24
Martin v. Löwisfe33d0b2005-01-16 08:57:39 +000025- stat_float_times is now True.
26
Raymond Hettingerb0900e62004-12-16 16:23:40 +000027- array.array objects are now picklable.
28
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +000029- the cPickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
30 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
31
Raymond Hettingerb2594052004-12-05 09:25:51 +000032- itertools.islice() now accepts None for the start and step arguments.
33 This allows islice() to work more readily with slices:
34 islice(s.start, s.stop, s.step)
35
Skip Montanaro0af3ade2005-01-13 04:12:31 +000036- datetime.datetime() now has a strptime class method which can be used to
37 create datetime object using a string and format.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000038
39Library
40-------
41
Martin v. Löwis22b457e2005-01-16 08:40:58 +000042- os.{SEEK_SET, SEEK_CUR, SEEK_END} have been added for convenience.
43
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +000044- Enhancements to the csv module:
45
46 + Dialects are now validated by the underlying C code, better
47 reflecting it's capabilities, and improving it's compliance with
48 PEP 305.
49 + Dialect parameter parsing has been re-implemented to improve error
50 reporting.
51 + quotechar=None and quoting=QUOTE_NONE now work the way PEP 305
52 dictates.
53 + the parser now removes the escapechar prefix from escaped characters.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +000054 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the writer now tests for numeric
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +000055 types, rather than any object than can be represented as a numeric.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +000056 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the reader now casts unquoted fields
57 to floats.
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +000058 + reader now allows \r characters to be quoted (previously it only allowed
59 \n to be quoted).
Andrew McNamarac89f2842005-01-12 07:44:42 +000060 + writer doublequote handling improved.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +000061 + Dialect classes passed to the module are no longer instantiated by
62 the module before being parsed (the former validation scheme required
63 this, but the mechanism was unreliable).
64 + The dialect registry now contains instances of the internal
65 C-coded dialect type, rather than references to python objects.
66 + the internal c-coded dialect type is now immutable.
67 + register_dialect now accepts the same keyword dialect specifications
68 as the reader and writer, allowing the user to register dialects
69 without first creating a dialect class.
70 + a configurable limit to the size of parsed fields has been added -
71 previously, an unmatched quote character could result in the entire
72 file being read into the field buffer before an error was reported.
Andrew McNamara31d88962005-01-12 03:45:10 +000073 + A new module method csv.field_size_limit() has been added that sets
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +000074 the parser field size limit (returning the former limit). The initial
75 limit is 128kB.
Andrew McNamara7f2053e2005-01-12 11:17:16 +000076 + A line_num attribute has been added to the reader object, which tracks
77 the number of lines read from the source iterator. This is not
78 the same as the number of records returned, as records can span
79 multiple lines.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +000080 + reader and writer objects were not being registered with the cyclic-GC.
81 This has been fixed.
82
Brett Cannone6539c42005-01-08 02:43:53 +000083- _DummyThread objects in the threading module now delete self.__block that is
84 inherited from _Thread since it uses up a lock allocated by 'thread'. The
85 lock primitives tend to be limited in number and thus should not be wasted on
86 a _DummyThread object. Fixes bug #1089632.
87
Raymond Hettinger97db05d2005-01-07 08:15:41 +000088- The imghdr module now detects Exif files.
89
Raymond Hettinger6065d322004-12-20 23:51:53 +000090- StringIO.truncate() now correctly adjusts the size attribute.
91 (Bug #951915).
92
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +000093- locale.py now uses an updated locale alias table (built using
94 Tools/i18n/makelocalealias.py, a tool to parse the X11 locale
95 alias file); the encoding lookup was enhanced to use Python's
96 encoding alias table
97
Raymond Hettinger3557f422004-12-07 12:02:02 +000098- moved deprecated modules to Lib/lib-old: whrandom, tzparse, statcache.
99
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000100- the pickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
101 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
102
Brett Cannon84667c02004-12-07 03:25:18 +0000103- optparse now optionally imports gettext. This allows its use in setup.py.
104
Raymond Hettinger3489cad2004-12-05 05:20:42 +0000105- the pickle module no longer uses the deprecated bin parameter.
106
Raymond Hettinger1bc82f82004-12-05 03:58:17 +0000107- the shelve module no longer uses the deprecated binary parameter.
108
Raymond Hettinger6c92d762004-12-05 03:28:00 +0000109- the pstats module no longer uses the deprecated ignore() method.
110
Raymond Hettingerf3fa9462004-12-05 01:58:09 +0000111- the filecmp module no longer uses the deprecated use_statcache argument.
112
Raymond Hettinger664347b2004-12-04 21:21:53 +0000113- unittest.TestCase.run() and unittest.TestSuite.run() can now be successfully
114 extended or overridden by subclasses. Formerly, the subclassed method would
115 be ignored by the rest of the module. (Bug #1078905).
116
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000117- heapq.nsmallest() and heapq.nlargest() now support key= arguments with
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000118 the same meaning as in list.sort().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000119
Walter Dörwald36733692004-12-22 12:50:50 +0000120- Bug #1076985: ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` now calls ``read()`` only
121 once when a size argument is given. This prevents a buffer overflow in the
122 tokenizer with very long source lines.
123
Andrew M. Kuchling3b585b32004-12-28 20:10:48 +0000124- Bug #1083110: ``zlib.decompress.flush()`` would segfault if called immediately
125 after creating the object, without any intervening ``.decompress()`` calls.
126
Skip Montanaro05885812005-01-16 20:48:27 +0000127- The reconvert.quote function can now emit triple-quoted strings. The
128 reconvert module now has some simple documentation.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000129
130Build
131-----
132
Brett Cannon516592f2004-12-07 00:42:59 +0000133- setup.py now uses the directories specified in LDFLAGS using the -L option
134 and in CPPFLAGS using the -I option for adding library and include
135 directories, respectively, for compiling extension modules against. This has
136 led to the core being compiled using the values in CPPFLAGS. It also removes
137 the need for the special-casing of both DarwinPorts and Fink for darwin since
138 the proper directories can be specified in LDFLAGS (``-L/sw/lib`` for Fink,
139 ``-L/opt/local/lib`` for DarwinPorts) and CPPFLAGS (``-I/sw/include`` for
140 Fink, ``-I/opt/local/include`` for DarwinPorts).
141
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000142
143C API
144-----
145
Raymond Hettinger66517482004-12-03 11:45:13 +0000146- Removed PyRange_New().
147
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000148
149Tests
150-----
151
152
153Mac
154---
155
156
157
158Tools/Demos
159-----------
160
161
162
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000163What's New in Python 2.4 final?
164===============================
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000165
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000166*Release date: 30-NOV-2004*
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000167
168Core and builtins
169-----------------
170
171- Bug 875692: Improve signal handling, especially when using threads, by
172 forcing an early re-execution of PyEval_EvalFrame() "periodic" code when
173 things_to_do is not cleared by Py_MakePendingCalls().
174
175
Anthony Baxter4277ed82004-11-30 11:53:10 +0000176What's New in Python 2.4 (release candidate 1)
177==============================================
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000178
Anthony Baxter5cc727a2004-11-18 12:32:27 +0000179*Release date: 18-NOV-2004*
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000180
181Core and builtins
182-----------------
183
Tim Petersfb1ffb02004-11-08 04:30:21 +0000184- Bug 1061968: Fixes in 2.4a3 to address thread bug 1010677 reintroduced
185 the years-old thread shutdown race bug 225673. Numeric history lesson
186 aside, all bugs in all three reports are fixed now.
187
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000188
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000189Library
190-------
191
192- Bug 1052242: If exceptions are raised by an atexit handler function an
193 attempt is made to execute the remaining handlers. The last exception
194 raised is re-raised.
195
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000196- ``doctest``'s new support for adding ``pdb.set_trace()`` calls to
197 doctests was broken in a dramatic but shallow way. Fixed.
198
Tim Petersbbc0d442004-11-13 16:18:32 +0000199- Bug 1065388: ``calendar``'s ``day_name``, ``day_abbr``, ``month_name``,
200 and ``month_abbr`` attributes emulate sequences of locale-correct
201 spellings of month and day names. Because the locale can change at
202 any time, the correct spelling is recomputed whenever one of these is
203 indexed. In the worst case, the index may be a slice object, so these
204 recomputed every day or month name each time they were indexed. This is
205 much slower than necessary in the usual case, when the index is just an
206 integer. In that case, only the single spelling needed is recomputed
207 now; and, when the index is a slice object, only the spellings needed
208 by the slice are recomputed now.
209
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000210- Patch 1061679: Added ``__all__`` to pickletools.py.
Tim Peters90cf2122004-11-06 23:45:48 +0000211
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000212Build
213-----
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000214
Brett Cannon7d28e962004-11-07 01:19:00 +0000215- Bug 1034277 / Patch 1035255: Remove compilation of core against CoreServices
216 and CoreFoundation on OS X. Involved removing PyMac_GetAppletScriptFile()
217 which has no known users. Thanks Bob Ippolito.
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000218
219C API
220-----
221
Raymond Hettinger39e92ea2004-11-18 09:41:45 +0000222- The PyRange_New() function is deprecated.
223
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000224
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000225What's New in Python 2.4 beta 2?
226================================
227
Anthony Baxter9f41f3a2004-11-03 06:21:37 +0000228*Release date: 03-NOV-2004*
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000229
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000230License
231-------
232
233The Python Software Foundation changed the license under which Python
234is released, to remove Python version numbers. There were no other
235changes to the license. So, for example, wherever the license for
236Python 2.3 said "Python 2.3", the new license says "Python". The
237intent is to make it possible to refer to the PSF license in a more
238durable way. For example, some people say they're confused by that
239the Open Source Initiative's entry for the Python Software Foundation
240License::
241
242 http://www.opensource.org/licenses/PythonSoftFoundation.php
243
244says "Python 2.1.1" all over it, wondering whether it applies only
245to Python 2.1.1.
246
247The official name of the new license is the Python Software Foundation
248License Version 2.
249
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000250Core and builtins
251-----------------
252
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +0000253- Bug #1055820 Cyclic garbage collection was not protecting against that
254 calling a live weakref to a piece of cyclic trash could resurrect an
255 insane mutation of the trash if any Python code ran during gc (via
256 running a dead object's __del__ method, running another callback on a
257 weakref to a dead object, or via any Python code run in any other thread
258 that managed to obtain the GIL while a __del__ or callback was running
259 in the thread doing gc). The most likely symptom was "impossible"
260 ``AttributeEror`` exceptions, appearing seemingly at random, on weakly
261 referenced objects. The cure was to clear all weakrefs to unreachable
262 objects before allowing any callbacks to run.
263
Raymond Hettinger561fbf12004-10-26 01:52:37 +0000264- Bug #1054139 _PyString_Resize() now invalidates its cached hash value.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000265
266Extension Modules
267-----------------
268
Raymond Hettinger9047c8f2004-10-24 00:10:06 +0000269- Bug #1048870: the compiler now generates distinct code objects for
270 functions with identical bodies. This was producing confusing
271 traceback messages which pointed to the function where the code
272 object was first defined rather than the function being executed.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000273
274Library
275-------
276
Barry Warsaw8c72eae2004-11-01 03:52:43 +0000277- Patch #1056967 changes the semantics of Template.safe_substitute() so that
278 no ValueError is raised on an 'invalid' match group. Now the delimiter is
279 returned.
280
Raymond Hettinger2ef7e6c2004-10-24 00:32:24 +0000281- Bug #1052503 pdb.runcall() was not passing along keyword arguments.
282
Raymond Hettingerc64aab82004-10-20 08:21:57 +0000283- Bug #902037: XML.sax.saxutils.prepare_input_source() now combines relative
284 paths with a base path before checking os.path.isfile().
285
Raymond Hettingere54e7262004-10-20 07:17:16 +0000286- The whichdb module can now be run from the command line.
287
Brett Cannon8abcc5d2004-10-18 01:37:57 +0000288- Bug #1045381: time.strptime() can now infer the date using %U or %W (week of
289 the year) when the day of the week and year are also specified.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000290
Andrew M. Kuchling0d19bae2004-10-19 19:54:41 +0000291- Bug #1048816: fix bug in Ctrl-K at start of line in curses.textpad.Textbox
292
Andrew M. Kuchling66e80ba2004-10-20 11:56:15 +0000293- Bug #1017553: fix bug in tarfile.filemode()
294
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000295- Patch #737473: fix bug that old source code is shown in tracebacks even if
Hye-Shik Chang182ac852004-10-26 09:16:42 +0000296 the source code is updated and reloaded.
297
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000298Build
299-----
300
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000301- Patch #1044395: --enable-shared is allowed in FreeBSD also.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000302
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000303What's New in Python 2.4 beta 1?
304================================
305
Anthony Baxter6a587c12004-10-15 08:07:21 +0000306*Release date: 15-OCT-2004*
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000307
308Core and builtins
309-----------------
310
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000311- Patch #975056: Restartable signals were not correctly disabled on
Anthony Baxtere4f8a482004-10-13 14:55:56 +0000312 BSD systems. Consistently use PyOS_setsig() instead of signal().
313
Tim Peters263091e2004-10-10 01:58:44 +0000314- The internal portable implementation of thread-local storage (TLS), used
315 by the ``PyGILState_Ensure()``/``PyGILState_Release()`` API, was not
316 thread-correct. This could lead to a variety of problems, up to and
317 including segfaults. See bug 1041645 for an example.
318
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000319- Added a command line option, -m module, which searches sys.path for the
320 module and then runs it. (Contributed by Nick Coghlan.)
321
Raymond Hettinger2c31a052004-09-22 18:44:21 +0000322- The bytecode optimizer now folds tuples of constants into a single
323 constant.
324
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000325- SF bug #513866: Float/long comparison anomaly. Prior to 2.4b1, when
326 an integer was compared to a float, the integer was coerced to a float.
327 That could yield spurious overflow errors (if the integer was very
328 large), and to anomalies such as
329 ``long(1e200)+1 == 1e200 == long(1e200)-1``. Coercion to float is no
330 longer performed, and cases like ``long(1e200)-1 < 1e200``,
331 ``long(1e200)+1 > 1e200`` and ``(1 << 20000) > 1e200`` are computed
332 correctly now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000333
334Extension modules
335-----------------
336
Tim Peterscf8997f2004-10-01 02:13:16 +0000337- ``collections.deque`` objects didn't play quite right with garbage
338 collection, which could lead to a segfault in a release build, or
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000339 an assert failure in a debug build. Also, added overflow checks,
340 better detection of mutation during iteration, and shielded deque
341 comparisons from unusual subclass overrides of the __iter__() method.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000342
343Library
344-------
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000345
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000346- Patch 1046644: distutils build_ext grew two new options - --swig for
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000347 specifying the swig executable to use, and --swig-opts to specify
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000348 options to pass to swig. --swig-opts="-c++" is the new way to spell
349 --swig-cpp.
350
Anthony Baxter22dcf662004-10-13 15:54:17 +0000351- Patch 983206: distutils now obeys environment variable LDSHARED, if
352 it is set.
353
Andrew M. Kuchling518d3932004-10-12 15:32:10 +0000354- Added Peter Astrand's subprocess.py module. See PEP 324 for details.
Fredrik Lundh5b3687d2004-10-12 15:26:28 +0000355
Brett Cannon4f35c712004-10-06 02:11:37 +0000356- time.strptime() now properly escapes timezones and all other locale-specific
357 strings for regex-specific symbols. Was breaking under Japanese Windows when
358 the timezone was specified as "Tokyo (standard time)".
359 Closes bug #1039270.
360
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000361- Updates for the email package:
Brett Cannon06a30b02004-10-22 06:22:54 +0000362
Barry Warsaw418de1f2004-10-11 14:32:47 +0000363 + email.Utils.formatdate() grew a 'usegmt' argument for HTTP support.
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000364 + All deprecated APIs that in email 2.x issued warnings have been removed:
365 _encoder argument to the MIMEText constructor, Message.add_payload(),
366 Utils.dump_address_pair(), Utils.decode(), Utils.encode()
367 + New deprecations: Generator.__call__(), Message.get_type(),
368 Message.get_main_type(), Message.get_subtype(), the 'strict' argument to
369 the Parser constructor. These will be removed in email 3.1.
370 + Support for Python earlier than 2.3 has been removed (see PEP 291).
371 + All defect classes have been renamed to end in 'Defect'.
372 + Some FeedParser fixes; also a MultipartInvariantViolationDefect will be
373 added to messages that claim to be multipart but really aren't.
374 + Updates to documentation.
375
Raymond Hettinger596ba4d2004-09-24 03:41:05 +0000376- re's findall() and finditer() functions now take an optional flags argument
377 just like the compile(), search(), and match() functions. Also, documented
378 the previously existing start and stop parameters for the findall() and
379 finditer() methods of regular expression objects.
380
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000381- rfc822 Messages now support iterating over the headers.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000382
Martin v. Löwisf3c56112004-09-18 09:08:52 +0000383- The (undocumented) tarfile.Tarfile.membernames has been removed;
384 applications should use the getmember function.
385
Martin v. Löwis39a31782004-09-18 09:03:49 +0000386- httplib now offers symbolic constants for the HTTP status codes.
387
Tim Peters528ca532004-09-16 01:30:50 +0000388- SF bug #1028306: Trying to compare a ``datetime.date`` to a
389 ``datetime.datetime`` mistakenly compared only the year, month and day.
390 Now it acts like a mixed-type comparison: ``False`` for ``==``,
391 ``True`` for ``!=``, and raises ``TypeError`` for other comparison
392 operators. Because datetime is a subclass of date, comparing only the
393 base class (date) members can still be done, if that's desired, by
394 forcing using of the approprate date method; e.g.,
395 ``a_date.__eq__(a_datetime)`` is true if and only if the year, month
396 and day members of ``a_date`` and ``a_datetime`` are equal.
397
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000398- bdist_rpm now supports command line options --force-arch,
399 {pre,post}-install, {pre,post}-uninstall, and
Martin v. Löwis23c48a12004-09-10 06:32:54 +0000400 {prep,build,install,clean,verify}-script.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000401
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000402- SF patch #998993: The UTF-8 and the UTF-16 stateful decoders now support
403 decoding incomplete input (when the input stream is temporarily exhausted).
404 ``codecs.StreamReader`` now implements buffering, which enables proper
405 readline support for the UTF-16 decoders. ``codecs.StreamReader.read()``
406 has a new argument ``chars`` which specifies the number of characters to
407 return. ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` and
408 ``codecs.StreamReader.readlines()`` have a new argument ``keepends``.
409 Trailing "\n"s will be stripped from the lines if ``keepends`` is false.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000410
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000411- The documentation for doctest is greatly expanded, and now covers all
412 the new public features (of which there are many).
413
Walter Dörwald5011d0c2004-09-13 08:53:15 +0000414- ``doctest.master`` was put back in, and ``doctest.testmod()`` once again
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000415 updates it. This isn't good, because every ``testmod()`` call
416 contributes to bloating the "hidden" state of ``doctest.master``, but
417 some old code apparently relies on it. For now, all we can do is
418 encourage people to stitch doctests together via doctest's unittest
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000419 integration features instead.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000420
Skip Montanaro82d0eec2004-09-14 17:58:31 +0000421- httplib now handles ipv6 address/port pairs.
422
David Goodger68a1abd2004-10-03 15:40:25 +0000423- SF bug #1017864: ConfigParser now correctly handles default keys,
424 processing them with ``ConfigParser.optionxform`` when supplied,
425 consistent with the handling of config file entries and runtime-set
426 options.
427
David Goodger1cbf2062004-10-03 15:55:09 +0000428- SF bug #997050: Document, test, & check for non-string values in
429 ConfigParser. Moved the new string-only restriction added in
430 rev. 1.65 to the SafeConfigParser class, leaving existing
431 ConfigParser & RawConfigParser behavior alone, and documented the
432 conditions under which non-string values work.
433
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000434Build
435-----
436
Brett Cannonbfef8692004-09-28 04:08:11 +0000437- Building on darwin now includes /opt/local/include and /opt/local/lib for
438 building extension modules. This is so as to include software installed as
439 a DarwinPorts port <http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/>
440
Tim Peters862f0592004-09-23 19:11:32 +0000441- pyport.h now defines a Py_IS_NAN macro. It works as-is when the
442 platform C computes true for ``x != x`` if and only if X is a NaN.
443 Other platforms can override the default definition with a platform-
444 specific spelling in that platform's pyconfig.h. You can also override
445 pyport.h's default Py_IS_INFINITY definition now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000446
447C API
448-----
449
Tim Peters7f468f22004-10-11 02:40:51 +0000450- SF patch 1044089: New function ``PyEval_ThreadsInitialized()`` returns
451 non-zero if PyEval_InitThreads() has been called.
452
453- The undocumented and unused extern int ``_PyThread_Started`` was removed.
454
Tim Peters84705582004-10-10 02:47:33 +0000455- The C API calls ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
456 are two of the very few advertised as being safe to call without holding
457 the GIL. However, this wasn't true in a debug build, as bug 1041645
458 demonstrated. In a debug build, Python redirects the ``PyMem`` family
459 of calls to Python's small-object allocator, to get the benefit of
460 its extra debugging capabilities. But Python's small-object allocator
461 isn't threadsafe, relying on the GIL to avoid the expense of doing its
462 own locking. ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
463 call the platform ``malloc()`` directly now, regardless of build type.
464
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000465- PyLong_AsUnsignedLong[Mask] now support int objects as well.
466
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000467- SF patch #998993: ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF8Stateful`` and
468 ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF16Stateful`` have been added, which implement stateful
469 decoding.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000470
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000471Tests
472-----
473
474- test__locale ported to unittest
475
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000476Mac
477---
478
Just van Rossumdd3c8372004-10-03 16:27:09 +0000479- ``plistlib`` now supports non-dict root objects. There is also a new
480 interface for reading and writing plist files: ``readPlist(pathOrFile)``
481 and ``writePlist(rootObject, pathOrFile)``
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000482
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000483Tools/Demos
484-----------
485
Tim Peters130e37f2004-10-03 19:03:19 +0000486- The text file comparison scripts ``ndiff.py`` and ``diff.py`` now
487 read the input files in universal-newline mode. This spares them
488 from consuming a great deal of time to deduce the useless result that,
489 e.g., a file with Windows line ends and a file with Linux line ends
490 have no lines in common.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000491
492
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000493What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
494=================================
495
Anthony Baxtere13943a2004-09-02 16:37:15 +0000496*Release date: 02-SEP-2004*
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000497
498Core and builtins
499-----------------
500
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000501- SF patch #1007189: ``from ... import ...`` statements now allow the name
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +0000502 list to be surrounded by parentheses.
503
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000504- Some speedups for long arithmetic, thanks to Trevor Perrin. Gradeschool
505 multiplication was sped a little by optimizing the C code. Gradeschool
506 squaring was sped by about a factor of 2, by exploiting that about half
507 the digit products are duplicates in a square. Because exponentiation
508 uses squaring often, this also speeds long power. For example, the time
509 to compute 17**1000000 dropped from about 14 seconds to 9 on my box due
510 to this much. The cutoff for Karatsuba multiplication was raised,
511 since gradeschool multiplication got quicker, and the cutoff was
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000512 aggressively small regardless. The exponentiation algorithm was switched
513 from right-to-left to left-to-right, which is more efficient for small
514 bases. In addition, if the exponent is large, the algorithm now does
515 5 bits (instead of 1 bit) at a time. That cut the time to compute
516 17**1000000 on my box in half again, down to about 4.5 seconds.
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000517
Tim Petersc8854432004-08-25 02:14:08 +0000518- OverflowWarning is no longer generated. PEP 237 scheduled this to
519 occur in Python 2.3, but since OverflowWarning was disabled by default,
520 nobody realized it was still being generated. On the chance that user
521 code is still using them, the Python builtin OverflowWarning, and
522 corresponding C API PyExc_OverflowWarning, will exist until Python 2.5.
523
Martin v. Löwis336e85f2004-08-19 11:31:58 +0000524- Py_InitializeEx has been added.
525
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +0000526- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
527 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
528
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +0000529- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
530 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
531 modified the list.
532
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +0000533- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
534 functions is now writable.
535
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +0000536- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
537 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
538 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
539 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
540
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000541- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
542 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
543 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
544 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
545 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +0000546
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +0000547- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
548 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
549
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000550Extension modules
551-----------------
552
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000553- difflib now supports HTML side-by-side diff.
554
Martin v. Löwisdc3883f2004-08-29 15:46:35 +0000555- os.urandom has been added for systems that support sources of random
556 data.
557
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000558- Patch 1012740: truncate() on a writeable cStringIO now resets the
559 position to the end of the stream. This is consistent with the original
560 StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was
561 supposed to have been truncated away.
562
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +0000563- Added socket.socketpair().
564
Dave Cole3203efb2004-08-26 00:37:31 +0000565- Added CurrentByteIndex, CurrentColumnNumber, CurrentLineNumber
566 members to xml.parsers.expat.XMLParser object.
567
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000568- The mpz, rotor, and xreadlines modules, all deprecated in earlier
Andrew M. Kuchling00873432004-08-31 13:50:43 +0000569 versions of Python, have now been removed.
570
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000571Library
572-------
573
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000574- Patch #934356: if a module defines __all__, believe that rather than using
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000575 heuristics for filtering out imported names.
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000576
Johannes Gijsbersae882f72004-08-30 10:19:56 +0000577- Patch #941486: added os.path.lexists(), which returns True for broken
578 symlinks, unlike os.path.exists().
579
Raymond Hettinger356a4592004-08-30 06:14:31 +0000580- the random module now uses os.urandom() for seeding if it is available.
581 Added a new generator based on os.urandom().
582
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000583- difflib and diff.py can now generate HTML.
584
Martin v. Löwiscae9e672004-08-25 13:04:53 +0000585- bdist_rpm now includes version and release in the BuildRoot, and
586 replaces - by ``_`` in version and release.
Martin v. Löwiscf525242004-08-25 13:00:34 +0000587
Martin v. Löwis9f5c0c42004-08-25 11:37:43 +0000588- distutils build/build_scripts now has an -e option to specify the
589 path to the Python interpreter for installed scripts.
590
Barry Warsaw8bee7612004-08-25 02:22:30 +0000591- PEP 292 classes Template and SafeTemplate are added to the string module.
592
Martin v. Löwis75b9da42004-08-18 13:57:44 +0000593- tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
594
Martin v. Löwisdeacce22004-08-18 12:46:26 +0000595- HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
596
Johannes Gijsbersc473c992004-08-18 12:40:31 +0000597- Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
598 Percivall.
599
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +0000600- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
601 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
602
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000603- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
604 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
605 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000606 than creating a new one.
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000607
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000608- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
609 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
610 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
611 and exponent.
612
613- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
614
615- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
616 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatability and atexit
617 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
618
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000619- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
620 to the readline module.
621
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000622- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000623 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
624 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000625
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +0000626- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
627 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
628 contains symlinks.
629
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +0000630- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
631 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
632
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +0000633- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
634 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
635 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
636
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000637- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
638 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
639 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
640 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
641 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
642 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
643 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
644 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
645 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
646 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
647 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
648 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
649 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
650
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +0000651- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
652
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000653Tools/Demos
654-----------
655
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000656- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
657 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
658
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +0000659- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
660
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000661Build
662-----
663
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000664- Backward incompatibility: longintrepr.h now triggers a compile-time
665 error if SHIFT (the number of bits in a Python long "digit") isn't
666 divisible by 5. This new requirement allows simple code for the new
667 5-bits-at-a-time long_pow() implementation. If necessary, the
668 restriction could be removed (by complicating long_pow(), or by
669 falling back to the 1-bit-at-a-time algorithm), but there are no
670 plans to do so.
671
Brett Cannoncc8a4f62004-08-26 01:44:07 +0000672- bug #991962: When building with --disable-toolbox-glue on Darwin no
673 attempt to build Mac-specific modules occurs.
674
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +0000675- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
676 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
677
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000678- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
679 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
680
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +0000681- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
682 GNU/k*BSD systems.
683
Hye-Shik Chang3ba5bfc2004-08-19 17:52:37 +0000684- bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings
685 found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64.
686
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000687C API
688-----
689
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000690..
691
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000692Documentation
693-------------
694
Neal Norwitz5268c392004-08-21 15:13:52 +0000695- patch #1005936, bug #1009373: fix index entries which contain
696 an underscore when viewed with Acrobat.
697
698- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if
699 it contains symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment
700 since 1992, but is now in the library reference as well.
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +0000701
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000702New platforms
703-------------
704
Hye-Shik Changf64700a2004-08-18 15:13:41 +0000705- FreeBSD 6 is now supported.
706
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000707Tests
708-----
709
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000710..
711
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000712Windows
713-------
714
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +0000715- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
716 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
717 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
718 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
719 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
720 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
721 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
722 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
723 the problem.
724
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000725Mac
726---
727
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000728..
729
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000730
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000731What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
732=================================
733
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000734*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000735
736Core and builtins
737-----------------
738
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +0000739- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
740 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
741 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
742 sensitive code.
743
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000744- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000745 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so::
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000746
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000747 @staticmethod
748 def foo(bar):
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000749
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000750 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000751
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000752- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
753 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
754 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
755 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
756 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
757 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
758 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
759 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
760 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
761 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
762 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
763
764 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
765 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
766 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
767 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
768 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
769 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
770 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
771
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +0000772- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
773 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
774
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000775- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000776 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000777
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000778- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000779 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000780 which was missing for no apparent reason.
781
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000782- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000783 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
784 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
785
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000786- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
787 types that support garbage collection.
788
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +0000789- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
790
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +0000791- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
792 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
793 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
794 Jython.
795
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000796- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
797
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +0000798- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
799 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
800
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +0000801- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
802 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
803 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +0000804
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +0000805- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
806 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
807 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
808
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000809Extension modules
810-----------------
811
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +0000812- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
813
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000814Library
815-------
816
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +0000817- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
818 TIS-620
819
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +0000820- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
821 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
822 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
823 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
824 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
825 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
826 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
827 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
828 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
829 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
830
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +0000831- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
832
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +0000833- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
834 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
835 same as when the argument is omitted).
836 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
837
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +0000838- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
839
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +0000840- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
841 schemes are offered.
842
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +0000843- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
844
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +0000845- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
846 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
847 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
848
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +0000849- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
850
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +0000851- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
852 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
853
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +0000854- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
855 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
856 when dummy_threading is being used.
857
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +0000858- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
859 from a tarfile.
860
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000861- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000862 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000863
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +0000864- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
865 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
866 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
867 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
868
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +0000869- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
870 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
871
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +0000872- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
873 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
874 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
875 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
876 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
877 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
878 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
879 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
880 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
881 by some other method in progress).
882
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000883- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
884 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
885 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +0000886
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +0000887- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
888
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +0000889- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
890 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
891 AM Kuchling.
892
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +0000893- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
894 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
895 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
896
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +0000897- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
898 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
899 instead of unsigned.
900
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000901- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +0000902 no longer part of the public API.
903
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +0000904- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
905 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
906 string methods of the same name).
907
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000908- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +0000909 SF patch 945642.
910
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000911- doctest unittest integration improvements:
912
913 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
914
915 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
916 DocTestSuites.
917
918- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
919 that provide thread-local data.
920
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000921- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
922 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
923
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000924- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
925
926- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
927 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
928 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
929
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000930- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
931
932 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
933 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
934 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000935
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000936 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
937 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
938 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
939 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
940
941 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
942 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
943
944 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
945 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
946 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
947 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
948
949 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
950 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
951 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
952 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
953 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
954
955 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
956 wrapping help output.
957
958 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
959 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
960 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000961
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000962C API
963-----
964
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000965- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
966 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
967 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
968 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
969 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
970 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
971 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
972 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
973 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
974 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
975 its visible semantics have not changed.
976
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000977- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
978 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
979
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000980Documentation
981-------------
982
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +0000983- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000984
985 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +0000986 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000987
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +0000988 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000989
990 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
991
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +0000992- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000993
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000994Tests
995-----
996
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000997- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +0000998 platforms that use the Makefile.
999
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001000- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
1001 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
1002 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
1003
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001004
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001005What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
1006=================================
1007
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +00001008*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001009
1010Core and builtins
1011-----------------
1012
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +00001013- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
1014 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
1015 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
1016 objects now (one object instead of three).
1017
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +00001018- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
1019 Windows DLLs.
1020
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +00001021- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
1022 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +00001023
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +00001024- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
1025 a new .pyc magic.
1026
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +00001027- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
1028 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
1029 be there.
1030
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +00001031- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
1032 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
1033 the LC_NUMERIC category.
1034
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +00001035- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
1036 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
1037 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
1038
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +00001039- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
1040
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +00001041- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
1042 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
1043 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +00001044
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +00001045- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
1046 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
1047
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +00001048- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
1049
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001050- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001051 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001052
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +00001053- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
1054
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +00001055- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
1056
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +00001057- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
1058 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
1059
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +00001060- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
1061 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
1062 Fixes bug #858016 .
1063
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +00001064- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
1065 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
1066 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
1067
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +00001068- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
1069 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
1070 improves their performance (about 35%).
1071
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +00001072- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
1073 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
1074 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
1075
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +00001076- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
1077 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
1078 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
1079 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
1080
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001081- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
1082 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
1083 list comprehensions, and the list contructor (when the input iterable
1084 length is not known).
1085
1086- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
1087 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +00001088 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
1089 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001090 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
1091
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +00001092- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
1093 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
1094
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +00001095- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
1096 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
1097 keyword arguments.
1098
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +00001099- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
1100 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
1101 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
1102
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +00001103- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
1104 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
1105 cases.
1106
1107- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
1108 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
1109 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
1110 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
1111 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
1112 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
1113 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
1114 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
1115 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
1116 a release build.
1117
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +00001118- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
1119 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
1120
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001121- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001122 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001123
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +00001124- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
1125 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
1126 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
1127 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
1128 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
1129 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
1130 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
1131 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
1132 destroyed.
1133
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +00001134- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
1135 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
1136 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
1137 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
1138 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
1139 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
1140 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
1141 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
1142
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +00001143- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
1144 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
1145 character other than a space.
1146
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +00001147- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
1148 by the function object or by the method object, the function
1149 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
1150 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
1151 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
1152 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
1153 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
1154 attributes with the same name.
1155
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001156- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
1157 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
1158 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
1159 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
1160 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
1161 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
1162 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
1163 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
1164 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
1165 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
1166 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
1167 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
1168 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
1169 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +00001170
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +00001171- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
1172 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
1173 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
1174 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
1175 This has been repaired.
1176
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001177- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
1178
1179- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
1180
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +00001181- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
1182 over a sequence.
1183
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001184- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001185 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001186
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +00001187- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
1188
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +00001189- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
1190 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
1191 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
1192 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
1193 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
1194 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
1195 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
1196 records with equal keys is unchanged).
1197
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +00001198- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
1199 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
1200 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
1201
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +00001202- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
1203 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
1204 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
1205 freelist.
1206
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +00001207- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
1208 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
1209
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +00001210- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
1211 number.
1212
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +00001213- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
1214 a TypeError exception.
1215
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +00001216- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
1217 820195.
1218
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +00001219- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
1220 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
1221 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
1222
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001223- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001224 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
1225 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +00001226
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +00001227- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
1228 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
1229 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
1230
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001231- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
1232 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001233 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001234
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001235- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +00001236 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
1237 the first call.
1238
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001239
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001240Extension modules
1241-----------------
1242
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +00001243- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
1244 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
1245
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001246- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
1247 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
1248 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
1249 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
1250 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
1251 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
1252 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +00001253
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +00001254- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
1255
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +00001256- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
1257
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +00001258- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
1259 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
1260
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +00001261- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
1262 fewer false positives.
1263
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +00001264- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
1265 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
1266
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001267- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +00001268 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
1269
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +00001270- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001271 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +00001272 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
Raymond Hettinger6ab78cd2004-08-29 07:50:43 +00001273 Also, array.array() and array.extend() now accept any iterable argument
1274 for repeated appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +00001275
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +00001276- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
1277 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
1278 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
1279 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
1280
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +00001281- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
1282 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
1283 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
1284 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
1285 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
1286 #897625.
1287
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +00001288- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
1289 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
1290
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +00001291- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
1292 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
1293 and pops on either side of the deque.
1294
1295- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
1296 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
1297
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +00001298- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
1299 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
1300 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
1301 other functions that expect a function argument.
1302
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +00001303- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
1304
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001305- os.getsid was added.
1306
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +00001307- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
1308 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
1309 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
1310
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +00001311- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
1312
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +00001313- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
1314
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +00001315- readline.clear_history was added.
1316
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +00001317- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
1318
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +00001319- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
1320
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +00001321- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
1322
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +00001323- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
1324
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +00001325- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
1326
1327- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
1328
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +00001329- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
1330
1331- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
1332
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001333- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
1334 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
1335 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
1336
1337- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
1338 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
1339 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
1340 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
1341 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
1342 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
1343 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
1344
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +00001345- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
1346 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
1347 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
1348 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001349
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001350- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001351 iterators from a single iterable.
1352
1353- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
1354 of raising a TypeError exception.
1355
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +00001356- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
1357 as parameter.
1358
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001359Library
1360-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001361
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +00001362- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
1363 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
1364 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001365
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +00001366- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
1367 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
1368 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +00001369
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +00001370- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +00001371
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +00001372- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
1373 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +00001374
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +00001375- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
1376 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1377
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001378- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
1379
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001380- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001381 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001382
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001383- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001384 that generate a -debuginfo.rpm
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001385
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +00001386- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
1387
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +00001388- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
1389 on cygwin and mingw32.
1390
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +00001391- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
1392
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +00001393- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
1394 module.
1395
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +00001396- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
1397 installation scheme for all platforms.
1398
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001399- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +00001400 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001401
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001402- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
1403 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
1404 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
1405
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +00001406- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
1407 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
1408 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
1409
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +00001410- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
1411
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +00001412- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
1413
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +00001414- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
1415 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
1416
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +00001417- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
1418 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
1419 type pattern with the same value exists.
1420
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +00001421- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
1422 when run from the command prompt).
1423
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001424- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
1425 not taken into consideration when caching value.
1426
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +00001427- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
1428 default sort).
1429
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +00001430- Added global runctx function to profile module
1431
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +00001432- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
1433
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +00001434- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
1435
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +00001436- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
1437
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001438- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +00001439 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
1440 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
1441 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
1442 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
1443 accordingly.
1444
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +00001445- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
1446 decoding standards.
1447
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +00001448- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
1449 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
1450 called for all requests.
1451
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +00001452- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
1453 they are passed to the compiler.
1454
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +00001455- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
1456 indent, width and depth.
1457
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +00001458- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
1459 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
1460
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +00001461- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
1462 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
1463
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +00001464- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
1465
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +00001466- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
1467
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001468- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
1469
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +00001470- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
1471 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
1472
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +00001473- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +00001474 for better performance.
1475
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001476- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +00001477
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +00001478- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
1479 a string).
1480
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +00001481- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
1482
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +00001483- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
1484
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +00001485- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
1486
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +00001487- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
1488
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +00001489- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
1490 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
1491 list of fieldnames.
1492
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +00001493- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
1494 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
1495
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +00001496- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
1497
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +00001498- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
1499 empty lists.
1500
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +00001501- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
1502 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
1503 and shelves.
1504
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +00001505- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
1506 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
1507
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001508- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +00001509 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
1510 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001511
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +00001512- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
1513 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +00001514 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +00001515
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001516- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +00001517 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
1518 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
1519
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001520- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
1521 and removed in Py2.4.
1522
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +00001523- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
1524
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +00001525- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
1526
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001527Tools/Demos
1528-----------
1529
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +00001530- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
1531 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
1532
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +00001533- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
1534
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +00001535- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
1536 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
1537 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
1538 destination in situations where both files are given.
1539
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +00001540- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
1541 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
1542 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
1543 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
1544
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +00001545- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
1546
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +00001547- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
1548 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
1549 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
1550 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
1551 now.
1552
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001553- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
1554 in effect
1555
1556- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
1557 C-c C-h
1558
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +00001559- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
1560 -d option was given.
1561
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001562Build
1563-----
1564
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +00001565- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
1566 build under OS X.
1567
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +00001568- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
1569 --enable-profiling.
1570
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +00001571- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
1572 is configured --with-tsc.
1573
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +00001574- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
1575 on AMD64.
1576
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +00001577- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
1578 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
1579
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00001580- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
1581 removed.
1582
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00001583- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
1584 supported (see PEP 11).
1585
1586- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
1587
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00001588- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
1589
1590- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
1591 (see PEP 11).
1592
1593- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
1594 sizeof(char) must be 1.
1595
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001596C API
1597-----
1598
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00001599- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
1600 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
1601 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
1602
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001603- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
1604 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
1605 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
1606 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
1607
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00001608- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
1609 generator objects.
1610
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001611- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
1612 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00001613 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
1614 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001615
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00001616- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
1617 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
1618
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00001619- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
1620 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
1621 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
1622 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
1623 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
1624
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00001625- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
1626 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
1627 about 10% faster.
1628
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00001629- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
1630 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
1631
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00001632- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
1633 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
1634 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
1635 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
1636
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001637Windows
1638-------
1639
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00001640- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
1641 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
1642 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
1643 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
1644
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00001645- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
1646 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
1647 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
1648
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001649
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001650What's New in Python 2.3 final?
1651===============================
1652
1653*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
1654
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001655IDLE
1656----
1657
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00001658- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
1659 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
1660 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
1661 context-menu actions.
1662
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001663- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
1664 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
1665 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
1666 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
1667 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
1668 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
1669 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
1670 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
1671 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
1672
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001673
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001674What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
1675=============================================
1676
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00001677*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001678
1679Core and builtins
1680-----------------
1681
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001682- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001683 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001684 comment at the end are still unsupported.
1685
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001686Extension modules
1687-----------------
1688
1689- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
1690 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
1691 than once. This has been fixed.
1692
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00001693- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
1694 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
1695 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
1696 call.
1697
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001698- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
1699
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001700Library
1701-------
1702
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001703- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
1704 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
1705
1706- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
1707 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
1708 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
1709 restored.
1710
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001711IDLE
1712----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001713
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001714- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001715
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001716Build
1717-----
1718
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001719- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
1720 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
1721
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001722C API
1723-----
1724
1725Windows
1726-------
1727
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00001728- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
1729 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
1730
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001731- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
1732
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001733Mac
1734---
1735
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001736- Various fixes to pimp.
1737
1738- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
1739
1740- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
1741 more problems than it solves.
1742
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001743
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001744What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
1745=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001746
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00001747*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
1748
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001749Core and builtins
1750-----------------
1751
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00001752- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
1753 by sys.setcheckinterval().
1754
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001755- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
1756 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001757 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001758
1759- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
1760 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
1761 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001762 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001763
1764- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
1765 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001766
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001767- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
1768 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
1769 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
1770
1771- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001772 770247.
1773
1774- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001775
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001776Extension modules
1777-----------------
1778
1779- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
1780 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
1781
1782- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
1783
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001784- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
1785
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00001786- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
1787 contained within the _strptime module.
1788
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001789- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
1790 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
1791
1792- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001793 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
1794
1795- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
1796 the find_class attribute, if present.
1797
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001798- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001799
1800 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
1801 (SF bug 763298).
1802
1803 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00001804 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
1805 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
1806 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001807
1808 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
1809
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001810Library
1811-------
1812
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001813- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
1814
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00001815- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
1816 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
1817 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
1818 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
1819 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
1820 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
1821 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
1822 or Tester().
1823
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001824- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
1825 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
1826 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
1827 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
1828 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
1829 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
1830 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
1831 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
1832 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00001833
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001834 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00001835
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00001836- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
1837 weren't before was an oversight.
1838
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001839- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
1840 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
1841
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00001842- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
1843 when there are no lines.
1844
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00001845- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
1846 which could occur with Tk 8.4
1847
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001848- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
1849 to child processes.
1850
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001851- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
1852
1853- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
1854
1855- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
1856 xmlrpclib.
1857
1858- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
1859 responses.
1860
1861- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
1862 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
1863
1864- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
1865 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
1866 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
1867
1868- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
1869 used as patterns.
1870
1871- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
1872 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
1873 than Tk 8.3.
1874
1875- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
1876
1877- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001878
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001879Tools/Demos
1880-----------
1881
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001882- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
1883
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00001884- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
1885
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001886- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001887
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001888Build
1889-----
1890
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001891- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
1892
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001893- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
1894
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001895- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
1896 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001897
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001898- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
1899 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
1900 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001901
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001902C API
1903-----
1904
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001905- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
1906 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
1907
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001908Windows
1909-------
1910
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001911- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
1912 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
1913 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
1914 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
1915 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
1916 Python exception ::
1917
1918 thread.error: can't start new thread
1919
1920 is raised now.
1921
1922- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
1923 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
1924 instead of from DLL teardown.
1925
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001926Mac
1927---
1928
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001929- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00001930 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001931 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
1932 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
1933 the executable in the bundle.
1934
1935- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001936
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00001937- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
1938
1939- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
1940 on Panther.
1941
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001942What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
1943================================
1944
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001945*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001946
1947Core and builtins
1948-----------------
1949
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00001950- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
1951 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
1952 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
1953 with the -i option.
1954
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00001955- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
1956 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
1957
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001958- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
1959 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
1960
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00001961- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
1962 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
1963 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
1964 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
1965 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
1966 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
1967 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
1968 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
1969 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
1970 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
1971 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
1972 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
1973 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00001974
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001975- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
1976 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
1977 embedded in a lambda expression.
1978
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00001979- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
1980 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
1981 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
1982 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
1983 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
1984
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001985- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
1986 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
1987 matches the restriction on classic classes.
1988
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00001989- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
1990 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
1991
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00001992- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
1993 It's writable again.
1994
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001995- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
1996 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
1997 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001998 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001999
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002000- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
2001 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
2002 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
2003
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002004Extension modules
2005-----------------
2006
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00002007- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
2008 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
2009
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002010- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
2011 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
2012 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
2013 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
2014
2015- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
2016 collection.
2017
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00002018- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
2019 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
2020 unique within a single program run.
2021
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00002022- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
2023 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
2024
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00002025- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
2026 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
2027
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00002028- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
2029 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00002030
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00002031- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
2032
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00002033- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
2034 Fixes SF bug #730685.
2035
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00002036- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
2037 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
2038 for many BSD-derived systems.
2039
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002040
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002041Library
2042-------
2043
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00002044- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
2045 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
2046 primary ones:
2047
2048 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
2049 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
2050 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
2051
2052 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
2053 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
2054 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
2055 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
2056 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
2057 framework features (which doctest lacks).
2058
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00002059- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
2060 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
2061 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
2062 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
2063 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
2064 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
2065 argument.
2066
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002067- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
2068 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
2069 in the archive.
2070
2071- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
2072 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
2073
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00002074- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
2075 569574).
2076
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002077- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
2078 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
2079 no more.
2080
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002081- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
2082 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
2083 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
2084 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
2085 code coverage.
2086
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002087- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
2088 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
2089 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002090 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
2091 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002092
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002093- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
2094 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
2095 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00002096 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002097
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00002098- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
2099
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00002100- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
2101 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
2102 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
2103 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
2104
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00002105- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
2106 handling.
2107
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00002108- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
2109 __doc__ of data descriptors.
2110
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00002111- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
2112 in socket.py.
2113
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00002114- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
2115
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00002116- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
2117 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
2118 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
2119 opener with proxy support.
2120
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002121- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
2122
2123- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
2124
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002125Tools/Demos
2126-----------
2127
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00002128- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
2129
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002130- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
2131
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002132- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
2133 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00002134
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00002135- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
2136 files.
2137
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002138Build
2139-----
2140
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002141- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00002142 different root directory.
2143
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002144C API
2145-----
2146
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00002147- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
2148 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
2149 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
2150 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
2151 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
2152 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
2153 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
2154 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
2155 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
2156 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
2157
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002158- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
2159 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
2160 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
2161 from Python.
2162
2163
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002164New platforms
2165-------------
2166
2167None this time.
2168
2169Tests
2170-----
2171
2172- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
2173 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
2174
2175Windows
2176-------
2177
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00002178- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
2179
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00002180- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
2181 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
2182 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
2183 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
2184 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
2185 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
2186 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
2187 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
2188 that's what it's for.
2189
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002190Mac
2191---
2192
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00002193- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
2194 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
2195 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
2196 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00002197- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
2198 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
2199- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002200
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002201SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
2202------------------------------------
2203
2204430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
2205598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
2206622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
2207661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
2208683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
2209697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
2210713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
2211724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
2212727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
2213729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
2214730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
2215731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
2216732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
2217733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
2218735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
2219740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
2220744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
2221745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
2222747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
2223749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
2224751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
2225753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
2226755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
2227757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
2228760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
2229
2230
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002231What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
2232================================
2233
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00002234*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002235
2236Core and builtins
2237-----------------
2238
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00002239- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
2240 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
2241
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00002242- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
2243 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
2244 and cannot be strings).
2245
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00002246- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
2247 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
2248 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
2249 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
2250
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00002251- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
2252 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
2253 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
2254 Python itself.
2255
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00002256- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
2257 the referenced object, if it has one.
2258
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00002259- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
2260 the thread started at
2261 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
2262
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00002263- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
2264 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
2265 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
2266 placed on a list index.
2267
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00002268- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
2269 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
2270 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
2271 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
2272
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002273- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
2274 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
2275 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
2276 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
2277 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
2278 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
2279 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
2280
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00002281- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
2282 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
2283 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
2284 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
2285 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
2286
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00002287- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
2288 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00002289
2290- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
2291 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
2292 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
2293 #693195.)
2294
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00002295- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
2296 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002297
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002298- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00002299 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002300 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
2301 interpreter executions, would fail.
2302
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002303- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00002304 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00002305 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002306
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002307Extension modules
2308-----------------
2309
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00002310- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
2311 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
2312 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
2313 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
2314
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00002315- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
2316 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
2317
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00002318- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
2319 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
2320 and Greg Chapman.)
2321
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002322- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
2323 recursively.
2324
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00002325- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00002326 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
2327 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
2328 leaks.
2329
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00002330- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
2331
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00002332- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
2333 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
2334 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
2335 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
2336 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
2337 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
2338 #705836.
2339
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002340- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00002341 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
2342
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00002343- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
2344 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
2345 See SF bug #692416.
2346
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00002347- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
2348 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
2349
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00002350- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
2351 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
2352 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002353
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002354- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00002355 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
2356 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
2357
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00002358- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
2359 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
2360 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
2361 timeouts to work properly.
2362
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002363Library
2364-------
2365
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002366- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
2367 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
2368 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
2369 future release.
2370
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00002371- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
2372 for querying platform dependent features.
2373
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00002374- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00002375
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00002376- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
2377 pickle protocol versions.
2378
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00002379- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
2380 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
2381 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
2382
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00002383- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
2384
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00002385- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
2386 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
2387 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
2388 modules.
2389
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00002390- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
2391 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
2392 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
2393
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002394- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
2395 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
2396
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00002397- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
2398 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
2399 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
2400
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002401- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00002402 MS Office extensions.
2403
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00002404- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
2405 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
2406
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00002407- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
2408 execution speed of expressions and statements.
2409
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002410- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
2411 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
2412 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
2413 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
2414 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
2415 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
2416
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002417- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
2418 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
2419 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002420
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00002421- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
2422 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
2423 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
2424
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00002425- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
2426
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00002427- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
2428 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
2429 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
2430
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002431Tools/Demos
2432-----------
2433
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00002434- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
2435 See the module docstring for details.
2436
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002437Build
2438-----
2439
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00002440- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
2441 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002442
2443C API
2444-----
2445
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002446- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
2447
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00002448- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
2449 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
2450 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
2451
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002452- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
2453 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002454
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002455 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
2456 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
2457 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00002458
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00002459- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00002460 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
2461
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00002462- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
2463 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
2464 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002465
2466New platforms
2467-------------
2468
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002469None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002470
2471Tests
2472-----
2473
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00002474- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
2475 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002476
2477Windows
2478-------
2479
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00002480- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
2481 function.
2482
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00002483- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
2484 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002485
2486Mac
2487---
2488
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002489- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
2490 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00002491
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00002492- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
2493 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002494
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00002495- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
2496 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
2497 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002498
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002499- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00002500 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
2501 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002502
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002503- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
2504 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002505
2506
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002507What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
2508=================================
2509
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002510*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002511
2512Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002513-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002514
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00002515- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
2516 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
2517 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
2518
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00002519- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
2520 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
2521 (SF patch #664376.)
2522
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002523- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
2524 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
2525 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
2526 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
2527 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
2528 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00002529 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002530
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002531- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
2532 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
2533 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
2534 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002535 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002536
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00002537- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
2538 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
2539 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
2540 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
2541 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
2542 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
2543 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
2544 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
2545 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
2546 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
2547 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
2548
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00002549- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
2550 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
2551 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
2552 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
2553 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
2554 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
2555
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00002556- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
2557 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
2558
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00002559- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
2560 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
2561 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
2562 case.)
2563
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00002564- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
2565 passed as unicode strings.
2566
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00002567- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
2568 See SF bug #683467.
2569
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00002570- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
2571 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
2572
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00002573- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
2574
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00002575- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
2576
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00002577- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
2578 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
2579 arguments.
2580
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00002581- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
2582 See SF bug #667147.
2583
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002584- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002585 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002586 See SF bug #676155.
2587
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002588- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002589 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002590 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
2591 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
2592 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
2593 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
2594 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
2595 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002596
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002597Extension modules
2598-----------------
2599
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002600- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
2601 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2602 tp_as_number pointer.
2603
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002604- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
2605 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
2606 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
2607 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
2608 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
2609
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002610- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
2611
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00002612- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
2613
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002614- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00002615 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002616 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
2617 patch #678531.)
2618
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00002619- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
2620 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
2621
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00002622- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
2623 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
2624
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00002625- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
2626
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00002627- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
2628 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
2629 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
2630
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002631- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
2632
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002633- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
2634 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
2635
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002636- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002637
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002638- datetime changes:
2639
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00002640 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
2641
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00002642 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
2643 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
2644 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
2645 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
2646 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
2647 now.
2648
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002649 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002650 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
2651 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002652
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002653 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002654 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002655 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
2656 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
2657 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
2658 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002659
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002660 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
2661 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
2662 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002663 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
2664
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002665 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
2666 by a later example coded by Guido.
2667
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002668 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002669 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
2670 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
2671 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002672 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
2673 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
2674
2675 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
2676 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
2677 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
2678 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
2679 tzinfo subclass instance.
2680
2681 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
2682 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
2683 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
2684 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
2685 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
2686 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
2687 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
2688 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002689
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002690 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
2691 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
2692 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
2693 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
2694 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002695 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
2696
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002697 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002698
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002699 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
2700 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
2701 as a naive datetime object.
2702
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00002703 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
2704 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
2705 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
2706
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00002707 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
2708 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
2709 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
2710 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
2711 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
2712 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
2713 comparison.
2714
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002715 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
2716 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
2717 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
2718 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002719 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002720
2721 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002722
2723 and ::
2724
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002725 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
2726
2727 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
2728 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
2729 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
2730 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
2731
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00002732 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
2733 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
2734 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
2735 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
2736 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
2737
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002738 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
2739 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00002740 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
2741 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002742
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002743Library
2744-------
2745
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002746- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
2747 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
2748
2749- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
2750 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
2751 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
2752 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
2753 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
2754 See PEP 307 for details.
2755
2756- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
2757 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
2758
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002759- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
2760 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002761 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002762 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
2763 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002764 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002765
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00002766- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
2767 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
2768
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002769- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
2770 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
2771 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
2772
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00002773- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
2774
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00002775- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
2776 exception.
2777
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00002778- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
2779 class.
2780
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00002781- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
2782 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
2783 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
2784
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00002785- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
2786 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
2787
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002788- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00002789 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
2790 See SF bug #659228.
2791
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00002792- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
2793 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
2794 See SF patch #651082.
2795
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00002796- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002797
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00002798- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
2799 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
2800
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002801- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002802 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002803
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00002804- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
2805 DOS paths from other platforms.
2806
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002807Tools/Demos
2808-----------
2809
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002810- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
2811 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
2812 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
2813 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
2814 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
2815 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
2816 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
2817 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
2818 example:
2819
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00002820 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
2821 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002822
2823 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
2824
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002825
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002826Build
2827-----
2828
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002829- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
2830 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
2831 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002832 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
2833
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002834 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
2835
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00002836- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
2837 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
2838 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
2839 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
2840 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
2841 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
2842 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
2843 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
2844 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
2845
2846- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
2847 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
2848 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
2849 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
2850
2851- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
2852 from the Tools/scripts directory.
2853
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002854C API
2855-----
2856
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002857- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
2858 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00002859
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002860- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
2861 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2862 tp_as_number pointer.
2863
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00002864- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
2865 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
2866 (SF #681367)
2867
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00002868- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
2869 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
2870 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
2871 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00002872
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002873Tests
2874-----
2875
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00002876- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002877 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
2878 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
2879 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
2880 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
2881 pydoc.)
2882
2883- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
2884
2885- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002886
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002887Windows
2888-------
2889
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002890- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
2891 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
2892 time).
2893
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00002894- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
2895 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
2896
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002897- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
2898 release without strong cryptography.
2899
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002900- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002901 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002902
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002903- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
2904 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
2905
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002906Mac
2907---
2908
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002909- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
2910 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002911
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00002912- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
2913 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
2914 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002915
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002916- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
2917 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002918
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002919- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
2920 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
2921 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
2922 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002923
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002924- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00002925 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
2926 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
2927 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002928
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002929
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002930What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002931=================================
2932
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00002933*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002934
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002935Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002936--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002937
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00002938- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
2939
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002940- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
2941 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002942 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002943 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002944 a different meaning than before.
2945
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002946- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002947 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002948 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002949
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002950- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002951 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002952 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002953
2954- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
2955 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
2956 and deallocation.
2957
2958- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
2959 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
2960
2961- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
2962 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
2963 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
2964 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
2965 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
2966
2967- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
2968 now detected by the garbage collector.
2969
2970- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
2971 [SF bug 519621]
2972
2973- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
2974 identifier.
2975
2976- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
2977 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
2978 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
2979 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
2980 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
2981 [SF bug 563060]
2982
2983- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
2984 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
2985 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
2986 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
2987 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
2988
2989- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
2990 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
2991 not called. [SF bug #537450]
2992
2993- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
2994
2995- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
2996 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
2997 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
2998 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
2999 state of the slots would be lost.)
3000
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003001Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003002-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003003
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003004- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003005 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
3006 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
3007 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
3008 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003009 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
3010 Jython 2.1.
3011
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003012- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003013 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003014 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
3015 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
3016 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
3017 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
3018 these, see PEP 302.
3019
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003020- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
3021 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
3022 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
3023
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00003024- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
3025 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
3026 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
3027
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00003028- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
3029 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
3030 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
3031
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003032- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
3033 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
3034 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
3035 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
3036 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
3037 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
3038 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
3039 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
3040 releases or implementations.
3041
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003042- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003043 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
3044 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003045
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00003046- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
3047 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
3048
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003049- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
3050 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
3051 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
3052
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00003053- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
3054 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
3055
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003056- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
3057 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003058 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
3059 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003060
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00003061- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
3062 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
3063 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
3064 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
3065 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
3066
3067 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
3068 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
3069 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
3070 pattern.
3071
3072 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
3073 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
3074 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
3075 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
3076
3077 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
3078 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
3079 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
3080 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
3081 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
3082 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
3083
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00003084- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
3085 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
3086 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
3087 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
3088 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
3089 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
3090 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
3091 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00003092
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00003093- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
3094 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
3095 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
3096 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
3097 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003098 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
3099 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
3100 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
3101 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
3102 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
3103 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
3104 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003105
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003106- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
3107 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
3108
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00003109- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
3110 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
3111 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
3112 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
3113 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
3114 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
3115 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
3116 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
3117 to Zack Weinberg!
3118
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00003119- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
3120 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
3121 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
3122 type. This has been fixed now.
3123
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00003124- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
3125 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
3126 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
3127
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003128- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
3129 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
3130 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
3131 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
3132 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
3133 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
3134 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
3135 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00003136 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003137
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00003138- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
3139 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
3140 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00003141
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003142- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
3143 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
3144 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
3145 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
3146 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
3147 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
3148 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
3149 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003150 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003151 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
3152 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
3153
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00003154- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
3155 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
3156 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
3157 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
3158 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
3159 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
3160 this.)
3161
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003162- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
3163 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003164 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003165 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003166 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
3167 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00003168 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
3169 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003170
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003171- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
3172 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
3173 currently running.
3174
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00003175- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
3176 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
3177 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
3178 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
3179
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00003180- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
3181 as directory names.
3182
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00003183- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
3184 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
3185
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00003186- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
3187 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
3188
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003189- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00003190 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
3191 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003192
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00003193- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
3194 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
3195 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
3196 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
3197 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
3198
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003199- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
3200 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
3201 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
3202 removed.
3203
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00003204- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
3205 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
3206 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
3207
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00003208- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
3209 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
3210 to __debug__.
3211
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00003212- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
3213 string to the left with zeros. For example,
3214 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
3215
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00003216- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
3217 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
3218 deprecated now.
3219
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00003220- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
3221 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
3222 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00003223
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00003224- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
3225 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
3226 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
3227 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
3228 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00003229
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00003230- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
3231 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
3232
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003233- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
3234 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
3235 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003236 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003237 is backward compatible.
3238
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00003239- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
3240 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
3241 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
3242 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
3243 could access a pointer to freed memory.
3244
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00003245- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
3246 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
3247 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
3248 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
3249 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
3250 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003251
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00003252- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
3253 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
3254
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003255- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
3256 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
3257
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003258- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
3259 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
3260 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
3261 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
3262 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
3263
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00003264- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
3265 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
3266 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
3267
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003268- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00003269 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
3270
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00003271- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
3272 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
3273 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00003274
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00003275- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
3276 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
3277
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00003278- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
3279 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
3280 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
3281
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00003282- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
3283
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003284Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003285-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003286
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00003287- Added three operators to the operator module:
3288 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
3289 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
3290 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
3291
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00003292- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
3293
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003294- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
3295 archives.
3296
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003297- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
3298 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
3299 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
3300
3301 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
3302
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003303- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
3304 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
3305 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00003306 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003307
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00003308- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
3309 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
3310 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
3311 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003312 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
3313 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
3314 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
3315 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00003316
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00003317- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
3318 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00003319
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00003320- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
3321
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00003322- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
3323 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
3324
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00003325- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
3326 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
3327 supported.
3328
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00003329- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
3330
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00003331- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
3332 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00003333
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00003334- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
3335 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
3336
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003337- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
3338
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003339- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
3340 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
3341
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00003342- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
3343 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
3344 functions but callable type objects.
3345
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003346- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003347 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003348 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003349
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00003350- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
3351 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00003352
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00003353- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
3354 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00003355
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00003356- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
3357 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
3358 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
3359 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
3360
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00003361- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
3362 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00003363
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00003364- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
3365 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
3366 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
3367 and __imul__.
3368
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00003369- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00003370 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
3371 is called.
3372
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00003373- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
3374 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
3375 interpreter was compiled.
3376
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003377- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
3378 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
3379 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003380 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003381 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
3382 1, not 2.
3383
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00003384- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
3385 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
3386 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
3387 limit.
3388
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00003389- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
3390 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
3391 bug #623464.
3392
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00003393- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
3394 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
3395 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
3396 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
3397
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003398Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003399-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003400
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00003401- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
3402
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00003403- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
3404 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
3405 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
3406 with Python 2.3a2.
3407
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00003408- os.path exposes getctime.
3409
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003410- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003411 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003412 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003413 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003414 unit tests of floating point results.
3415
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00003416- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
3417 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
3418 has been increased.
3419
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003420- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
3421 executed.
3422
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00003423- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
3424 postinstallation script.
3425
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00003426- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
3427 test the current module.
3428
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003429- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00003430 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
3431 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
3432 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
3433 this behavior needs to be controlled.
3434
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003435- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003436 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003437 Ward's Optik package.
3438
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003439- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
3440 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
3441 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
3442 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
3443
3444- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
3445 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003446 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003447
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00003448- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
3449 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
3450 shelf are binary pickles.
3451
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00003452- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
3453 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
3454
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00003455- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
3456 modules are iterators now.
3457
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00003458- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
3459 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
3460 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
3461 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
3462 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
3463 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003464
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00003465- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
3466 with their entity value.
3467
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00003468- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
3469
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003470- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
3471 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00003472
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003473- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
3474 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003475 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00003476
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00003477- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
3478 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
3479 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
3480 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
3481 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
3482 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
3483 main():
3484
3485 import locale
3486 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
3487
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00003488- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
3489 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
3490
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00003491- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
3492 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
3493 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
3494 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
3495 to the new standard.
3496
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00003497- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
3498 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
3499 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
3500 an extension to the database.
3501
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003502- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
3503 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
3504 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
3505 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00003506 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003507
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003508- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003509 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003510
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003511- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
3512 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
3513 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
3514 bounded integers.
3515
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00003516- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
3517 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
3518 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
3519 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
3520 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
3521 in existence.
3522
3523 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
3524 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
3525 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
3526 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
3527 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
3528 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
3529
3530 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
3531 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
3532 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
3533 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
3534
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00003535- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
3536 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
3537 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
3538
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00003539- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
3540
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003541- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
3542 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
3543 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
3544 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
3545
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00003546- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
3547 argument.
3548
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00003549- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
3550 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
3551 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
3552 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
3553 [SF patch 560794].
3554
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003555- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
3556 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
3557 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003558 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
3559 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
3560 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003561
3562- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
3563 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00003564
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00003565- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
3566 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
3567 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
3568 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00003569
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00003570- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
3571 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
3572 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
3573 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
3574 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
3575
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003576- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00003577
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00003578- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
3579
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00003580- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
3581 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
3582 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
3583 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
3584 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
3585 identical to None.
3586
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00003587- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
3588 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
3589 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
3590 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
3591 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
3592 results now.
3593
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00003594- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
3595 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
3596
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003597- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
3598 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
3599 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
3600 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
3601 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
3602 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
3603 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
3604 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
3605
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00003606- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
3607
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00003608- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
3609 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
3610
3611- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
3612 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
3613 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
3614 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
3615 and other systems.
3616
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003617- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
3618 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
3619 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
3620 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 +00003621 work well with these.
3622
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00003623- compileall now supports quiet operation.
3624
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003625- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00003626 connections.
3627
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00003628- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
3629 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
3630 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
3631
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00003632- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
3633 sets
3634
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00003635- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
3636 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
3637 name.
3638
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00003639- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
3640 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
3641 passed in.
3642
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003643- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00003644 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00003645 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
3646 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00003647
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00003648- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
3649
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00003650- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
3651
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00003652- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
3653 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
3654 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
3655
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003656- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
3657 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
3658 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
3659 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00003660 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003661
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003662- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003663 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003664 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003665
3666- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
3667 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
3668 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
3669
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003670- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00003671 the value of its expression argument.
3672
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003673- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
3674 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
3675 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
3676
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00003677- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
3678 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
3679 skipstone browser was included.
3680
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00003681- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
3682 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
3683
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003684Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003685-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003686
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00003687- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
3688 names in addition to accepting file names.
3689
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00003690- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
3691 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
3692 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
3693 still used and useful.)
3694
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00003695- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
3696 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
3697 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
3698 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00003699
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00003700- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
3701 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
3702 the generated binary.
3703
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003704Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003705-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003706
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00003707- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
3708
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003709- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
3710 except in the hands of experts.
3711
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003712- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003713 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
3714 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
3715 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00003716
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00003717- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
3718 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
3719 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
3720 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
3721 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
3722 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
3723 builds.
3724
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003725- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
3726 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
3727 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
3728 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
3729 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
3730 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
3731 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
3732 new type.
3733
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00003734- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00003735
3736 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
3737 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
3738 positive infinities.
3739
3740 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
3741 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
3742 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
3743 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
3744 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
3745 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
3746 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
3747
3748 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
3749
3750 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
3751
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00003752- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
3753 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
3754 size of the executable.
3755
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003756- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
3757 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
3758 configure script. On other platforms, remove
3759 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00003760
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00003761- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
3762
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00003763- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
3764 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
3765 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00003766
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00003767- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
3768 well as Unix.
3769
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00003770- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
3771 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
3772 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
3773 modules in the README file for details.
3774
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003775C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003776-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003777
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003778- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
3779 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003780 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00003781 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003782 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003783
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003784- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
3785 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
3786 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
3787 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
3788 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
3789 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003790 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003791 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
3792 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
3793 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
3794 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
3795 aligned.)
3796
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00003797- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
3798 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
3799 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
3800
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003801- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
3802 level.
3803
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00003804- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
3805 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
3806 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
3807 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
3808 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
3809
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00003810- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
3811 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
3812 code.
3813
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00003814- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
3815 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
3816 adjusting for negative indices.
3817
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003818- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
3819 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
3820 object.
3821
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00003822- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
3823 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
3824 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
3825
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003826- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
3827 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00003828
3829- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
3830
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00003831- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
3832 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
3833 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
3834 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
3835
3836- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
3837
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00003838- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003839
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003840- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00003841 without going through the buffer API.
3842
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003843- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00003844
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00003845- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
3846 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
3847 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
3848 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
3849
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003850- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
3851 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
3852
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003853- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003854 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
3855
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003856New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003857-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003858
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00003859- OpenVMS is now supported.
3860
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00003861- AtheOS is now supported.
3862
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00003863- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
3864
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00003865- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
3866
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003867Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003868-----
3869
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00003870- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
3871 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
3872 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003873
3874Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003875-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003876
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003877- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
3878 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
3879 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
3880 bugs.
3881 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003882 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00003883 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
3884 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003885 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003886
3887- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00003888 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003889
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00003890- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
3891 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
3892
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003893- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
3894 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003895 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003896 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
3897
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00003898- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
3899 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
3900 use files" uninstall option).
3901
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00003902- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
3903
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003904- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
3905 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
3906
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003907- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
3908 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
3909 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
3910
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003911- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
3912 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
3913 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
3914 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
3915 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003916 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
3917 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
3918 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003919
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003920- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003921 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003922 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
3923 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
3924 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
3925 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
3926 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
3927 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
3928 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
3929 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
3930 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
3931 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
3932 work around.
3933
3934- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
3935 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
3936 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
3937 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
3938 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
3939 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
3940 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
3941 specified with O_CREAT too).
3942
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003943Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003944----
3945
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003946- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003947
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00003948- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
3949 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
3950 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
3951
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003952- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
3953 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
3954 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
3955
3956- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
3957 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
3958 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
3959 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
3960 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
3961 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
3962 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
3963 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003964
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00003965- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
3966 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
3967 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003968
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003969- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
3970 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
3971 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
3972 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
3973 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003974
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003975- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
3976 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
3977 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003978
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003979- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
3980 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003981
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003982- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
3983 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
3984 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
3985 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
3986 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003987
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003988- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
3989 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
3990 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
3991
3992- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
3993 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
3994 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003995
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003996- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
3997 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
3998 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
3999 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004000 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004001
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004002- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
4003 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004004
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004005- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
4006 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00004007
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004008- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00004009 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004010 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
4011 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004012
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00004013
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004014What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004015===============================
4016
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004017*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
4018
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004019Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004020--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004021
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004022- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
4023 with a custom metaclass.
4024
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004025Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004026-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004027
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004028- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
4029 are proxies.
4030
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004031Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004032-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004033
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004034- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
4035 very short strings.
4036
4037- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
4038 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
4039 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
4040 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
4041 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
4042
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004043Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004044-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004045
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004046- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
4047 close or delete time).
4048
4049- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
4050 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
4051
4052- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
4053
4054- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004055 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004056
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004057Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004058-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004059
4060Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004061-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004062
4063C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004064-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004065
4066New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004067-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004068
4069Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004070-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004071
4072Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004073-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004074
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004075- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
4076
4077- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
4078 instances are deleted at process exit time.
4079
4080- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
4081 deleted at process exit time.
4082
4083- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
4084 in backslash.
4085
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004086Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004087----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004088
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004089- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
4090 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
4091 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
4092
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004093
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00004094What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004095===========================
4096
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004097*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
4098
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004099Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004100--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004101
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004102- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
4103 been extensively updated. See
4104
4105 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
4106
4107 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
4108
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00004109- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
4110 deleted!
4111
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00004112- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
4113 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
4114 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
4115 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
4116 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
4117
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004118- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
4119
4120 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
4121 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
4122
4123 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
4124 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
4125 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
4126 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
4127 supported anyway.
4128
4129 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
4130 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
4131
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00004132- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
4133 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
4134 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
4135 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
4136 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004137
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00004138- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
4139 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
4140 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
4141
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004142Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004143-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004144
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004145- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
4146 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
4147 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
4148 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
4149 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
4150 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00004151 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
4152 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
4153 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
4154 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004155
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00004156- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
4157 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
4158 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
4159
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004160Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004161-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004162
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004163- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
4164
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004165Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004166-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004167
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00004168- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
4169 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
4170 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
4171 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
4172 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
4173 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
4174
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00004175- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
4176
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00004177- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
4178
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00004179- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
4180
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004181- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
4182 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
4183 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
4184
4185- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
4186
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004187Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004188-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004189
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004190- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
4191 off a search on Google.
4192
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004193Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004194-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004195
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004196- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
4197 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
4198 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
4199 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
4200 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
4201 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
4202 other platforms should do likewise.
4203
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00004204- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
4205 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
4206 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
4207
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004208C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004209-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004210
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004211- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
4212 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
4213 producing key-value pairs.
4214
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004215- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004216 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004217 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
4218 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
4219 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
4220 previously went unchallenged.
4221
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004222New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004223-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004224
4225Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004226-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004227
4228Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004229-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004230
4231Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004232----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004233
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00004234- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
4235 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004236
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004237- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
4238 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
4239 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
4240 home.
4241
4242
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004243What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004244===========================
4245
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004246*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
4247
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004248Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004249--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004250
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004251- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
4252 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004253
4254 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004255 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004256
4257 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
4258 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004259 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004260 This needs to be documented.
4261
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00004262- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
4263 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
4264
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00004265- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
4266 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
4267 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
4268
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00004269- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
4270 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
4271
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004272- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
4273 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
4274 class forbids it).
4275
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00004276- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
4277 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
4278 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
4279
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004280- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
4281
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004282Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004283-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004284
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004285- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
4286 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004287 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004288
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004289- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
4290 (like 1 + '').
4291
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004292Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004293-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004294
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004295- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
4296 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
4297 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
4298 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004299 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004300 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
4301
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00004302- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
4303 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
4304 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
4305 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
4306
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004307- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
4308 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004309 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
4310 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
4311 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004312
4313- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
4314 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004315
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00004316- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
4317 bytes on its input.
4318
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004319Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004320-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004321
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004322- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00004323 convenience function.
4324
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004325- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
4326 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
4327 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004328 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
4329 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
4330 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
4331 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
4332 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
4333 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004334
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00004335- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
4336 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
4337 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
4338 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
4339
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00004340- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
4341 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
4342 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
4343
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004344- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
4345 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
4346 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
4347 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
4348
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004349- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
4350 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004351 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004352 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
4353 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
4354 new -l and -e options.
4355
4356- statcache is now deprecated.
4357
4358- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
4359 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004360 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004361 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
4362 time properly taken into account.
4363
4364- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
4365 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
4366 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
4367 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
4368
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004369Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004370-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004371
4372Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004373-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004374
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004375- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
4376 is built with libdb3 if available.
4377
4378- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
4379
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004380C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004381-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004382
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00004383- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
4384 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
4385 PySequence_Size().
4386
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004387- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
4388
4389- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
4390 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
4391 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
4392
4393- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
4394 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
4395
4396- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
4397 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
4398
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004399New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004400-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004401
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004402- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
4403 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
4404
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00004405- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
4406 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
4407
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004408- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
4409
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004410Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004411-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004412
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004413- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
4414 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
4415
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004416Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004417-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004418
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004419Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004420----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004421
4422- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
4423 removed completely in the next release.
4424
4425- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
4426 OSX.
4427
4428- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
4429 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
4430
4431- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
4432
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004433
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004434What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004435===========================
4436
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004437*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
4438
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004439Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004440--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004441
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004442- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004443 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004444 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004445 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
4446 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004447 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
4448 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004449 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
4450 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00004451
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00004452- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
4453 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
4454
4455- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
4456 class methods, static methods, and properties.
4457
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004458Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004459-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004460
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00004461- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
4462 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
4463 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
4464 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
4465 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
4466 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
4467 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
4468 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
4469
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004470- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
4471 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
4472 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
4473 example).
4474
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004475- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004476 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004477 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004478 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004479
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004480- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
4481 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
4482 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00004483 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004484
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004485- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
4486 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
4487 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
4488 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
4489 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
4490 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
4491
4492 isinstance(x, (A, B))
4493
4494 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
4495
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004496Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004497-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004498
4499- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
4500
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004501- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
4502
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004503- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
4504 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00004505
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004506- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
4507 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
4508 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
4509 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
4510 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
4511 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00004512 attributes.
4513
4514- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
4515 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
4516 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00004517
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004518- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
4519 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
4520 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004521
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004522- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
4523 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
4524 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004525 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
4526 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
4527
4528- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
4529 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004530
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004531Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004532-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004533
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00004534- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
4535 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
4536
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004537- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
4538 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
4539 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
4540 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
4541
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00004542- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
4543 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
4544 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
4545 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
4546
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00004547 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
4548 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
4549 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
4550 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
4551 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
4552 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
4553 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
4554 without losing information).
4555
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004556- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004557 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
4558 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
4559 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
4560 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
4561 module).
4562
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004563 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004564 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
4565 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
4566 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
4567 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004568
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004569- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00004570 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
4571 encoding.
4572
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00004573- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
4574 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
4575
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004576- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004577 to allow saving the message body to a file.
4578
4579- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
4580 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
4581 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
4582 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
4583
4584- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
4585
4586- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
4587 ON, and OFF.
4588
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004589- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
4590 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
4591
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004592Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004593-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004594
4595- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
4596 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
4597 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004598
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004599- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
4600 been added: -X and -E.
4601
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004602Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004603-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004604
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004605- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
4606 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
4607
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004608C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004609-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004610
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00004611- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
4612 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
4613 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
4614 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
4615 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
4616
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00004617- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
4618 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
4619 as long) arguments.
4620
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004621- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
4622 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
4623 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
4624 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
4625 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
4626 report any bugs or strange behavior).
4627
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004628- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
4629 input.
4630
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004631New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004632-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004633
4634Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004635-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004636
4637Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004638-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004639
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00004640- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
4641 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
4642 is created for .py and .pyw files.
4643
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004644- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
4645 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
4646 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004647 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004648
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004649 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
4650 # (SIGINT) behavior.
4651 import signal
4652 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004653
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004654 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004655 while 1:
4656 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004657 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004658 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
4659 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
4660 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
4661 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004662
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004663
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004664What's New in Python 2.2a4?
4665===========================
4666
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004667*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
4668
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004669Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004670--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004671
4672- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
4673 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
4674 documentation for all operations on list objects.
4675
4676- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
4677 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
4678 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
4679 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
4680 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
4681 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
4682 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004683
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004684- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004685 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004686 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
4687 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
4688 associate a docstring with a property.
4689
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004690- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
4691 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
4692 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
4693 other built-in object types.
4694
4695- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
4696 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
4697 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
4698 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
4699 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
4700
4701- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
4702 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
4703
4704- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
4705 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004706 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004707 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
4708 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
4709 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
4710 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
4711 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
4712
4713- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
4714 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
4715 class.
4716
4717- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
4718 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
4719 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
4720 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
4721
4722- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
4723 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
4724 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
4725 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
4726
4727- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
4728 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
4729
4730- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
4731 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
4732 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
4733 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
4734 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004735 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004736 with the same value as s.
4737
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00004738- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
4739
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004740Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004741----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004742
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00004743- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
4744
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00004745- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
4746 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
4747 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
4748 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
4749 objects.
4750
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004751- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
4752 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00004753 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
4754 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
4755
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004756- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
4757 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
4758 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
4759
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004760Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004761-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004762
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00004763- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4764 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
4765 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
4766 by the instances.
4767
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00004768- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
4769 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
4770 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
4771
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004772- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
4773 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
4774 before the entire comparison is complete.
4775
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00004776- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4777 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
4778 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
4779
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00004780- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
4781 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
4782 getwriter().
4783
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004784- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
4785 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
4786
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00004787- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004788 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
4789 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
4790
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00004791- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
4792 iterable object.
4793
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004794- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
4795 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004796
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004797- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
4798 authentication.
4799
4800- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
4801 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004802
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004803- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00004804 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
4805 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
4806 a sample driver.)
4807
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004808Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004809-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004810
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004811- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
4812 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
4813 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
4814 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
4815 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
4816 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
4817 kernel has large file support.
4818
4819- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
4820 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
4821 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
4822 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
4823 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
4824
4825- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
4826 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
4827 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
4828
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004829C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004830-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004831
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004832- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
4833 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
4834
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004835New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004836-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004837
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004838- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
4839 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
4840
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004841Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004842-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004843
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004844- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
4845 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
4846 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
4847 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
4848 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
4849
4850- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
4851 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
4852 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
4853 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
4854
4855- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
4856 especially in regard to reporting errors.
4857
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004858Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004859-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004860
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004861- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004862 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
4863 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004864
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004865
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004866What's New in Python 2.2a3?
4867===========================
4868
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004869*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
4870
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004871Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004872----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004873
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004874- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
4875 big to represent as a C double.
4876
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00004877- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
4878 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
4879 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
4880 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
4881 restriction).
4882
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00004883- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
4884 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
4885 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
4886 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
4887 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
4888
4889 >>> dir([])
4890 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
4891 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
4892 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
4893 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
4894 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
4895 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
4896 'reverse', 'sort']
4897
4898 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
4899
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004900- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004901 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
4902 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
4903 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
4904 OverflowError exception.
4905
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00004906- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004907 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004908 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
4909 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
4910 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
4911 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
4912 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004913 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004914 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
4915 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
4916
4917 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
4918 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
4919 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
4920 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004921
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004922- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004923 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
4924 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
4925 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
4926 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
4927 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
4928 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
4929 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
4930 once it is created.
4931
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00004932- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
4933 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
4934 (key, value) pairs.
4935
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004936- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004937 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
4938 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
4939
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00004940- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
4941 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
4942 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
4943 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
4944 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004945
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004946- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004947 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
4948 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
4949
4950 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
4951
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004952- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00004953 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
4954
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004955Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004956-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004957
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004958- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00004959 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
4960 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004961
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00004962- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
4963 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
4964 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
4965 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
4966 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
4967 in this area anymore).
4968
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00004969- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
4970 threading.Timer.
4971
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00004972- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
4973 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
4974
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004975- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004976 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
4977
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004978- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00004979 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
4980 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
4981 converted to Python longs.
4982
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004983- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004984 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
4985
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00004986- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
4987 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
4988 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
4989
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004990Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004991-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004992
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004993- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
4994 division operators as per PEP 238.
4995
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004996Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004997-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004998
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004999- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
5000 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
5001 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
5002 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
5003
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005004C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005005-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005006
5007- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005008
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005009- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
5010 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005011 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005012
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005013 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
5014 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005015 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005016 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005017
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005018- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005019 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
5020 module:
5021
5022 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005023
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005024 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
5025 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005026
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005027 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
5028 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005029
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005030 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
5031
5032 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
5033
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005034- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005035 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
5036 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
5037 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005038
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005039New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005040-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005041
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00005042- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
5043 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
5044 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
5045 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
5046 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005047
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005048Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005049-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005050
5051Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005052-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005053
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005054- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
5055 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
5056 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
5057 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00005058 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
5059 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
5060 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
5061 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
5062 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005063
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005064- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00005065 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
5066
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005067
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005068What's New in Python 2.2a2?
5069===========================
5070
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005071*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
5072
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005073Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005074-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005075
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00005076- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
5077 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
5078
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005079- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
5080 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
5081 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005082
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00005083- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
5084 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
5085 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
5086 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005087
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005088- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
5089
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005090- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005091
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005092Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005093-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005094
5095- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00005096 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005097 the module docstring for details.
5098
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005099Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005100-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005101
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005102- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005103 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
5104 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
5105 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005106
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005107- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
5108 Nick Mathewson.
5109
5110Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005111----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005112
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005113- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
5114 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
5115 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
5116 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
5117 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
5118 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
5119 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
5120 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
5121
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00005122- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
5123 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
5124 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
5125 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
5126
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00005127- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
5128 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
5129 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
5130 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
5131 come a long way).
5132
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005133- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
5134 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
5135 write filters for these warnings).
5136
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00005137- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
5138 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
5139 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
5140 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
5141 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
5142
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00005143- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
5144 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
5145 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
5146 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
5147 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
5148 older distribution.
5149
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005150Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005151-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005152
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005153- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
5154 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005155 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005156
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005157- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
5158 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
5159 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
5160
5161- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
5162
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005163- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
5164
5165- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
5166
5167- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
5168
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005169- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005170
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00005171- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
5172
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005173New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005174-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005175
5176C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005177-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005178
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005179- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
5180 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
5181 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
5182 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
5183 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
5184 against buffer overruns.
5185
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005186- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005187 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
5188 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005189 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
5190 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
5191 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
5192
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005193- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
5194 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
5195 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
5196 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
5197 deprecated.
5198
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005199Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005200-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005201
5202- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
5203 relevant is found.
5204
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005205
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005206What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005207===========================
5208
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005209*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
5210
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005211Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005212----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005213
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005214- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
5215 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
5216 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
5217 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
5218 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
5219 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
5220 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
5221 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005222 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005223 repaired.
5224
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005225- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00005226 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005227 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
5228 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
5229 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
5230 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
5231 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
5232 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
5233 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
5234 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
5235
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00005236- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
5237 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
5238 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
5239 leading BMO character).
5240
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005241- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
5242 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
5243 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
5244
5245 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
5246 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
5247 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005248
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005249 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
5250 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
5251 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
5252 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
5253 for various simple to use conversions.
5254
5255 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
5256 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
5257
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005258 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5259 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
5260 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
5261 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
5262 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5263 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
5264 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5265 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
5266 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5267 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
5268 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5269 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
5270 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5271 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
5272 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005273
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005274- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
5275 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
5276 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005277 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005278 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005279
5280 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005281 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
5282 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
5283 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
5284 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
5285 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005286 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
5287 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005288
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005289 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
5290 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
5291 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005292 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005293
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00005294- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
5295 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
5296 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
5297 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
5298 floating arithmetic,
5299
5300 x = 9007199254740992.0
5301 print long(x)
5302
5303 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
5304 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
5305 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
5306 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
5307 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
5308 functions are of good quality).
5309
5310 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
5311 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
5312 algorithms to break.
5313
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00005314- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
5315 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
5316 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
5317 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
5318 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
5319 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
5320 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
5321 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
5322 order.
5323
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005324- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
5325 operation along the most common code paths.
5326
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005327- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
5328 the same as dict.has_key(x).
5329
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00005330- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
5331 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
5332 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
5333 {}.update(UserDict())
5334
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005335- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
5336 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
5337 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
5338 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
5339 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
5340 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
5341 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
5342 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
5343
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005344- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005345 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005346
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005347 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00005348 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
5349 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00005350 join() method of strings
5351 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005352 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
5353 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005354 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00005355 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005356
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00005357- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
5358 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
5359
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005360- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
5361 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
5362
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00005363- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
5364 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
5365 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
5366 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
5367
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005368- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
5369 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005370 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005371 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
5372 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00005373
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00005374- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
5375
5376
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005377Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005378-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005379
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005380- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005381 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005382 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
5383 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
5384
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00005385- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
5386 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
5387
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00005388- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
5389 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
5390 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
5391 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
5392
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00005393- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
5394 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
5395 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
5396
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00005397- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
5398
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00005399- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
5400
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00005401- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
5402 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
5403 that are still imported into string.py).
5404
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005405- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
5406
5407- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
5408 Now it does.
5409
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005410- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
5411
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005412- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
5413 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
5414 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
5415 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
5416 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005417 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
5418 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005419
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00005420- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
5421 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
5422 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
5423 'help(object)'.
5424
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005425Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005426-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005427
5428- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005429 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005430 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
5431 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
5432
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005433- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005434 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
5435 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005436
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005437C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005438-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005439
5440- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
5441 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005442
5443----
5444
5445**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**