blob: 1db35f44b90d33b510c4a364608a1828d1bbeb34 [file] [log] [blame]
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +00007What's New in Python 2.5 alpha 1?
8=================================
9
Anthony Baxter12b6f6c2005-03-29 13:36:16 +000010*Release date: XX-XXX-2006*
11
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000012Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Neal Norwitze7214a12005-12-18 05:03:17 +000015- Support for converting hex strings to floats no longer works.
16 This was not portable. float('0x3') now raises a ValueError.
17
Barry Warsaw2a38a862005-12-18 01:27:35 +000018- Patch #1382163: Expose Subversion revision number to Python. New C API
19 function Py_GetBuildNumber(). New attribute sys.build_number. Build number
20 is now displayed in interactive prompt banner.
21
Georg Brandlfa166682005-12-17 21:45:17 +000022- Implementation of PEP 341 - Unification of try/except and try/finally.
23 "except" clauses can now be written together with a "finally" clause in
Neal Norwitz11ca77e2005-12-17 22:24:12 +000024 one try statement instead of two nested ones. Patch #1355913.
Georg Brandlfa166682005-12-17 21:45:17 +000025
Hye-Shik Chang835b2432005-12-17 04:38:31 +000026- Bug #1379994: Builtin unicode_escape and raw_unicode_escape codec
27 now encodes backslash correctly.
28
Martin v. Löwisb45b3152005-11-28 17:34:23 +000029- Patch #1350409: Work around signal handling bug in Visual Studio 2005.
30
Georg Brandlf06e30a2005-11-24 15:37:42 +000031- Bug #1281408: Py_BuildValue now works correct even with unsigned longs
32 and long longs.
33
Neal Norwitz67715f02005-11-09 06:59:35 +000034- SF Bug #1350188, "setdlopenflags" leads to crash upon "import"
35 It was possible dlerror() returns a NULL pointer, use a default error
36 message in this case.
37
Marc-André Lemburga5bafc42005-10-23 13:43:40 +000038- Replaced most Unicode charmap codecs with new ones using the
39 new Unicode translate string feature in the builtin charmap
40 codec; the codecs were created from the mapping tables available
41 at ftp.unicode.org and contain a few updates (e.g. the Mac OS
42 encodings now include a mapping for the Apple logo)
43
Tim Peterse3547fd2005-12-16 23:13:57 +000044- Added a few more codecs for Mac OS encodings
Marc-André Lemburga5bafc42005-10-23 13:43:40 +000045
Neal Norwitzfed9b3e2005-10-21 06:32:02 +000046- Speed up some Unicode operations.
47
48- A new AST parser implementation was completed.
49
Neal Norwitzb6570f52005-10-21 06:26:10 +000050- SF bug #1167751: fix incorrect code being for generator expressions.
Neal Norwitz16af7342005-10-21 06:25:33 +000051 The following code now raises a SyntaxError: foo(a = i for i in range(10))
52
Neal Norwitz708e51a2005-10-03 04:48:15 +000053- SF Bug #976608: fix SystemError when mtime of an imported file is -1.
54
Neal Norwitz11bd1192005-10-03 00:54:56 +000055- SF Bug #887946: fix segfault when redirecting stdin from a directory.
56 Provide a warning when a directory is passed on the command line.
57
Neal Norwitz40d37812005-10-02 01:48:49 +000058- Fix segfault with invalid coding.
59
60- SF bug #772896: unknown encoding results in MemoryError.
61
Raymond Hettinger6b27cda2005-09-24 21:23:05 +000062- All iterators now have a Boolean value of true. Formerly, some iterators
63 supported a __len__() method which evaluated to False when the iterator
64 was empty.
65
Guido van Rossum630db602005-09-20 18:49:54 +000066- On 64-bit platforms, when __len__() returns a value that cannot be
67 represented as a C int, raise OverflowError.
68
Skip Montanarof8948ca2005-09-19 03:54:46 +000069- test__locale is skipped on OS X < 10.4 (only partial locale support is
Walter Dörwald6611a8b2005-10-09 19:28:35 +000070 present).
Skip Montanarof8948ca2005-09-19 03:54:46 +000071
Georg Brandl80bbf3f2005-09-14 19:38:29 +000072- SF bug #893549: parsing keyword arguments was broken with a few format
73 codes.
74
Guido van Rossum8ee3e5a2005-09-14 18:09:42 +000075- Changes donated by Elemental Security to make it work on AIX 5.3
76 with IBM's 64-bit compiler (SF patch #1284289). This also closes SF
77 bug #105470: test_pwd fails on 64bit system (Opteron).
78
Guido van Rossum539c6622005-09-14 17:49:54 +000079- Changes donated by Elemental Security to make it work on HP-UX 11 on
80 Itanium2 with HP's 64-bit compiler (SF patch #1225212).
81
Georg Brandl4550b8d2005-08-26 06:43:52 +000082- Disallow keyword arguments for type constructors that don't use them
Georg Brandl02c42872005-08-26 06:42:30 +000083 (fixes bug #1119418).
84
Martin v. Löwisd35edda2005-08-24 08:39:24 +000085- Forward UnicodeDecodeError into SyntaxError for source encoding errors.
86
Barry Warsawe2eca0b2005-08-15 18:14:19 +000087- SF bug #900092: When tracing (e.g. for hotshot), restore 'return' events for
88 exceptions that cause a function to exit.
89
Raymond Hettinger9f1a6792005-07-31 01:16:36 +000090- The implementation of set() and frozenset() was revised to use its
91 own internal data structure. Memory consumption is reduced by 1/3
92 and there are modest speed-ups as well. The API is unchanged.
93
Tim Petersde7990b2005-07-17 23:45:23 +000094- SF bug #1238681: freed pointer is used in longobject.c:long_pow().
95
Michael W. Hudson0edc7a02005-07-12 10:21:19 +000096- SF bug #1229429: PyObject_CallMethod failed to decrement some
97 reference counts in some error exit cases.
98
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +000099- SF bug #1185883: Python's small-object memory allocator took over
100 a block managed by the platform C library whenever a realloc specified
101 a small new size. However, there's no portable way to know then how
102 much of the address space following the pointer is valid, so no
103 portable way to copy data from the C-managed block into Python's
104 small-object space without risking a memory fault. Python's small-object
105 realloc now leaves such blocks under the control of the platform C
106 realloc.
107
Michael W. Hudsonb8963812005-07-05 15:21:58 +0000108- SF bug #1232517: An overflow error was not detected properly when
109 attempting to convert a large float to an int in os.utime().
110
Raymond Hettinger3296e692005-06-29 23:29:56 +0000111- SF bug #1224347: hex longs now print with lowercase letters just
112 like their int counterparts.
113
Michael W. Hudson188d4362005-06-20 16:52:57 +0000114- SF bug #1163563: the original fix for bug #1010677 ("thread Module
115 Breaks PyGILState_Ensure()") broke badly in the case of multiple
116 interpreter states; back out that fix and do a better job (see
117 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2005-June/054258.html
118 for a longer write-up of the problem).
119
Michael W. Hudsondf888462005-06-03 14:41:55 +0000120- SF patch #1180995: marshal now uses a binary format by default when
121 serializing floats.
122
Michael W. Hudsonda85a902005-06-01 11:34:22 +0000123- SF patch #1181301: on platforms that appear to use IEEE 754 floats,
124 the routines that promise to produce IEEE 754 binary representations
125 of floats now simply copy bytes around.
126
Skip Montanarobbf12ba2005-05-20 03:07:06 +0000127- bug #967182: disallow opening files with 'wU' or 'aU' as specified by PEP
128 278.
129
Brett Cannonc3647ac2005-04-26 03:45:26 +0000130- patch #1109424: int, long, float, complex, and unicode now check for the
131 proper magic slot for type conversions when subclassed. Previously the
132 magic slot was ignored during conversion. Semantics now match the way
133 subclasses of str always behaved. int/long/float, conversion of an instance
Walter Dörwald78a78b02005-09-01 12:04:29 +0000134 to the base class has been moved to the proper nb_* magic slot and out of
Brett Cannonc3647ac2005-04-26 03:45:26 +0000135 PyNumber_*().
136 Thanks Walter Dörwald.
137
Barry Warsawc8d907c2005-04-19 23:43:40 +0000138- Descriptors defined in C with a PyGetSetDef structure, where the setter is
139 NULL, now raise an AttributeError when attempting to set or delete the
140 attribute. Previously a TypeError was raised, but this was inconsistent
141 with the equivalent pure-Python implementation.
142
Michael W. Hudson774479c2005-04-18 08:46:17 +0000143- It is now safe to call PyGILState_Release() before
144 PyEval_InitThreads() (note that if there is reason to believe there
145 are multiple threads around you still must call PyEval_InitThreads()
146 before using the Python API; this fix is for extension modules that
147 have no way of knowing if Python is multi-threaded yet).
148
Michael W. Hudsone3afc592005-04-07 10:11:19 +0000149- Typing Ctrl-C whilst raw_input() was waiting in a build with threads
150 disabled caused a crash.
151
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +0000152- Bug #1165306: instancemethod_new allowed the creation of a method
153 with im_class == im_self == NULL, which caused a crash when called.
154
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000155- Move exception finalisation later in the shutdown process - this
Anthony Baxter12b6f6c2005-03-29 13:36:16 +0000156 fixes the crash seen in bug #1165761
157
Raymond Hettinger96229b12005-03-11 06:49:40 +0000158- Added two new builtins, any() and all().
159
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +0000160- Defining a class with empty parentheses is now allowed
Brett Cannonf4189912005-04-09 02:30:16 +0000161 (e.g., ``class C(): pass`` is no longer a syntax error).
162 Patch #1176012 added support to the 'parser' module and 'compiler' package
163 (thanks to logistix for that added support).
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +0000164
Martin v. Löwis96d743e2005-03-03 23:00:26 +0000165- Patch #1115086: Support PY_LONGLONG in structmember.
166
Raymond Hettingerb67cc802005-03-03 16:45:19 +0000167- Bug #1155938: new style classes did not check that __init__() was
168 returning None.
169
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000170- Patch #802188: Report characters after line continuation character
Martin v. Löwis4bf108d2005-03-03 11:45:45 +0000171 ('\') with a specific error message.
172
Martin v. Löwisff232d72005-03-03 09:24:38 +0000173- Bug #723201: Raise a TypeError for passing bad objects to 'L' format.
174
Michael W. Hudson8e1afab2005-02-17 14:55:21 +0000175- Bug #1124295: the __name__ attribute of file objects was
176 inadvertently made inaccessible in restricted mode.
177
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000178- Bug #1074011: closing sys.std{out,err} now causes a flush() and
Martin v. Löwis8e3ca8a2005-01-23 09:41:49 +0000179 an ferror() call.
180
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000181- min() and max() now support key= arguments with the same meaning as in
182 list.sort().
183
Raymond Hettingerc34f8672005-01-02 06:17:33 +0000184- The peephole optimizer now performs simple constant folding in expressions:
185 (2+3) --> (5).
186
Raymond Hettingera422c342005-01-11 03:03:27 +0000187- set and frozenset objects can now be marshalled. SF #1098985.
188
Michael W. Hudsonfaa76482005-01-31 17:09:25 +0000189- Bug #1077106: Poor argument checking could cause memory corruption
190 in calls to os.read().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000191
Jeremy Hyltonab630502005-02-04 18:44:06 +0000192- The parser did not complain about future statements in illegal
193 positions. It once again reports a syntax error if a future
194 statement occurs after anything other than a doc string.
195
Neil Schemenauercf52c072005-08-12 17:34:58 +0000196- Change the %s format specifier for str objects so that it returns a
197 unicode instance if the argument is not an instance of basestring and
198 calling __str__ on the argument returns a unicode instance.
199
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000200Extension Modules
201-----------------
202
Neal Norwitz8856fb72005-12-18 03:34:22 +0000203- Patch #1365916: fix some unsafe 64-bit mmap methods.
204
Hye-Shik Changc5c57e62005-12-12 11:48:32 +0000205- Bug #1290333: Added a workaround for cjkcodecs' _codecs_cn build
206 problem on AIX.
207
Georg Brandla13c2442005-11-22 19:30:31 +0000208- Bug #869197: os.setgroups rejects long integer arguments
209
Neal Norwitz0f46bbf2005-11-03 05:00:25 +0000210- Bug #1346533, select.poll() doesn't raise an error if timeout > sys.maxint
211
Neal Norwitz7b631792005-11-02 05:26:07 +0000212- Bug #1344508, Fix UNIX mmap leaking file descriptors
213
Neal Norwitzf3396542005-10-28 05:52:22 +0000214- Patch #1338314, Bug #1336623: fix tarfile so it can extract
215 REGTYPE directories from tarfiles written by old programs.
216
Neal Norwitzfed9b3e2005-10-21 06:32:02 +0000217- Get bsddb module to build with BSD DB version 3.2
218
Neal Norwitz484d9a42005-09-30 04:46:49 +0000219- Patch #1309009, Fix segfault in pyexpat when the XML document is in latin_1,
220 but Python incorrectly assumes it is in UTF-8 format
221
Georg Brandle677adc2005-09-29 13:40:49 +0000222- Fix parse errors in the readline module when compiling without threads.
223
Hye-Shik Chang9ceebd52005-09-24 14:58:47 +0000224- Patch #1288833: Removed thread lock from socket.getaddrinfo on
225 FreeBSD 5.3 and later versions which got thread-safe getaddrinfo(3).
226
Michael W. Hudson10402a32005-09-22 09:19:01 +0000227- Patches #1298449 and #1298499: Add some missing checks for error
228 returns in cStringIO.c.
229
Neal Norwitz058bde12005-09-21 06:44:25 +0000230- Patch #1297028: fix segfault if call type on MultibyteCodec,
231 MultibyteStreamReader, or MultibyteStreamWriter
232
Neal Norwitzcfe7dd92005-09-19 06:49:27 +0000233- Fix memory leak in posix.access().
234
Martin v. Löwis8b291e22005-09-18 08:17:56 +0000235- Patch #1213831: Fix typo in unicodedata._getcode.
236
Georg Brandlfb1ef852005-09-14 20:53:32 +0000237- Bug #1007046: os.startfile() did not accept unicode strings encoded in
238 the file system encoding.
239
Georg Brandld2e3ba72005-08-26 08:34:00 +0000240- Patch #756021: Special-case socket.inet_aton('255.255.255.255') for
241 platforms that don't have inet_aton().
Georg Brandl02760f92005-08-25 13:10:41 +0000242
Georg Brandld2e3ba72005-08-26 08:34:00 +0000243- Bug #1215928: Fix bz2.BZ2File.seek() for 64-bit file offsets.
244
245- Bug #1191043: Fix bz2.BZ2File.(x)readlines for files containing one
Georg Brandl02760f92005-08-25 13:10:41 +0000246 line without newlines.
247
Georg Brandl38387b82005-08-24 07:17:40 +0000248- Bug #728515: mmap.resize() now resizes the file on Unix as it did
249 on Windows.
250
Walter Dörwalda05834e2005-10-09 19:38:21 +0000251- Patch #1180695: Add nanosecond stat resolution, and st_gen,
Martin v. Löwisebd9d5b2005-08-09 15:00:59 +0000252 st_birthtime for FreeBSD.
253
Michael W. Hudson8137bea2005-07-27 20:24:40 +0000254- Patch #1231069: The fcntl.ioctl function now uses the 'I' code for
255 the request code argument, which results in more C-like behaviour
256 for large or negative values.
257
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000258- Bug #1234979: For the argument of thread.Lock.acquire, the Windows
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000259 implementation treated all integer values except 1 as false.
Georg Brandlaf410b52005-07-08 22:26:13 +0000260
Georg Brandl6b95f1d2005-06-03 19:47:00 +0000261- Bug #1194181: bz2.BZ2File didn't handle mode 'U' correctly.
262
Hye-Shik Chang5f937a72005-06-02 13:09:30 +0000263- Patch #1212117: os.stat().st_flags is now accessible as a attribute
264 if available on the platform.
265
Skip Montanaro5ff14922005-05-16 02:42:22 +0000266- Patch #1103951: Expose O_SHLOCK and O_EXLOCK in the posix module if
267 available on the platform.
268
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +0000269- Bug #1166660: The readline module could segfault if hook functions
270 were set in a different thread than that which called readline.
271
Raymond Hettinger4aec61e2005-03-18 21:20:23 +0000272- collections.deque objects now support a remove() method.
273
Raymond Hettinger984f9bb2005-03-09 16:38:48 +0000274- operator.itemgetter() and operator.attrgetter() now support retrieving
275 multiple fields. This provides direct support for sorting on multiple
276 keys (primary, secondary, etc).
277
Martin v. Löwisb60ae992005-03-08 09:10:29 +0000278- os.access now supports Unicode path names on non-Win32 systems.
279
Martin v. Löwisfd78a6f2005-03-04 14:37:01 +0000280- Patches #925152, #1118602: Avoid reading after the end of the buffer
281 in pyexpat.GetInputContext.
282
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000283- Patches #749830, #1144555: allow UNIX mmap size to default to current
Martin v. Löwis7fe60c02005-03-03 11:22:44 +0000284 file size.
285
Raymond Hettinger9c323f82005-02-28 19:39:44 +0000286- Added functional.partial(). See PEP309.
287
Martin v. Löwis9533e342005-02-27 20:33:25 +0000288- Patch #1093585: raise a ValueError for negative history items in readline.
289 {remove_history,replace_history}
290
Fred Drake9c131f22005-01-23 15:16:08 +0000291- The spwd module has been added, allowing access to the shadow password
292 database.
Martin v. Löwisc3001752005-01-23 09:27:24 +0000293
Martin v. Löwisfe33d0b2005-01-16 08:57:39 +0000294- stat_float_times is now True.
295
Raymond Hettingerb0900e62004-12-16 16:23:40 +0000296- array.array objects are now picklable.
297
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000298- the cPickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
299 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
300
Raymond Hettingerb2594052004-12-05 09:25:51 +0000301- itertools.islice() now accepts None for the start and step arguments.
302 This allows islice() to work more readily with slices:
303 islice(s.start, s.stop, s.step)
304
Skip Montanaro0af3ade2005-01-13 04:12:31 +0000305- datetime.datetime() now has a strptime class method which can be used to
306 create datetime object using a string and format.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000307
308Library
309-------
310
Brett Cannon3cbd0382005-12-16 22:49:23 +0000311- Added the hashlib module. It provides secure hash functions for MD5 and
Tim Peterse3547fd2005-12-16 23:13:57 +0000312 SHA1, 224, 256, 384, and 512. Note that recent developments make the
313 historic MD5 and SHA1 unsuitable for cryptographic-strength applications.
314 In <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2005-December/058850.html>
315 Ronald L. Rivest offered this advice for Python:
316
317 "The consensus of researchers in this area (at least as
318 expressed at the NIST Hash Function Workshop 10/31/05),
319 is that SHA-256 is a good choice for the time being, but
320 that research should continue, and other alternatives may
321 arise from this research. The larger SHA's also seem OK."
Brett Cannon3cbd0382005-12-16 22:49:23 +0000322
Fredrik Lundh7e0aef02005-12-12 18:54:55 +0000323- Added a subset of Fredrik Lundh's ElementTree package. Available
324 modules are xml.etree.ElementTree, xml.etree.ElementPath, and
325 xml.etree.ElementInclude, from ElementTree 1.2.6.
326
Martin v. Löwis307021f2005-11-27 16:59:04 +0000327- Patch #1162825: Support non-ASCII characters in IDLE window titles.
328
Georg Brandl1f663572005-11-26 16:50:44 +0000329- Bug #1365984: urllib now opens "data:" URLs again.
330
Brett Cannonad07ff22005-11-23 02:15:50 +0000331- Patch #1314396: prevent deadlock for threading.Thread.join() when an exception
332 is raised within the method itself on a previous call (e.g., passing in an
333 illegal argument)
334
Brett Cannon5d0bf942005-11-02 23:04:26 +0000335- Bug #1340337: change time.strptime() to always return ValueError when there
336 is an error in the format string.
337
Georg Brandle8f24432005-10-03 14:16:44 +0000338- Patch #754022: Greatly enhanced webbrowser.py (by Oleg Broytmann).
339
Walter Dörwalda05834e2005-10-09 19:38:21 +0000340- Bug #729103: pydoc.py: Fix docother() method to accept additional
Georg Brandl8b813db2005-10-01 16:32:31 +0000341 "parent" argument.
342
Georg Brandlaa935172005-09-29 20:49:16 +0000343- Patch #1300515: xdrlib.py: Fix pack_fstring() to really use null bytes
344 for padding.
345
Georg Brandl80ba8e82005-09-29 20:16:07 +0000346- Bug #1296004: httplib.py: Limit maximal amount of data read from the
347 socket to avoid a MemoryError on Windows.
348
Matthias Klosef3f231f2005-09-20 07:02:49 +0000349- Patch #1166948: locale.py: Prefer LC_ALL, LC_CTYPE and LANG over LANGUAGE
350 to get the correct encoding.
351
352- Patch #1166938: locale.py: Parse LANGUAGE as a colon separated list of
353 languages.
354
Martin v. Löwis4ed67382005-09-18 08:34:39 +0000355- Patch #1268314: Cache lines in StreamReader.readlines for performance.
356
Brett Cannona783d062005-09-15 02:34:56 +0000357- Bug #1290505: Fix clearing the regex cache for time.strptime().
358
Martin v. Löwis5dbdc592005-08-27 10:07:56 +0000359- Bug #1167128: Fix size of a symlink in a tarfile to be 0.
360
Georg Brandl5a650a22005-08-26 08:51:34 +0000361- Patch #810023: Fix off-by-one bug in urllib.urlretrieve reporthook
362 functionality.
363
Martin v. Löwis8b595142005-08-25 11:03:38 +0000364- Bug #1163178: Make IDNA return an empty string when the input is empty.
365
Georg Brandl532efab2005-08-24 22:34:21 +0000366- Patch #848017: Make Cookie more RFC-compliant. Use CRLF as default output
367 separator and do not output trailing semicola.
368
Georg Brandlb9256022005-08-24 18:46:39 +0000369- Patch #1062060: urllib.urlretrieve() now raises a new exception, named
370 ContentTooShortException, when the actually downloaded size does not
371 match the Content-Length header.
372
Martin v. Löwis0a5d4a22005-08-24 14:55:22 +0000373- Bug #1121494: distutils.dir_utils.mkpath now accepts Unicode strings.
374
Martin v. Löwis56066d22005-08-24 07:38:12 +0000375- Bug #1178484: Return complete lines from codec stream readers
376 even if there is an exception in later lines, resulting in
Walter Dörwalda05834e2005-10-09 19:38:21 +0000377 correct line numbers for decoding errors in source code.
Martin v. Löwis56066d22005-08-24 07:38:12 +0000378
Georg Brandl6d2b3462005-08-24 07:36:17 +0000379- Bug #1192315: Disallow negative arguments to clear() in pdb.
380
Martin v. Löwisb813c532005-08-07 20:51:04 +0000381- Patch #827386: Support absolute source paths in msvccompiler.py.
382
Georg Brandl649f8e72005-08-03 07:30:12 +0000383- Patch #1105730: Apply the new implementation of commonprefix in posixpath
384 to ntpath, macpath, os2emxpath and riscospath.
385
Guido van Rossum755149f2005-07-27 00:00:44 +0000386- Fix a problem in Tkinter introduced by SF patch #869468: delete bogus
387 __hasattr__ and __delattr__ methods on class Tk that were breaking
388 Tkdnd.
389
Georg Brandl5dbda752005-07-17 20:27:41 +0000390- Bug #1015140: disambiguated the term "article id" in nntplib docs and
391 docstrings to either "article number" or "message id".
392
Georg Brandla4a8b822005-07-15 09:13:21 +0000393- Bug #1238170: threading.Thread.__init__ no longer has "kwargs={}" as a
394 parameter, but uses the usual "kwargs=None".
395
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000396- textwrap now processes text chunks at O(n) speed instead of O(n**2).
Raymond Hettinger8bfa8932005-07-15 06:53:35 +0000397 Patch #1209527 (Contributed by Connelly).
398
Georg Brandl5c5fe2f2005-07-14 06:40:47 +0000399- urllib2 has now an attribute 'httpresponses' mapping from HTTP status code
400 to W3C name (404 -> 'Not Found'). RFE #1216944.
401
Georg Brandl9e43acf2005-07-04 17:16:07 +0000402- Bug #1177468: Don't cache the /dev/urandom file descriptor for os.urandom,
403 as this can cause problems with apps closing all file descriptors.
404
Georg Brandl5284b532005-06-26 22:54:58 +0000405- Bug #839151: Fix an attempt to access sys.argv in the warnings module
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000406 it can be missing in embedded interpreters
Georg Brandl5284b532005-06-26 22:54:58 +0000407
Georg Brandl2f210b62005-06-26 22:09:06 +0000408- Bug #1155638: Fix a bug which affected HTTP 0.9 responses in httplib.
409
Georg Brandlfbff1bc2005-06-26 21:36:25 +0000410- Bug #1100201: Cross-site scripting was possible on BaseHTTPServer via
411 error messages.
412
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000413- Bug #1108948: Cookie.py produced invalid JavaScript code.
414
Raymond Hettingerda99d1c2005-06-21 07:43:58 +0000415- The tokenize module now detects and reports indentation errors.
416 Bug #1224621.
417
Raymond Hettinger68c04532005-06-10 11:05:19 +0000418- The tokenize module has a new untokenize() function to support a full
419 roundtrip from lexed tokens back to Python sourcecode. In addition,
420 the generate_tokens() function now accepts a callable argument that
421 terminates by raising StopIteration.
422
Georg Brandl9166e1a2005-06-04 09:20:03 +0000423- Bug #1196315: fix weakref.WeakValueDictionary constructor.
424
Georg Brandl268e61c2005-06-03 14:28:50 +0000425- Bug #1213894: os.path.realpath didn't resolve symlinks that were the first
426 component of the path.
427
Skip Montanaro174dd222005-05-14 20:54:16 +0000428- Patch #1120353: The xmlrpclib module provides better, more transparent,
429 support for datetime.{datetime,date,time} objects. With use_datetime set
430 to True, applications shouldn't have to fiddle with the DateTime wrapper
431 class at all.
432
Martin v. Löwis55f1bb82005-03-21 20:56:35 +0000433- distutils.commands.upload was added to support uploading distribution
434 files to PyPI.
435
Walter Dörwalda6e8a4a2005-03-31 13:57:38 +0000436- distutils.commands.register now encodes the data as UTF-8 before posting
437 them to PyPI.
438
Raymond Hettinger267b8682005-03-27 10:47:39 +0000439- decimal operator and comparison methods now return NotImplemented
440 instead of raising a TypeError when interacting with other types. This
441 allows other classes to implement __radd__ style methods and have them
442 work as expected.
443
Raymond Hettingerbea3f6f2005-03-15 04:59:17 +0000444- Bug #1163325: Decimal infinities failed to hash. Attempting to
445 hash a NaN raised an InvalidOperation instead of a TypeError.
446
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000447- Patch #918101: Add tarfile open mode r|* for auto-detection of the
Martin v. Löwis78be7df2005-03-05 12:47:42 +0000448 stream compression; add, for symmetry reasons, r:* as a synonym of r.
449
Martin v. Löwis00a73e72005-03-04 19:40:34 +0000450- Patch #1043890: Add extractall method to tarfile.
451
Martin v. Löwisc72dd382005-03-04 13:50:17 +0000452- Patch #1075887: Don't require MSVC in distutils if there is nothing
453 to build.
454
Martin v. Löwis637431b2005-03-03 23:12:42 +0000455- Patch #1103407: Properly deal with tarfile iterators when untarring
456 symbolic links on Windows.
457
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000458- Patch #645894: Use getrusage for computing the time consumption in
Martin v. Löwisa4dac402005-03-03 11:39:45 +0000459 profile.py if available.
460
Martin v. Löwisdf37c8c2005-03-03 11:08:03 +0000461- Patch #1046831: Use get_python_version where appropriate in sysconfig.py.
462
Martin v. Löwisc5574e82005-03-03 10:57:37 +0000463- Patch #1117454: Remove code to special-case cookies without values
464 in LWPCookieJar.
465
Martin v. Löwis4ea3ead2005-03-03 10:48:12 +0000466- Patch #1117339: Add cookielib special name tests.
467
Martin v. Löwise869eb12005-03-03 09:46:07 +0000468- Patch #1112812: Make bsddb/__init__.py more friendly for modulefinder.
469
Martin v. Löwisf2a8d632005-03-03 08:35:22 +0000470- Patch #1110248: SYNC_FLUSH the zlib buffer for GZipFile.flush.
471
Martin v. Löwisdf241532005-03-03 08:17:42 +0000472- Patch #1107973: Allow to iterate over the lines of a tarfile.ExFileObject.
473
Martin v. Löwis8ed338a2005-03-03 08:12:27 +0000474- Patch #1104111: Alter setup.py --help and --help-commands.
475
Martin v. Löwis4afe1542005-03-01 08:09:28 +0000476- Patch #1121234: Properly cleanup _exit and tkerror commands.
477
Martin v. Löwisc2a0ac22005-02-24 20:22:10 +0000478- Patch #1049151: xdrlib now unpacks booleans as True or False.
479
Raymond Hettingerbab41432005-02-05 01:31:19 +0000480- Fixed bug in a NameError bug in cookielib. Patch #1116583.
481
Guido van Rossumd0641422005-02-03 15:01:24 +0000482- Applied a security fix to SimpleXMLRPCserver (PSF-2005-001). This
483 disables recursive traversal through instance attributes, which can
484 be exploited in various ways.
485
Tim Peterse3547fd2005-12-16 23:13:57 +0000486- Bug #1222790: in SimpleXMLRPCServer, set the reuse-address and close-on-exec
Andrew M. Kuchling3a976052005-12-04 15:07:41 +0000487 flags on the HTTP listening socket.
488
Andrew M. Kuchlinge63fde72005-12-04 15:36:57 +0000489- Bug #792570: SimpleXMLRPCServer had problems if the request grew too large.
490 Fixed by reading the HTTP body in chunks instead of one big socket.read().
491
Tim Peterse3547fd2005-12-16 23:13:57 +0000492- Patches #893642, #1039083: add allow_none, encoding arguments to constructors of
Andrew M. Kuchling10a16de2005-12-04 16:34:40 +0000493 SimpleXMLRPCServer and CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler.
494
Martin v. Löwis1d11de62005-01-29 13:29:23 +0000495- Bug #1110478: Revert os.environ.update to do putenv again.
496
Thomas Hellerd6c6e222005-01-20 19:20:16 +0000497- Bug #1103844: fix distutils.install.dump_dirs() with negated options.
498
Martin v. Löwis22b457e2005-01-16 08:40:58 +0000499- os.{SEEK_SET, SEEK_CUR, SEEK_END} have been added for convenience.
500
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000501- Enhancements to the csv module:
502
503 + Dialects are now validated by the underlying C code, better
Georg Brandl7eb4b7d2005-07-22 21:49:32 +0000504 reflecting its capabilities, and improving its compliance with
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000505 PEP 305.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000506 + Dialect parameter parsing has been re-implemented to improve error
507 reporting.
508 + quotechar=None and quoting=QUOTE_NONE now work the way PEP 305
509 dictates.
510 + the parser now removes the escapechar prefix from escaped characters.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000511 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the writer now tests for numeric
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000512 types, rather than any object than can be represented as a numeric.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000513 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the reader now casts unquoted fields
514 to floats.
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000515 + reader now allows \r characters to be quoted (previously it only allowed
516 \n to be quoted).
Andrew McNamarac89f2842005-01-12 07:44:42 +0000517 + writer doublequote handling improved.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000518 + Dialect classes passed to the module are no longer instantiated by
519 the module before being parsed (the former validation scheme required
520 this, but the mechanism was unreliable).
521 + The dialect registry now contains instances of the internal
522 C-coded dialect type, rather than references to python objects.
523 + the internal c-coded dialect type is now immutable.
524 + register_dialect now accepts the same keyword dialect specifications
525 as the reader and writer, allowing the user to register dialects
526 without first creating a dialect class.
527 + a configurable limit to the size of parsed fields has been added -
528 previously, an unmatched quote character could result in the entire
529 file being read into the field buffer before an error was reported.
Andrew McNamara31d88962005-01-12 03:45:10 +0000530 + A new module method csv.field_size_limit() has been added that sets
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000531 the parser field size limit (returning the former limit). The initial
532 limit is 128kB.
Andrew McNamara7f2053e2005-01-12 11:17:16 +0000533 + A line_num attribute has been added to the reader object, which tracks
534 the number of lines read from the source iterator. This is not
535 the same as the number of records returned, as records can span
536 multiple lines.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000537 + reader and writer objects were not being registered with the cyclic-GC.
538 This has been fixed.
539
Brett Cannone6539c42005-01-08 02:43:53 +0000540- _DummyThread objects in the threading module now delete self.__block that is
541 inherited from _Thread since it uses up a lock allocated by 'thread'. The
542 lock primitives tend to be limited in number and thus should not be wasted on
543 a _DummyThread object. Fixes bug #1089632.
544
Raymond Hettinger97db05d2005-01-07 08:15:41 +0000545- The imghdr module now detects Exif files.
546
Raymond Hettinger6065d322004-12-20 23:51:53 +0000547- StringIO.truncate() now correctly adjusts the size attribute.
548 (Bug #951915).
549
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000550- locale.py now uses an updated locale alias table (built using
551 Tools/i18n/makelocalealias.py, a tool to parse the X11 locale
552 alias file); the encoding lookup was enhanced to use Python's
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000553 encoding alias table.
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000554
Raymond Hettinger3557f422004-12-07 12:02:02 +0000555- moved deprecated modules to Lib/lib-old: whrandom, tzparse, statcache.
556
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000557- the pickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
558 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
559
Brett Cannon84667c02004-12-07 03:25:18 +0000560- optparse now optionally imports gettext. This allows its use in setup.py.
561
Raymond Hettinger3489cad2004-12-05 05:20:42 +0000562- the pickle module no longer uses the deprecated bin parameter.
563
Raymond Hettinger1bc82f82004-12-05 03:58:17 +0000564- the shelve module no longer uses the deprecated binary parameter.
565
Raymond Hettinger6c92d762004-12-05 03:28:00 +0000566- the pstats module no longer uses the deprecated ignore() method.
567
Raymond Hettingerf3fa9462004-12-05 01:58:09 +0000568- the filecmp module no longer uses the deprecated use_statcache argument.
569
Raymond Hettinger664347b2004-12-04 21:21:53 +0000570- unittest.TestCase.run() and unittest.TestSuite.run() can now be successfully
571 extended or overridden by subclasses. Formerly, the subclassed method would
572 be ignored by the rest of the module. (Bug #1078905).
573
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000574- heapq.nsmallest() and heapq.nlargest() now support key= arguments with
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000575 the same meaning as in list.sort().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000576
Walter Dörwald36733692004-12-22 12:50:50 +0000577- Bug #1076985: ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` now calls ``read()`` only
578 once when a size argument is given. This prevents a buffer overflow in the
579 tokenizer with very long source lines.
580
Andrew M. Kuchling3b585b32004-12-28 20:10:48 +0000581- Bug #1083110: ``zlib.decompress.flush()`` would segfault if called immediately
582 after creating the object, without any intervening ``.decompress()`` calls.
583
Skip Montanaro05885812005-01-16 20:48:27 +0000584- The reconvert.quote function can now emit triple-quoted strings. The
585 reconvert module now has some simple documentation.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000586
Walter Dörwaldaf3b39a2005-02-18 13:22:43 +0000587- ``UserString.MutableString`` now supports negative indices in
588 ``__setitem__`` and ``__delitem__``
589
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000590- Bug #1149508: ``textwrap`` now handles hyphenated numbers (eg. "2004-03-05")
591 correctly.
592
Walter Dörwaldbc8e6422005-04-21 21:32:03 +0000593- Partial fixes for SF bugs #1163244 and #1175396: If a chunk read by
594 ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` has a trailing "\r", read one more
595 character even if the user has passed a size parameter to get a proper
596 line ending. Remove the special handling of a "\r\n" that has been split
597 between two lines.
598
Walter Dörwalda47d1c02005-08-30 10:23:14 +0000599- Bug #1251300: On UCS-4 builds the "unicode-internal" codec will now complain
600 about illegal code points. The codec now supports PEP 293 style error
601 handlers.
602
Walter Dörwald78a78b02005-09-01 12:04:29 +0000603- Bug #1235646: ``codecs.StreamRecoder.next()`` now reencodes the data it reads
Walter Dörwaldc5238b82005-09-01 11:56:53 +0000604 from the input stream, so that the output is a byte string in the correct
605 encoding instead of a unicode string.
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000606
Gustavo Niemeyer6fa0c5a2005-09-14 08:54:39 +0000607- Bug #1202493: Fixing SRE parser to handle '{}' as perl does, rather than
608 considering it exactly like a '*'.
609
Walter Dörwald007f8df2005-10-09 19:42:27 +0000610- Bug #1245379: Add "unicode-1-1-utf-7" as an alias for "utf-7" to
611 ``encodings.aliases``.
Gustavo Niemeyer6fa0c5a2005-09-14 08:54:39 +0000612
Walter Dörwald09f0dd52005-11-21 19:10:07 +0000613- ` uu.encode()`` and ``uu.decode()`` now support unicode filenames.
614
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000615Build
616-----
617
Martin v. Löwis147fbe52005-08-07 21:09:30 +0000618- Bug #1189330: configure did not correctly determine the necessary
619 value of LINKCC if python was built with GCC 4.0.
620
Trent Mick8321b422005-07-26 02:29:21 +0000621- Upgrade Windows build to zlib 1.2.3 which eliminates a potential security
622 vulnerability in zlib 1.2.1 and 1.2.2.
623
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000624- EXTRA_CFLAGS has been introduced as an environment variable to hold compiler
625 flags that change binary compatibility. Changes were also made to
626 distutils.sysconfig to also use the environment variable when used during
Martin v. Löwisd7c795e2005-04-25 07:14:03 +0000627 compilation of the interpreter and of C extensions through distutils.
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000628
Bob Ippolitoed233462005-03-29 13:47:59 +0000629- SF patch 1171735: Darwin 8's headers are anal about POSIX compliance,
630 and linking has changed (prebinding is now deprecated, and libcc_dynamic
631 no longer exists). This configure patch makes things right.
632
Martin v. Löwise2713be2005-03-08 15:03:08 +0000633- Bug #1158607: Build with --disable-unicode again.
634
Brett Cannon46d96232005-02-16 00:07:19 +0000635- spwdmodule.c is built only if either HAVE_GETSPNAM or HAVE_HAVE_GETSPENT is
636 defined. Discovered as a result of not being able to build on OS X.
637
Brett Cannon516592f2004-12-07 00:42:59 +0000638- setup.py now uses the directories specified in LDFLAGS using the -L option
639 and in CPPFLAGS using the -I option for adding library and include
640 directories, respectively, for compiling extension modules against. This has
641 led to the core being compiled using the values in CPPFLAGS. It also removes
642 the need for the special-casing of both DarwinPorts and Fink for darwin since
643 the proper directories can be specified in LDFLAGS (``-L/sw/lib`` for Fink,
644 ``-L/opt/local/lib`` for DarwinPorts) and CPPFLAGS (``-I/sw/include`` for
645 Fink, ``-I/opt/local/include`` for DarwinPorts).
646
Brett Cannon43802422005-02-10 20:48:03 +0000647- Test in configure.in that checks for tzset no longer dependent on tm->tm_zone
648 to exist in the struct (not required by either ISO C nor the UNIX 2 spec).
649 Tests for sanity in tzname when HAVE_TZNAME defined were also defined.
650 Closes bug #1096244. Thanks Gregory Bond.
651
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000652
653C API
654-----
655
Raymond Hettingerbeb31012005-08-16 03:47:52 +0000656- Added a C API for set and frozenset objects.
657
Raymond Hettinger66517482004-12-03 11:45:13 +0000658- Removed PyRange_New().
659
Walter Dörwaldd1c1e102005-10-06 20:29:57 +0000660- Patch #1313939: PyUnicode_DecodeCharmap() accepts a unicode string as the
661 mapping argument now. This string is used as a mapping table. Byte values
662 greater than the length of the string and 0xFFFE are treated as undefined
663 mappings.
664
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000665
666Tests
667-----
668
Martin v. Löwis4d394df2005-01-23 09:19:22 +0000669- In test_os, st_?time is now truncated before comparing it with ST_?TIME.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000670
Hye-Shik Changaaa2f1d2005-12-10 17:44:27 +0000671- Patch #1276356: New resource "urlfetch" is implemented. This enables
672 even impatient people to run tests that require remote files.
673
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000674
675Documentation
676-------------
677
Georg Brandl32252422005-09-14 20:42:00 +0000678- Bug #1274828: Document os.path.splitunc().
679
Georg Brandl79c122f2005-08-24 07:31:33 +0000680- Bug #1190204: Clarify which directories are searched by site.py.
681
Georg Brandl6f2bbd32005-08-24 07:26:55 +0000682- Bug #1193849: Clarify os.path.expanduser() documentation.
683
Georg Brandlf13c4ba2005-08-02 10:28:08 +0000684- Bug #1243192: re.UNICODE and re.LOCALE affect \d, \D, \s and \S.
685
Georg Brandl150db732005-07-18 08:53:17 +0000686- Bug #755617: Document the effects of os.chown() on Windows.
687
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000688- Patch #1180012: The documentation for modulefinder is now in the library reference.
689
690- Patch #1213031: Document that os.chown() accepts argument values of -1.
691
692- Bug #1190563: Document os.waitpid() return value with WNOHANG flag.
693
694- Bug #1175022: Correct the example code for property().
695
Georg Brandl40c71652005-06-25 21:08:46 +0000696- Document the IterableUserDict class in the UserDict module.
697 Closes bug #1166582.
698
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000699- Remove all latent references for "Macintosh" that referred to semantics for
700 Mac OS 9 and change to reflect the state for OS X.
701 Closes patch #1095802. Thanks Jack Jansen.
702
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000703Mac
704---
705
706
Hye-Shik Chang4e422812005-07-17 02:36:59 +0000707New platforms
708-------------
709
710- FreeBSD 7 support is added.
711
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000712
713Tools/Demos
714-----------
715
Georg Brandl56897312005-08-24 18:32:30 +0000716- Added two new files to Tools/scripts: pysource.py, which recursively
717 finds Python source files, and findnocoding.py, which finds Python
718 source files that need an encoding declaration.
719 Patch #784089, credits to Oleg Broytmann.
720
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000721- Bug #1072853: pindent.py used an uninitialized variable.
722
Martin v. Löwisab9ec162005-04-09 10:53:34 +0000723- Patch #1177597: Correct Complex.__init__.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000724
725
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000726What's New in Python 2.4 final?
727===============================
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000728
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000729*Release date: 30-NOV-2004*
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000730
731Core and builtins
732-----------------
733
734- Bug 875692: Improve signal handling, especially when using threads, by
735 forcing an early re-execution of PyEval_EvalFrame() "periodic" code when
736 things_to_do is not cleared by Py_MakePendingCalls().
737
738
Anthony Baxter4277ed82004-11-30 11:53:10 +0000739What's New in Python 2.4 (release candidate 1)
740==============================================
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000741
Anthony Baxter5cc727a2004-11-18 12:32:27 +0000742*Release date: 18-NOV-2004*
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000743
744Core and builtins
745-----------------
746
Tim Petersfb1ffb02004-11-08 04:30:21 +0000747- Bug 1061968: Fixes in 2.4a3 to address thread bug 1010677 reintroduced
748 the years-old thread shutdown race bug 225673. Numeric history lesson
749 aside, all bugs in all three reports are fixed now.
750
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000751
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000752Library
753-------
754
755- Bug 1052242: If exceptions are raised by an atexit handler function an
756 attempt is made to execute the remaining handlers. The last exception
757 raised is re-raised.
758
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000759- ``doctest``'s new support for adding ``pdb.set_trace()`` calls to
760 doctests was broken in a dramatic but shallow way. Fixed.
761
Tim Petersbbc0d442004-11-13 16:18:32 +0000762- Bug 1065388: ``calendar``'s ``day_name``, ``day_abbr``, ``month_name``,
763 and ``month_abbr`` attributes emulate sequences of locale-correct
764 spellings of month and day names. Because the locale can change at
765 any time, the correct spelling is recomputed whenever one of these is
766 indexed. In the worst case, the index may be a slice object, so these
767 recomputed every day or month name each time they were indexed. This is
768 much slower than necessary in the usual case, when the index is just an
769 integer. In that case, only the single spelling needed is recomputed
770 now; and, when the index is a slice object, only the spellings needed
771 by the slice are recomputed now.
772
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000773- Patch 1061679: Added ``__all__`` to pickletools.py.
Tim Peters90cf2122004-11-06 23:45:48 +0000774
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000775Build
776-----
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000777
Brett Cannon7d28e962004-11-07 01:19:00 +0000778- Bug 1034277 / Patch 1035255: Remove compilation of core against CoreServices
779 and CoreFoundation on OS X. Involved removing PyMac_GetAppletScriptFile()
780 which has no known users. Thanks Bob Ippolito.
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000781
782C API
783-----
784
Raymond Hettinger39e92ea2004-11-18 09:41:45 +0000785- The PyRange_New() function is deprecated.
786
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000787
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000788What's New in Python 2.4 beta 2?
789================================
790
Anthony Baxter9f41f3a2004-11-03 06:21:37 +0000791*Release date: 03-NOV-2004*
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000792
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000793License
794-------
795
796The Python Software Foundation changed the license under which Python
797is released, to remove Python version numbers. There were no other
798changes to the license. So, for example, wherever the license for
799Python 2.3 said "Python 2.3", the new license says "Python". The
800intent is to make it possible to refer to the PSF license in a more
801durable way. For example, some people say they're confused by that
802the Open Source Initiative's entry for the Python Software Foundation
803License::
804
805 http://www.opensource.org/licenses/PythonSoftFoundation.php
806
807says "Python 2.1.1" all over it, wondering whether it applies only
808to Python 2.1.1.
809
810The official name of the new license is the Python Software Foundation
811License Version 2.
812
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000813Core and builtins
814-----------------
815
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +0000816- Bug #1055820 Cyclic garbage collection was not protecting against that
817 calling a live weakref to a piece of cyclic trash could resurrect an
818 insane mutation of the trash if any Python code ran during gc (via
819 running a dead object's __del__ method, running another callback on a
820 weakref to a dead object, or via any Python code run in any other thread
821 that managed to obtain the GIL while a __del__ or callback was running
822 in the thread doing gc). The most likely symptom was "impossible"
Andrew M. Kuchlingb2a739d2005-11-22 15:14:44 +0000823 ``AttributeError`` exceptions, appearing seemingly at random, on weakly
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +0000824 referenced objects. The cure was to clear all weakrefs to unreachable
825 objects before allowing any callbacks to run.
826
Raymond Hettinger561fbf12004-10-26 01:52:37 +0000827- Bug #1054139 _PyString_Resize() now invalidates its cached hash value.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000828
829Extension Modules
830-----------------
831
Raymond Hettinger9047c8f2004-10-24 00:10:06 +0000832- Bug #1048870: the compiler now generates distinct code objects for
833 functions with identical bodies. This was producing confusing
834 traceback messages which pointed to the function where the code
835 object was first defined rather than the function being executed.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000836
837Library
838-------
839
Barry Warsaw8c72eae2004-11-01 03:52:43 +0000840- Patch #1056967 changes the semantics of Template.safe_substitute() so that
841 no ValueError is raised on an 'invalid' match group. Now the delimiter is
842 returned.
843
Raymond Hettinger2ef7e6c2004-10-24 00:32:24 +0000844- Bug #1052503 pdb.runcall() was not passing along keyword arguments.
845
Raymond Hettingerc64aab82004-10-20 08:21:57 +0000846- Bug #902037: XML.sax.saxutils.prepare_input_source() now combines relative
847 paths with a base path before checking os.path.isfile().
848
Raymond Hettingere54e7262004-10-20 07:17:16 +0000849- The whichdb module can now be run from the command line.
850
Brett Cannon8abcc5d2004-10-18 01:37:57 +0000851- Bug #1045381: time.strptime() can now infer the date using %U or %W (week of
852 the year) when the day of the week and year are also specified.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000853
Andrew M. Kuchling0d19bae2004-10-19 19:54:41 +0000854- Bug #1048816: fix bug in Ctrl-K at start of line in curses.textpad.Textbox
855
Andrew M. Kuchling66e80ba2004-10-20 11:56:15 +0000856- Bug #1017553: fix bug in tarfile.filemode()
857
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000858- Patch #737473: fix bug that old source code is shown in tracebacks even if
Hye-Shik Chang182ac852004-10-26 09:16:42 +0000859 the source code is updated and reloaded.
860
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000861Build
862-----
863
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000864- Patch #1044395: --enable-shared is allowed in FreeBSD also.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000865
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000866What's New in Python 2.4 beta 1?
867================================
868
Anthony Baxter6a587c12004-10-15 08:07:21 +0000869*Release date: 15-OCT-2004*
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000870
871Core and builtins
872-----------------
873
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000874- Patch #975056: Restartable signals were not correctly disabled on
Anthony Baxtere4f8a482004-10-13 14:55:56 +0000875 BSD systems. Consistently use PyOS_setsig() instead of signal().
876
Tim Peters263091e2004-10-10 01:58:44 +0000877- The internal portable implementation of thread-local storage (TLS), used
878 by the ``PyGILState_Ensure()``/``PyGILState_Release()`` API, was not
879 thread-correct. This could lead to a variety of problems, up to and
880 including segfaults. See bug 1041645 for an example.
881
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000882- Added a command line option, -m module, which searches sys.path for the
883 module and then runs it. (Contributed by Nick Coghlan.)
884
Raymond Hettinger2c31a052004-09-22 18:44:21 +0000885- The bytecode optimizer now folds tuples of constants into a single
886 constant.
887
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000888- SF bug #513866: Float/long comparison anomaly. Prior to 2.4b1, when
889 an integer was compared to a float, the integer was coerced to a float.
890 That could yield spurious overflow errors (if the integer was very
891 large), and to anomalies such as
892 ``long(1e200)+1 == 1e200 == long(1e200)-1``. Coercion to float is no
893 longer performed, and cases like ``long(1e200)-1 < 1e200``,
894 ``long(1e200)+1 > 1e200`` and ``(1 << 20000) > 1e200`` are computed
895 correctly now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000896
897Extension modules
898-----------------
899
Tim Peterscf8997f2004-10-01 02:13:16 +0000900- ``collections.deque`` objects didn't play quite right with garbage
901 collection, which could lead to a segfault in a release build, or
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000902 an assert failure in a debug build. Also, added overflow checks,
903 better detection of mutation during iteration, and shielded deque
904 comparisons from unusual subclass overrides of the __iter__() method.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000905
906Library
907-------
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000908
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000909- Patch 1046644: distutils build_ext grew two new options - --swig for
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000910 specifying the swig executable to use, and --swig-opts to specify
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000911 options to pass to swig. --swig-opts="-c++" is the new way to spell
912 --swig-cpp.
913
Anthony Baxter22dcf662004-10-13 15:54:17 +0000914- Patch 983206: distutils now obeys environment variable LDSHARED, if
915 it is set.
916
Andrew M. Kuchling518d3932004-10-12 15:32:10 +0000917- Added Peter Astrand's subprocess.py module. See PEP 324 for details.
Fredrik Lundh5b3687d2004-10-12 15:26:28 +0000918
Brett Cannon4f35c712004-10-06 02:11:37 +0000919- time.strptime() now properly escapes timezones and all other locale-specific
920 strings for regex-specific symbols. Was breaking under Japanese Windows when
921 the timezone was specified as "Tokyo (standard time)".
922 Closes bug #1039270.
923
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000924- Updates for the email package:
Brett Cannon06a30b02004-10-22 06:22:54 +0000925
Barry Warsaw418de1f2004-10-11 14:32:47 +0000926 + email.Utils.formatdate() grew a 'usegmt' argument for HTTP support.
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000927 + All deprecated APIs that in email 2.x issued warnings have been removed:
928 _encoder argument to the MIMEText constructor, Message.add_payload(),
929 Utils.dump_address_pair(), Utils.decode(), Utils.encode()
930 + New deprecations: Generator.__call__(), Message.get_type(),
931 Message.get_main_type(), Message.get_subtype(), the 'strict' argument to
932 the Parser constructor. These will be removed in email 3.1.
933 + Support for Python earlier than 2.3 has been removed (see PEP 291).
934 + All defect classes have been renamed to end in 'Defect'.
935 + Some FeedParser fixes; also a MultipartInvariantViolationDefect will be
936 added to messages that claim to be multipart but really aren't.
937 + Updates to documentation.
938
Raymond Hettinger596ba4d2004-09-24 03:41:05 +0000939- re's findall() and finditer() functions now take an optional flags argument
940 just like the compile(), search(), and match() functions. Also, documented
941 the previously existing start and stop parameters for the findall() and
942 finditer() methods of regular expression objects.
943
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000944- rfc822 Messages now support iterating over the headers.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000945
Martin v. Löwisf3c56112004-09-18 09:08:52 +0000946- The (undocumented) tarfile.Tarfile.membernames has been removed;
947 applications should use the getmember function.
948
Martin v. Löwis39a31782004-09-18 09:03:49 +0000949- httplib now offers symbolic constants for the HTTP status codes.
950
Tim Peters528ca532004-09-16 01:30:50 +0000951- SF bug #1028306: Trying to compare a ``datetime.date`` to a
952 ``datetime.datetime`` mistakenly compared only the year, month and day.
953 Now it acts like a mixed-type comparison: ``False`` for ``==``,
954 ``True`` for ``!=``, and raises ``TypeError`` for other comparison
955 operators. Because datetime is a subclass of date, comparing only the
956 base class (date) members can still be done, if that's desired, by
957 forcing using of the approprate date method; e.g.,
958 ``a_date.__eq__(a_datetime)`` is true if and only if the year, month
959 and day members of ``a_date`` and ``a_datetime`` are equal.
960
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000961- bdist_rpm now supports command line options --force-arch,
962 {pre,post}-install, {pre,post}-uninstall, and
Martin v. Löwis23c48a12004-09-10 06:32:54 +0000963 {prep,build,install,clean,verify}-script.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000964
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000965- SF patch #998993: The UTF-8 and the UTF-16 stateful decoders now support
966 decoding incomplete input (when the input stream is temporarily exhausted).
967 ``codecs.StreamReader`` now implements buffering, which enables proper
968 readline support for the UTF-16 decoders. ``codecs.StreamReader.read()``
969 has a new argument ``chars`` which specifies the number of characters to
970 return. ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` and
971 ``codecs.StreamReader.readlines()`` have a new argument ``keepends``.
972 Trailing "\n"s will be stripped from the lines if ``keepends`` is false.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000973
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000974- The documentation for doctest is greatly expanded, and now covers all
975 the new public features (of which there are many).
976
Walter Dörwald5011d0c2004-09-13 08:53:15 +0000977- ``doctest.master`` was put back in, and ``doctest.testmod()`` once again
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000978 updates it. This isn't good, because every ``testmod()`` call
979 contributes to bloating the "hidden" state of ``doctest.master``, but
980 some old code apparently relies on it. For now, all we can do is
981 encourage people to stitch doctests together via doctest's unittest
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000982 integration features instead.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000983
Skip Montanaro82d0eec2004-09-14 17:58:31 +0000984- httplib now handles ipv6 address/port pairs.
985
David Goodger68a1abd2004-10-03 15:40:25 +0000986- SF bug #1017864: ConfigParser now correctly handles default keys,
987 processing them with ``ConfigParser.optionxform`` when supplied,
988 consistent with the handling of config file entries and runtime-set
989 options.
990
David Goodger1cbf2062004-10-03 15:55:09 +0000991- SF bug #997050: Document, test, & check for non-string values in
992 ConfigParser. Moved the new string-only restriction added in
993 rev. 1.65 to the SafeConfigParser class, leaving existing
994 ConfigParser & RawConfigParser behavior alone, and documented the
995 conditions under which non-string values work.
996
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000997Build
998-----
999
Brett Cannonbfef8692004-09-28 04:08:11 +00001000- Building on darwin now includes /opt/local/include and /opt/local/lib for
1001 building extension modules. This is so as to include software installed as
1002 a DarwinPorts port <http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/>
1003
Tim Peters862f0592004-09-23 19:11:32 +00001004- pyport.h now defines a Py_IS_NAN macro. It works as-is when the
1005 platform C computes true for ``x != x`` if and only if X is a NaN.
1006 Other platforms can override the default definition with a platform-
1007 specific spelling in that platform's pyconfig.h. You can also override
1008 pyport.h's default Py_IS_INFINITY definition now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001009
1010C API
1011-----
1012
Tim Peters7f468f22004-10-11 02:40:51 +00001013- SF patch 1044089: New function ``PyEval_ThreadsInitialized()`` returns
1014 non-zero if PyEval_InitThreads() has been called.
1015
1016- The undocumented and unused extern int ``_PyThread_Started`` was removed.
1017
Tim Peters84705582004-10-10 02:47:33 +00001018- The C API calls ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
1019 are two of the very few advertised as being safe to call without holding
1020 the GIL. However, this wasn't true in a debug build, as bug 1041645
1021 demonstrated. In a debug build, Python redirects the ``PyMem`` family
1022 of calls to Python's small-object allocator, to get the benefit of
1023 its extra debugging capabilities. But Python's small-object allocator
1024 isn't threadsafe, relying on the GIL to avoid the expense of doing its
1025 own locking. ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
1026 call the platform ``malloc()`` directly now, regardless of build type.
1027
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +00001028- PyLong_AsUnsignedLong[Mask] now support int objects as well.
1029
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +00001030- SF patch #998993: ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF8Stateful`` and
1031 ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF16Stateful`` have been added, which implement stateful
1032 decoding.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001033
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001034Tests
1035-----
1036
1037- test__locale ported to unittest
1038
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001039Mac
1040---
1041
Just van Rossumdd3c8372004-10-03 16:27:09 +00001042- ``plistlib`` now supports non-dict root objects. There is also a new
1043 interface for reading and writing plist files: ``readPlist(pathOrFile)``
1044 and ``writePlist(rootObject, pathOrFile)``
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001045
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001046Tools/Demos
1047-----------
1048
Tim Peters130e37f2004-10-03 19:03:19 +00001049- The text file comparison scripts ``ndiff.py`` and ``diff.py`` now
1050 read the input files in universal-newline mode. This spares them
1051 from consuming a great deal of time to deduce the useless result that,
1052 e.g., a file with Windows line ends and a file with Linux line ends
1053 have no lines in common.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001054
1055
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001056What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
1057=================================
1058
Anthony Baxtere13943a2004-09-02 16:37:15 +00001059*Release date: 02-SEP-2004*
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001060
1061Core and builtins
1062-----------------
1063
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001064- SF patch #1007189: ``from ... import ...`` statements now allow the name
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001065 list to be surrounded by parentheses.
1066
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +00001067- Some speedups for long arithmetic, thanks to Trevor Perrin. Gradeschool
1068 multiplication was sped a little by optimizing the C code. Gradeschool
1069 squaring was sped by about a factor of 2, by exploiting that about half
1070 the digit products are duplicates in a square. Because exponentiation
1071 uses squaring often, this also speeds long power. For example, the time
1072 to compute 17**1000000 dropped from about 14 seconds to 9 on my box due
1073 to this much. The cutoff for Karatsuba multiplication was raised,
1074 since gradeschool multiplication got quicker, and the cutoff was
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +00001075 aggressively small regardless. The exponentiation algorithm was switched
1076 from right-to-left to left-to-right, which is more efficient for small
1077 bases. In addition, if the exponent is large, the algorithm now does
1078 5 bits (instead of 1 bit) at a time. That cut the time to compute
1079 17**1000000 on my box in half again, down to about 4.5 seconds.
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +00001080
Tim Petersc8854432004-08-25 02:14:08 +00001081- OverflowWarning is no longer generated. PEP 237 scheduled this to
1082 occur in Python 2.3, but since OverflowWarning was disabled by default,
1083 nobody realized it was still being generated. On the chance that user
1084 code is still using them, the Python builtin OverflowWarning, and
1085 corresponding C API PyExc_OverflowWarning, will exist until Python 2.5.
1086
Martin v. Löwis336e85f2004-08-19 11:31:58 +00001087- Py_InitializeEx has been added.
1088
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +00001089- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
1090 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
1091
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +00001092- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
1093 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
1094 modified the list.
1095
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +00001096- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
1097 functions is now writable.
1098
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +00001099- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
1100 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
1101 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
1102 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
1103
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +00001104- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
1105 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
1106 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
1107 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
1108 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +00001109
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +00001110- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
1111 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
1112
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001113Extension modules
1114-----------------
1115
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +00001116- difflib now supports HTML side-by-side diff.
1117
Martin v. Löwisdc3883f2004-08-29 15:46:35 +00001118- os.urandom has been added for systems that support sources of random
1119 data.
1120
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +00001121- Patch 1012740: truncate() on a writeable cStringIO now resets the
1122 position to the end of the stream. This is consistent with the original
1123 StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was
1124 supposed to have been truncated away.
1125
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +00001126- Added socket.socketpair().
1127
Dave Cole3203efb2004-08-26 00:37:31 +00001128- Added CurrentByteIndex, CurrentColumnNumber, CurrentLineNumber
1129 members to xml.parsers.expat.XMLParser object.
1130
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001131- The mpz, rotor, and xreadlines modules, all deprecated in earlier
Andrew M. Kuchling00873432004-08-31 13:50:43 +00001132 versions of Python, have now been removed.
1133
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001134Library
1135-------
1136
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +00001137- Patch #934356: if a module defines __all__, believe that rather than using
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001138 heuristics for filtering out imported names.
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +00001139
Johannes Gijsbersae882f72004-08-30 10:19:56 +00001140- Patch #941486: added os.path.lexists(), which returns True for broken
1141 symlinks, unlike os.path.exists().
1142
Raymond Hettinger356a4592004-08-30 06:14:31 +00001143- the random module now uses os.urandom() for seeding if it is available.
1144 Added a new generator based on os.urandom().
1145
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +00001146- difflib and diff.py can now generate HTML.
1147
Martin v. Löwiscae9e672004-08-25 13:04:53 +00001148- bdist_rpm now includes version and release in the BuildRoot, and
1149 replaces - by ``_`` in version and release.
Martin v. Löwiscf525242004-08-25 13:00:34 +00001150
Martin v. Löwis9f5c0c42004-08-25 11:37:43 +00001151- distutils build/build_scripts now has an -e option to specify the
1152 path to the Python interpreter for installed scripts.
1153
Barry Warsaw8bee7612004-08-25 02:22:30 +00001154- PEP 292 classes Template and SafeTemplate are added to the string module.
1155
Martin v. Löwis75b9da42004-08-18 13:57:44 +00001156- tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
1157
Martin v. Löwisdeacce22004-08-18 12:46:26 +00001158- HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
1159
Johannes Gijsbersc473c992004-08-18 12:40:31 +00001160- Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
1161 Percivall.
1162
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +00001163- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
1164 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
1165
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +00001166- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
1167 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
1168 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +00001169 than creating a new one.
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +00001170
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001171- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
1172 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
1173 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
1174 and exponent.
1175
1176- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
1177
1178- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
Georg Brandl08c02db2005-07-22 18:39:19 +00001179 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatibility and atexit
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001180 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
1181
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001182- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
1183 to the readline module.
1184
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +00001185- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001186 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
1187 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +00001188
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +00001189- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
1190 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
1191 contains symlinks.
1192
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +00001193- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
1194 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
1195
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +00001196- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
1197 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
1198 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1199
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +00001200- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
1201 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
1202 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
1203 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
1204 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
1205 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
1206 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
1207 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
1208 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
1209 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
1210 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
1211 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
1212 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
1213
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +00001214- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
1215
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001216Tools/Demos
1217-----------
1218
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001219- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
1220 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
1221
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +00001222- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
1223
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001224Build
1225-----
1226
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +00001227- Backward incompatibility: longintrepr.h now triggers a compile-time
1228 error if SHIFT (the number of bits in a Python long "digit") isn't
1229 divisible by 5. This new requirement allows simple code for the new
1230 5-bits-at-a-time long_pow() implementation. If necessary, the
1231 restriction could be removed (by complicating long_pow(), or by
1232 falling back to the 1-bit-at-a-time algorithm), but there are no
1233 plans to do so.
1234
Brett Cannoncc8a4f62004-08-26 01:44:07 +00001235- bug #991962: When building with --disable-toolbox-glue on Darwin no
1236 attempt to build Mac-specific modules occurs.
1237
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +00001238- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
1239 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
1240
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001241- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
1242 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
1243
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +00001244- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
1245 GNU/k*BSD systems.
1246
Hye-Shik Chang3ba5bfc2004-08-19 17:52:37 +00001247- bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings
1248 found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64.
1249
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001250C API
1251-----
1252
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001253..
1254
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001255Documentation
1256-------------
1257
Neal Norwitz5268c392004-08-21 15:13:52 +00001258- patch #1005936, bug #1009373: fix index entries which contain
1259 an underscore when viewed with Acrobat.
1260
1261- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if
1262 it contains symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment
1263 since 1992, but is now in the library reference as well.
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +00001264
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001265New platforms
1266-------------
1267
Hye-Shik Changf64700a2004-08-18 15:13:41 +00001268- FreeBSD 6 is now supported.
1269
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001270Tests
1271-----
1272
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001273..
1274
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001275Windows
1276-------
1277
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +00001278- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
1279 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
1280 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
1281 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
1282 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
1283 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
1284 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
1285 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
1286 the problem.
1287
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001288Mac
1289---
1290
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001291..
1292
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001293
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001294What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
1295=================================
1296
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +00001297*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001298
1299Core and builtins
1300-----------------
1301
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +00001302- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
1303 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
1304 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
1305 sensitive code.
1306
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001307- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001308 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so::
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001309
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001310 @staticmethod
1311 def foo(bar):
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001312
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +00001313 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001314
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001315- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
1316 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
1317 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
1318 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
1319 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
1320 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
1321 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
1322 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
1323 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
1324 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
1325 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
1326
1327 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
1328 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
1329 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
1330 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
1331 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
1332 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
1333 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
1334
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +00001335- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
1336 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
1337
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +00001338- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001339 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +00001340
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001341- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001342 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001343 which was missing for no apparent reason.
1344
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001345- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001346 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
1347 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
1348
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001349- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
1350 types that support garbage collection.
1351
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +00001352- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
1353
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +00001354- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
1355 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
1356 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
1357 Jython.
1358
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001359- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
1360
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +00001361- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
1362 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
1363
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +00001364- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
1365 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
1366 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +00001367
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +00001368- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
1369 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
1370 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
1371
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001372Extension modules
1373-----------------
1374
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +00001375- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
1376
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001377Library
1378-------
1379
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +00001380- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
1381 TIS-620
1382
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +00001383- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
1384 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
1385 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
1386 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
1387 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
1388 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
1389 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
1390 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
1391 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
1392 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
1393
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +00001394- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
1395
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +00001396- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
1397 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
1398 same as when the argument is omitted).
1399 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
1400
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +00001401- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
1402
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +00001403- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
1404 schemes are offered.
1405
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +00001406- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
1407
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +00001408- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
1409 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
1410 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
1411
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +00001412- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
1413
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +00001414- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
1415 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
1416
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +00001417- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
1418 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
1419 when dummy_threading is being used.
1420
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +00001421- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
1422 from a tarfile.
1423
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001424- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001425 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001426
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +00001427- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
1428 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
1429 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
1430 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
1431
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +00001432- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
1433 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
1434
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +00001435- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
1436 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
1437 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
1438 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
1439 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
1440 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
1441 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
1442 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
1443 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
1444 by some other method in progress).
1445
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001446- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
1447 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
1448 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +00001449
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +00001450- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
1451
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +00001452- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
1453 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
1454 AM Kuchling.
1455
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +00001456- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
1457 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
1458 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
1459
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +00001460- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
1461 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
1462 instead of unsigned.
1463
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001464- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +00001465 no longer part of the public API.
1466
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +00001467- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
1468 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
1469 string methods of the same name).
1470
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001471- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +00001472 SF patch 945642.
1473
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001474- doctest unittest integration improvements:
1475
1476 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
1477
1478 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
1479 DocTestSuites.
1480
1481- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
1482 that provide thread-local data.
1483
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001484- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
1485 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
1486
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001487- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
1488
1489- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
1490 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
1491 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
1492
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001493- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
1494
1495 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
1496 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
1497 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001498
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001499 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
1500 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
1501 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
1502 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
1503
1504 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
1505 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
1506
1507 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
1508 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
1509 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
1510 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
1511
1512 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
1513 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
1514 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
1515 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
1516 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
1517
1518 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
1519 wrapping help output.
1520
1521 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
1522 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
1523 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001524
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001525C API
1526-----
1527
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001528- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
1529 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
1530 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
1531 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
1532 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
1533 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
1534 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
1535 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
1536 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
1537 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
1538 its visible semantics have not changed.
1539
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001540- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
1541 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
1542
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001543Documentation
1544-------------
1545
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001546- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001547
1548 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +00001549 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001550
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +00001551 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001552
1553 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
1554
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001555- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001556
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001557Tests
1558-----
1559
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001560- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +00001561 platforms that use the Makefile.
1562
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001563- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
1564 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
1565 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
1566
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001567
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001568What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
1569=================================
1570
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +00001571*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001572
1573Core and builtins
1574-----------------
1575
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +00001576- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
1577 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
1578 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
1579 objects now (one object instead of three).
1580
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +00001581- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
1582 Windows DLLs.
1583
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +00001584- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
1585 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +00001586
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +00001587- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
1588 a new .pyc magic.
1589
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +00001590- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
1591 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
1592 be there.
1593
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +00001594- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
1595 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
1596 the LC_NUMERIC category.
1597
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +00001598- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
1599 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
1600 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
1601
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +00001602- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
1603
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +00001604- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
1605 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
1606 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +00001607
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +00001608- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
1609 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
1610
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +00001611- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
1612
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001613- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001614 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001615
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +00001616- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
1617
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +00001618- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
1619
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +00001620- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
1621 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
1622
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +00001623- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
1624 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
1625 Fixes bug #858016 .
1626
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +00001627- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
1628 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
1629 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
1630
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +00001631- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
1632 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
1633 improves their performance (about 35%).
1634
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +00001635- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
1636 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
1637 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
1638
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +00001639- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
1640 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
1641 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
1642 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
1643
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001644- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
1645 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
Walter Dörwald09515af2005-03-18 10:28:24 +00001646 list comprehensions, and the list constructor (when the input iterable
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001647 length is not known).
1648
1649- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
1650 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +00001651 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
1652 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001653 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
1654
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +00001655- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
1656 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
1657
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +00001658- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
1659 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
1660 keyword arguments.
1661
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +00001662- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
1663 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
1664 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
1665
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +00001666- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
1667 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
1668 cases.
1669
1670- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
1671 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
1672 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
1673 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
1674 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
1675 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
1676 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
1677 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
1678 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
1679 a release build.
1680
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +00001681- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
1682 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
1683
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001684- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001685 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001686
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +00001687- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
1688 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
1689 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
1690 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
1691 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
1692 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
1693 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
1694 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
1695 destroyed.
1696
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +00001697- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
1698 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
1699 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
1700 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
1701 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
1702 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
1703 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
1704 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
1705
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +00001706- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
1707 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
1708 character other than a space.
1709
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +00001710- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
1711 by the function object or by the method object, the function
1712 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
1713 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
1714 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
1715 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
1716 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
1717 attributes with the same name.
1718
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001719- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
1720 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
1721 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
1722 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
1723 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
1724 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
1725 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
1726 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
1727 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
1728 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
1729 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
1730 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
1731 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
1732 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +00001733
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +00001734- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
1735 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
1736 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
1737 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
1738 This has been repaired.
1739
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001740- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
1741
1742- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
1743
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +00001744- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
1745 over a sequence.
1746
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001747- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001748 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001749
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +00001750- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
1751
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +00001752- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
1753 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
1754 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
1755 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
1756 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
1757 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
1758 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
1759 records with equal keys is unchanged).
1760
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +00001761- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
1762 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
1763 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
1764
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +00001765- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
1766 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
1767 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
1768 freelist.
1769
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +00001770- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
1771 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
1772
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +00001773- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
1774 number.
1775
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +00001776- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
1777 a TypeError exception.
1778
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +00001779- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
1780 820195.
1781
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +00001782- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
1783 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
1784 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
1785
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001786- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001787 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
1788 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +00001789
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +00001790- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
1791 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
1792 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
1793
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001794- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
1795 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001796 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001797
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001798- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +00001799 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
1800 the first call.
1801
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001802
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001803Extension modules
1804-----------------
1805
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +00001806- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
1807 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
1808
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001809- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
1810 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
1811 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
1812 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
1813 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
1814 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
1815 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +00001816
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +00001817- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
1818
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +00001819- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
1820
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +00001821- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
1822 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
1823
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +00001824- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
1825 fewer false positives.
1826
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +00001827- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
1828 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
1829
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001830- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +00001831 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
1832
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +00001833- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001834 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +00001835 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
Raymond Hettinger6ab78cd2004-08-29 07:50:43 +00001836 Also, array.array() and array.extend() now accept any iterable argument
1837 for repeated appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +00001838
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +00001839- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
1840 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
1841 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
1842 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
1843
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +00001844- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
1845 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
1846 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
1847 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
1848 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
1849 #897625.
1850
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +00001851- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
1852 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
1853
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +00001854- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
1855 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
1856 and pops on either side of the deque.
1857
1858- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
1859 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
1860
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +00001861- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
1862 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
1863 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
1864 other functions that expect a function argument.
1865
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +00001866- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
1867
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001868- os.getsid was added.
1869
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +00001870- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
1871 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
1872 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
1873
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +00001874- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
1875
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +00001876- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
1877
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +00001878- readline.clear_history was added.
1879
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +00001880- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
1881
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +00001882- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
1883
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +00001884- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
1885
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +00001886- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
1887
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +00001888- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
1889
1890- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
1891
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +00001892- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
1893
1894- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
1895
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001896- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
1897 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
1898 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
1899
1900- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
1901 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
1902 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
1903 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
1904 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
1905 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
1906 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
1907
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +00001908- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
1909 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
1910 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
1911 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001912
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001913- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001914 iterators from a single iterable.
1915
1916- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
1917 of raising a TypeError exception.
1918
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +00001919- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
1920 as parameter.
1921
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001922Library
1923-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001924
Georg Brandlf0de6a12005-08-22 18:02:59 +00001925- Bug #1266283: The new function "lexists" is now in os.path.__all__.
1926
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +00001927- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
1928 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
1929 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001930
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +00001931- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
1932 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
1933 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +00001934
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +00001935- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +00001936
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +00001937- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
1938 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +00001939
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +00001940- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
1941 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1942
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001943- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
1944
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001945- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001946 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001947
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001948- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001949 that generate a -debuginfo.rpm
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001950
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +00001951- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
1952
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +00001953- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
1954 on cygwin and mingw32.
1955
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +00001956- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
1957
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +00001958- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
1959 module.
1960
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +00001961- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
1962 installation scheme for all platforms.
1963
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001964- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +00001965 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001966
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001967- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
1968 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
1969 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
1970
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +00001971- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
1972 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
1973 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
1974
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +00001975- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
1976
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +00001977- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
1978
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +00001979- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
1980 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
1981
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +00001982- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
1983 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
1984 type pattern with the same value exists.
1985
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +00001986- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
1987 when run from the command prompt).
1988
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001989- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
1990 not taken into consideration when caching value.
1991
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +00001992- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
1993 default sort).
1994
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +00001995- Added global runctx function to profile module
1996
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +00001997- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
1998
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +00001999- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
2000
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +00002001- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
2002
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00002003- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +00002004 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
2005 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
2006 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
2007 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
2008 accordingly.
2009
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +00002010- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
2011 decoding standards.
2012
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +00002013- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
2014 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
2015 called for all requests.
2016
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +00002017- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
2018 they are passed to the compiler.
2019
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +00002020- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
2021 indent, width and depth.
2022
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +00002023- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
2024 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
2025
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +00002026- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
2027 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
2028
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +00002029- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
2030
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +00002031- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
2032
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00002033- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
2034
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +00002035- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
2036 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
2037
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +00002038- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +00002039 for better performance.
2040
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00002041- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +00002042
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +00002043- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
2044 a string).
2045
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +00002046- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
2047
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +00002048- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
2049
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +00002050- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
2051
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +00002052- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
2053
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +00002054- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
2055 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
2056 list of fieldnames.
2057
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +00002058- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
2059 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
2060
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +00002061- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
2062
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +00002063- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
2064 empty lists.
2065
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +00002066- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
2067 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
2068 and shelves.
2069
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +00002070- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
2071 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
2072
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00002073- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +00002074 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
2075 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00002076
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +00002077- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
2078 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +00002079 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +00002080
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00002081- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +00002082 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
2083 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
2084
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00002085- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
2086 and removed in Py2.4.
2087
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +00002088- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
2089
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +00002090- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
2091
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002092Tools/Demos
2093-----------
2094
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +00002095- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
2096 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
2097
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +00002098- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
2099
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +00002100- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
2101 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
2102 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
2103 destination in situations where both files are given.
2104
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +00002105- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
2106 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
2107 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
2108 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
2109
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +00002110- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
2111
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +00002112- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
2113 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
2114 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
2115 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
2116 now.
2117
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002118- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
2119 in effect
2120
2121- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
2122 C-c C-h
2123
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +00002124- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
2125 -d option was given.
2126
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002127Build
2128-----
2129
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +00002130- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
2131 build under OS X.
2132
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +00002133- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
2134 --enable-profiling.
2135
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +00002136- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
2137 is configured --with-tsc.
2138
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +00002139- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
2140 on AMD64.
2141
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +00002142- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
2143 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
2144
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00002145- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
2146 removed.
2147
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00002148- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
2149 supported (see PEP 11).
2150
2151- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
2152
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00002153- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
2154
2155- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
2156 (see PEP 11).
2157
2158- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
2159 sizeof(char) must be 1.
2160
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002161C API
2162-----
2163
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00002164- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
2165 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
2166 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
2167
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00002168- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
2169 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
2170 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
2171 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
2172
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00002173- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
2174 generator objects.
2175
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00002176- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
2177 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00002178 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
2179 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00002180
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00002181- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
2182 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
2183
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00002184- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
2185 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
2186 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
2187 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
2188 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
2189
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00002190- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
2191 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
2192 about 10% faster.
2193
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00002194- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
2195 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
2196
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00002197- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
2198 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
2199 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
2200 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
2201
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002202Windows
2203-------
2204
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00002205- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
2206 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
2207 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
2208 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
2209
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00002210- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
2211 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
2212 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
2213
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002214
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002215What's New in Python 2.3 final?
2216===============================
2217
2218*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
2219
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002220IDLE
2221----
2222
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00002223- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
2224 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
2225 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
2226 context-menu actions.
2227
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002228- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
2229 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
2230 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
2231 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
2232 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
2233 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
2234 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
2235 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
2236 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
2237
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002238
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002239What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
2240=============================================
2241
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00002242*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002243
2244Core and builtins
2245-----------------
2246
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00002247- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002248 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00002249 comment at the end are still unsupported.
2250
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002251Extension modules
2252-----------------
2253
2254- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
2255 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
2256 than once. This has been fixed.
2257
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00002258- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
2259 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
2260 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
2261 call.
2262
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002263- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
2264
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002265Library
2266-------
2267
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002268- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
2269 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
2270
2271- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
2272 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
2273 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
2274 restored.
2275
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00002276IDLE
2277----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002278
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00002279- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002280
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002281Build
2282-----
2283
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002284- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
2285 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
2286
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002287C API
2288-----
2289
2290Windows
2291-------
2292
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00002293- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
2294 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
2295
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002296- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
2297
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002298Mac
2299---
2300
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002301- Various fixes to pimp.
2302
2303- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
2304
2305- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
2306 more problems than it solves.
2307
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002308
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002309What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
2310=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002311
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00002312*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
2313
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002314Core and builtins
2315-----------------
2316
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00002317- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
2318 by sys.setcheckinterval().
2319
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002320- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
2321 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002322 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002323
2324- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
2325 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
2326 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002327 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002328
2329- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
2330 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002331
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002332- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
2333 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
2334 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
2335
2336- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002337 770247.
2338
2339- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002340
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002341Extension modules
2342-----------------
2343
2344- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
2345 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
2346
2347- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
2348
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002349- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
2350
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00002351- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
2352 contained within the _strptime module.
2353
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002354- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
2355 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
2356
2357- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002358 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
2359
2360- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
2361 the find_class attribute, if present.
2362
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002363- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002364
2365 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
2366 (SF bug 763298).
2367
2368 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00002369 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
2370 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
2371 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002372
2373 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
2374
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002375Library
2376-------
2377
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002378- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
2379
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00002380- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
2381 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
2382 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
2383 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
2384 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
2385 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
2386 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
2387 or Tester().
2388
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002389- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
2390 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
2391 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
2392 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
2393 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
2394 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
2395 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
2396 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
2397 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00002398
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002399 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00002400
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00002401- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
2402 weren't before was an oversight.
2403
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002404- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
2405 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
2406
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00002407- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
2408 when there are no lines.
2409
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00002410- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
2411 which could occur with Tk 8.4
2412
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002413- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
2414 to child processes.
2415
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002416- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
2417
2418- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
2419
2420- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
2421 xmlrpclib.
2422
2423- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
2424 responses.
2425
2426- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
2427 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
2428
2429- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
2430 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
2431 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
2432
2433- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
2434 used as patterns.
2435
2436- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
2437 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
2438 than Tk 8.3.
2439
2440- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
2441
2442- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002443
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002444Tools/Demos
2445-----------
2446
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002447- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
2448
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00002449- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
2450
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002451- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002452
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002453Build
2454-----
2455
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002456- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
2457
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002458- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
2459
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002460- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
2461 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002462
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002463- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
2464 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
2465 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002466
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002467C API
2468-----
2469
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002470- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
2471 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
2472
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002473Windows
2474-------
2475
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002476- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
2477 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
2478 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
2479 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
2480 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
2481 Python exception ::
2482
2483 thread.error: can't start new thread
2484
2485 is raised now.
2486
2487- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
2488 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
2489 instead of from DLL teardown.
2490
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002491Mac
2492---
2493
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002494- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00002495 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002496 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
2497 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
2498 the executable in the bundle.
2499
2500- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002501
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00002502- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
2503
2504- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
2505 on Panther.
2506
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002507What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
2508================================
2509
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002510*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002511
2512Core and builtins
2513-----------------
2514
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00002515- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
2516 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
2517 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
2518 with the -i option.
2519
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00002520- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
2521 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
2522
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002523- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
2524 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
2525
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00002526- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
2527 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
2528 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
2529 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
2530 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
2531 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
2532 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
2533 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
2534 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
2535 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
2536 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
2537 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
2538 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00002539
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002540- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
2541 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
2542 embedded in a lambda expression.
2543
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00002544- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
2545 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
2546 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
2547 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
2548 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
2549
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002550- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
2551 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
2552 matches the restriction on classic classes.
2553
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00002554- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
2555 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
2556
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00002557- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
2558 It's writable again.
2559
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002560- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
2561 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
2562 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002563 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002564
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002565- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
2566 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
2567 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
2568
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002569Extension modules
2570-----------------
2571
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00002572- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
2573 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
2574
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002575- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
2576 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
2577 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
2578 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
2579
2580- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
2581 collection.
2582
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00002583- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
2584 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
2585 unique within a single program run.
2586
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00002587- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
2588 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
2589
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00002590- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
2591 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
2592
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00002593- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
2594 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00002595
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00002596- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
2597
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00002598- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
2599 Fixes SF bug #730685.
2600
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00002601- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
2602 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
2603 for many BSD-derived systems.
2604
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002605
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002606Library
2607-------
2608
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00002609- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
2610 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
2611 primary ones:
2612
2613 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
2614 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
2615 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
2616
2617 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
2618 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
2619 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
2620 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
2621 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
2622 framework features (which doctest lacks).
2623
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00002624- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
2625 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
2626 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
2627 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
2628 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
2629 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
2630 argument.
2631
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002632- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
2633 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
2634 in the archive.
2635
2636- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
2637 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
2638
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00002639- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
2640 569574).
2641
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002642- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
2643 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
2644 no more.
2645
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002646- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
2647 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
2648 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
2649 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
2650 code coverage.
2651
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002652- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
2653 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
2654 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002655 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
2656 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002657
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002658- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
2659 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
2660 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00002661 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002662
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00002663- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
2664
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00002665- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
2666 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
2667 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
2668 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
2669
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00002670- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
2671 handling.
2672
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00002673- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
2674 __doc__ of data descriptors.
2675
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00002676- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
2677 in socket.py.
2678
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00002679- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
2680
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00002681- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
2682 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
2683 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
2684 opener with proxy support.
2685
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002686- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
2687
2688- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
2689
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002690Tools/Demos
2691-----------
2692
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00002693- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
2694
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002695- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
2696
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002697- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
2698 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00002699
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00002700- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
2701 files.
2702
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002703Build
2704-----
2705
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002706- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00002707 different root directory.
2708
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002709C API
2710-----
2711
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00002712- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
2713 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
2714 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
2715 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
2716 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
2717 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
2718 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
2719 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
2720 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
2721 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
2722
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002723- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
2724 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
2725 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
2726 from Python.
2727
2728
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002729New platforms
2730-------------
2731
2732None this time.
2733
2734Tests
2735-----
2736
2737- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
2738 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
2739
2740Windows
2741-------
2742
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00002743- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
2744
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00002745- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
2746 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
2747 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
2748 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
2749 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
2750 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
2751 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
2752 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
2753 that's what it's for.
2754
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002755Mac
2756---
2757
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00002758- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
2759 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
2760 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
2761 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00002762- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
2763 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
2764- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002765
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002766SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
2767------------------------------------
2768
2769430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
2770598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
2771622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
2772661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
2773683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
2774697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
2775713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
2776724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
2777727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
2778729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
2779730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
2780731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
2781732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
2782733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
2783735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
2784740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
2785744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
2786745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
2787747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
2788749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
2789751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
2790753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
2791755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
2792757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
2793760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
2794
2795
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002796What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
2797================================
2798
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00002799*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002800
2801Core and builtins
2802-----------------
2803
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00002804- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
2805 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
2806
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00002807- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
2808 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
2809 and cannot be strings).
2810
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00002811- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
2812 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
2813 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
2814 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
2815
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00002816- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
2817 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
2818 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
2819 Python itself.
2820
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00002821- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
2822 the referenced object, if it has one.
2823
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00002824- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
2825 the thread started at
2826 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
2827
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00002828- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
2829 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
2830 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
2831 placed on a list index.
2832
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00002833- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
2834 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
2835 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
2836 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
2837
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002838- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
2839 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
2840 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
2841 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
2842 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
2843 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
2844 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
2845
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00002846- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
2847 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
2848 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
2849 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
2850 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
2851
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00002852- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
2853 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00002854
2855- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
2856 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
2857 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
2858 #693195.)
2859
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00002860- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
2861 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002862
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002863- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00002864 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002865 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
2866 interpreter executions, would fail.
2867
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002868- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00002869 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00002870 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002871
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002872Extension modules
2873-----------------
2874
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00002875- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
2876 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
2877 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
2878 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
2879
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00002880- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
2881 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
2882
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00002883- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
2884 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
2885 and Greg Chapman.)
2886
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002887- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
2888 recursively.
2889
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00002890- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00002891 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
2892 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
2893 leaks.
2894
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00002895- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
2896
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00002897- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
2898 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
2899 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
2900 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
2901 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
2902 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
2903 #705836.
2904
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002905- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00002906 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
2907
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00002908- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
2909 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
2910 See SF bug #692416.
2911
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00002912- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
2913 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
2914
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00002915- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
2916 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
2917 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002918
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002919- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00002920 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
2921 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
2922
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00002923- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
2924 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
2925 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
2926 timeouts to work properly.
2927
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002928Library
2929-------
2930
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002931- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
2932 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
2933 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
2934 future release.
2935
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00002936- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
2937 for querying platform dependent features.
2938
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00002939- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00002940
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00002941- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
2942 pickle protocol versions.
2943
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00002944- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
2945 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
2946 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
2947
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00002948- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
2949
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00002950- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
2951 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
2952 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
2953 modules.
2954
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00002955- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
2956 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
2957 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
2958
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002959- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
2960 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
2961
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00002962- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
2963 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
2964 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
2965
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002966- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00002967 MS Office extensions.
2968
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00002969- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
2970 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
2971
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00002972- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
2973 execution speed of expressions and statements.
2974
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002975- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
2976 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
2977 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
2978 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
2979 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
2980 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
2981
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002982- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
2983 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
2984 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002985
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00002986- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
2987 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
2988 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
2989
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00002990- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
2991
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00002992- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
2993 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
2994 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
2995
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002996Tools/Demos
2997-----------
2998
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00002999- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
3000 See the module docstring for details.
3001
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003002Build
3003-----
3004
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00003005- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
3006 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003007
3008C API
3009-----
3010
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00003011- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
3012
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00003013- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
3014 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
3015 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
3016
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00003017- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
3018 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00003019
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00003020 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
3021 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
3022 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00003023
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00003024- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00003025 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
3026
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00003027- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
3028 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
3029 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003030
3031New platforms
3032-------------
3033
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00003034None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003035
3036Tests
3037-----
3038
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00003039- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
3040 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003041
3042Windows
3043-------
3044
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00003045- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
3046 function.
3047
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00003048- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
3049 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003050
3051Mac
3052---
3053
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00003054- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
3055 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00003056
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00003057- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
3058 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003059
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00003060- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
3061 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
3062 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00003063
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00003064- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00003065 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
3066 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00003067
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00003068- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
3069 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003070
3071
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003072What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
3073=================================
3074
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00003075*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003076
3077Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00003078-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003079
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00003080- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
3081 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
3082 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
3083
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00003084- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
3085 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
3086 (SF patch #664376.)
3087
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00003088- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
3089 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
3090 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
3091 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
3092 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
3093 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00003094 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00003095
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00003096- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
3097 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
3098 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
3099 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003100 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00003101
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00003102- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
3103 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
3104 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
3105 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
3106 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
3107 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
3108 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
3109 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
3110 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
3111 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
3112 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
3113
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00003114- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
3115 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
3116 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
3117 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
3118 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
3119 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
3120
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00003121- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
3122 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
3123
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00003124- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
3125 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
3126 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
3127 case.)
3128
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00003129- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
3130 passed as unicode strings.
3131
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00003132- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
3133 See SF bug #683467.
3134
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00003135- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
3136 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
3137
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00003138- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
3139
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00003140- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
3141
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00003142- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
3143 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
3144 arguments.
3145
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00003146- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
3147 See SF bug #667147.
3148
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00003149- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003150 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00003151 See SF bug #676155.
3152
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00003153- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00003154 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00003155 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
3156 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
3157 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
3158 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
3159 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
3160 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00003161
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003162Extension modules
3163-----------------
3164
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00003165- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
3166 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
3167 tp_as_number pointer.
3168
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00003169- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
3170 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
3171 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
3172 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
3173 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
3174
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003175- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
3176
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00003177- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
3178
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00003179- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00003180 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00003181 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
3182 patch #678531.)
3183
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00003184- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
3185 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
3186
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00003187- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
3188 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
3189
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00003190- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
3191
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00003192- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
3193 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
3194 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
3195
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003196- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
3197
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00003198- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
3199 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
3200
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003201- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003202
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003203- datetime changes:
3204
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00003205 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
3206
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00003207 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
3208 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
3209 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
3210 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
3211 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
3212 now.
3213
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003214 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003215 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
3216 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003217
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003218 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003219 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003220 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
3221 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
3222 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
3223 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003224
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00003225 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
3226 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
3227 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003228 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
3229
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00003230 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
3231 by a later example coded by Guido.
3232
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003233 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003234 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
3235 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
3236 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003237 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
3238 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
3239
3240 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
3241 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
3242 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
3243 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
3244 tzinfo subclass instance.
3245
3246 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
3247 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
3248 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
3249 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
3250 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
3251 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
3252 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
3253 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003254
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003255 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
3256 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
3257 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
3258 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
3259 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003260 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
3261
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003262 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003263
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003264 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
3265 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
3266 as a naive datetime object.
3267
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00003268 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
3269 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
3270 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
3271
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00003272 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
3273 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
3274 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
3275 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
3276 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
3277 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
3278 comparison.
3279
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003280 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
3281 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
3282 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
3283 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003284 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003285
3286 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003287
3288 and ::
3289
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003290 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
3291
3292 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
3293 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
3294 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
3295 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
3296
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00003297 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
3298 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
3299 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
3300 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
3301 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
3302
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003303 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
3304 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00003305 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
3306 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003307
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003308Library
3309-------
3310
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003311- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
3312 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
3313
3314- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
3315 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
3316 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
3317 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
3318 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
3319 See PEP 307 for details.
3320
3321- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
3322 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
3323
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00003324- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
3325 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00003326 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003327 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
3328 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00003329 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00003330
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00003331- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
3332 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
3333
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003334- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
3335 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
3336 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
3337
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00003338- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
3339
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00003340- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
3341 exception.
3342
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00003343- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
3344 class.
3345
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00003346- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
3347 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
3348 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
3349
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00003350- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
3351 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
3352
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003353- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00003354 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
3355 See SF bug #659228.
3356
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00003357- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
3358 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
3359 See SF patch #651082.
3360
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00003361- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003362
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00003363- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
3364 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
3365
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003366- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003367 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003368
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00003369- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
3370 DOS paths from other platforms.
3371
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003372Tools/Demos
3373-----------
3374
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003375- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
3376 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
3377 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
3378 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
3379 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
3380 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
3381 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
3382 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
3383 example:
3384
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00003385 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
3386 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003387
3388 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
3389
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003390
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003391Build
3392-----
3393
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003394- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
3395 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
3396 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003397 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
3398
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003399 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
3400
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00003401- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
3402 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
3403 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
3404 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
3405 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
3406 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
3407 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
3408 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
3409 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
3410
3411- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
3412 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
3413 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
3414 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
3415
3416- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
3417 from the Tools/scripts directory.
3418
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003419C API
3420-----
3421
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003422- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
3423 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00003424
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00003425- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
3426 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
3427 tp_as_number pointer.
3428
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00003429- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
3430 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
3431 (SF #681367)
3432
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00003433- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
3434 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
3435 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
3436 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00003437
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003438Tests
3439-----
3440
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00003441- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003442 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
3443 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
3444 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
3445 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
3446 pydoc.)
3447
3448- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
3449
3450- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003451
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003452Windows
3453-------
3454
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00003455- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
3456 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
3457 time).
3458
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00003459- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
3460 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
3461
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00003462- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
3463 release without strong cryptography.
3464
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003465- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003466 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003467
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003468- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
3469 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
3470
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003471Mac
3472---
3473
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003474- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
3475 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003476
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00003477- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
3478 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
3479 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003480
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003481- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
3482 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003483
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003484- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
3485 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
3486 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
3487 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003488
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003489- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00003490 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
3491 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
3492 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003493
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003494
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003495What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003496=================================
3497
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00003498*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003499
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003500Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003501--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003502
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00003503- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
3504
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003505- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
3506 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003507 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003508 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003509 a different meaning than before.
3510
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003511- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003512 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003513 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003514
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003515- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003516 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003517 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003518
3519- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
3520 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
3521 and deallocation.
3522
3523- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
3524 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
3525
3526- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
3527 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
3528 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
3529 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
3530 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
3531
3532- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
3533 now detected by the garbage collector.
3534
3535- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
3536 [SF bug 519621]
3537
3538- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
3539 identifier.
3540
3541- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
3542 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
3543 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
3544 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
3545 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
3546 [SF bug 563060]
3547
3548- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
3549 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
3550 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
3551 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
3552 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
3553
3554- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
3555 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
3556 not called. [SF bug #537450]
3557
3558- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
3559
3560- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
3561 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
3562 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
3563 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
3564 state of the slots would be lost.)
3565
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003566Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003567-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003568
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003569- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003570 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
3571 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
3572 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
3573 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003574 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
3575 Jython 2.1.
3576
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003577- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003578 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003579 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
3580 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
3581 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
3582 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
3583 these, see PEP 302.
3584
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003585- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
3586 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
3587 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
3588
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00003589- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
3590 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
3591 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
3592
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00003593- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
3594 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
3595 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
3596
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003597- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
3598 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
3599 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
3600 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
3601 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
3602 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
3603 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
3604 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
3605 releases or implementations.
3606
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003607- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003608 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
3609 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003610
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00003611- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
3612 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
3613
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003614- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
3615 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
3616 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
3617
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00003618- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
3619 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
3620
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003621- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
3622 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003623 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
3624 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003625
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00003626- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
3627 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
3628 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
3629 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
3630 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
3631
3632 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
3633 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
3634 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
3635 pattern.
3636
3637 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
3638 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
3639 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
3640 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
3641
3642 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
3643 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
3644 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
3645 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
3646 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
3647 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
3648
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00003649- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
3650 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
3651 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
3652 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
3653 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
3654 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
3655 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
3656 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00003657
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00003658- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
3659 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
3660 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
3661 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
3662 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003663 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
3664 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
3665 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
3666 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
3667 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
3668 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
3669 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003670
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003671- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
3672 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
3673
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00003674- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
3675 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
3676 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
3677 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
3678 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
3679 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
3680 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
3681 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
3682 to Zack Weinberg!
3683
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00003684- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
3685 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
3686 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
3687 type. This has been fixed now.
3688
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00003689- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
3690 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
3691 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
3692
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003693- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
3694 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
3695 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
3696 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
3697 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
3698 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
3699 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
3700 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00003701 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003702
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00003703- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
3704 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
3705 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00003706
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003707- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
3708 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
3709 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
3710 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
3711 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
3712 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
3713 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
3714 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003715 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003716 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
3717 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
3718
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00003719- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
3720 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
3721 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
3722 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
3723 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
3724 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
3725 this.)
3726
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003727- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
3728 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003729 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003730 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003731 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
3732 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00003733 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
3734 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003735
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003736- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
3737 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
3738 currently running.
3739
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00003740- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
3741 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
3742 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
3743 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
3744
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00003745- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
3746 as directory names.
3747
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00003748- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
3749 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
3750
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00003751- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
3752 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
3753
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003754- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00003755 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
3756 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003757
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00003758- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
3759 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
3760 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
3761 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
3762 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
3763
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003764- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
3765 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
3766 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
3767 removed.
3768
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00003769- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
3770 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
3771 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
3772
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00003773- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
3774 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
3775 to __debug__.
3776
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00003777- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
3778 string to the left with zeros. For example,
3779 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
3780
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00003781- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
3782 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
3783 deprecated now.
3784
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00003785- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
3786 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
3787 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00003788
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00003789- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
3790 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
3791 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
3792 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
3793 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00003794
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00003795- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
3796 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
3797
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003798- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
3799 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
3800 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003801 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003802 is backward compatible.
3803
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00003804- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
3805 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
3806 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
3807 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
3808 could access a pointer to freed memory.
3809
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00003810- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
3811 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
3812 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
3813 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
3814 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
3815 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003816
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00003817- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
3818 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
3819
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003820- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
3821 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
3822
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003823- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
3824 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
3825 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
3826 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
3827 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
3828
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00003829- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
3830 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
3831 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
3832
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003833- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00003834 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
3835
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00003836- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
3837 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
3838 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00003839
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00003840- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
3841 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
3842
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00003843- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
3844 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
3845 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
3846
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00003847- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
3848
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003849Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003850-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003851
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00003852- Added three operators to the operator module:
3853 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
3854 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
3855 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
3856
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00003857- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
3858
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003859- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
3860 archives.
3861
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003862- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
3863 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
3864 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
3865
3866 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
3867
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003868- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
3869 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
3870 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00003871 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003872
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00003873- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
3874 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
3875 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
3876 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003877 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
3878 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
3879 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
3880 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00003881
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00003882- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
3883 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00003884
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00003885- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
3886
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00003887- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
3888 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
3889
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00003890- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
3891 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
3892 supported.
3893
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00003894- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
3895
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00003896- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
3897 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00003898
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00003899- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
3900 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
3901
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003902- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
3903
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003904- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
3905 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
3906
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00003907- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
3908 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
3909 functions but callable type objects.
3910
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003911- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003912 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003913 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003914
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00003915- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
3916 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00003917
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00003918- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
3919 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00003920
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00003921- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
3922 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
3923 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
3924 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
3925
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00003926- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
3927 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00003928
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00003929- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
3930 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
3931 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
3932 and __imul__.
3933
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00003934- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00003935 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
3936 is called.
3937
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00003938- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
3939 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
3940 interpreter was compiled.
3941
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003942- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
3943 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
3944 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003945 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003946 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
3947 1, not 2.
3948
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00003949- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
3950 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
3951 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
3952 limit.
3953
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00003954- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
3955 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
3956 bug #623464.
3957
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00003958- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
3959 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
3960 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
3961 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
3962
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003963Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003964-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003965
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00003966- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
3967
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00003968- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
3969 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
3970 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
3971 with Python 2.3a2.
3972
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00003973- os.path exposes getctime.
3974
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003975- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003976 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003977 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003978 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003979 unit tests of floating point results.
3980
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00003981- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
3982 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
3983 has been increased.
3984
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003985- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
3986 executed.
3987
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00003988- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
3989 postinstallation script.
3990
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00003991- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
3992 test the current module.
3993
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003994- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00003995 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
3996 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
3997 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
3998 this behavior needs to be controlled.
3999
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00004000- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00004001 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00004002 Ward's Optik package.
4003
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00004004- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
4005 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
4006 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
4007 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
4008
4009- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
4010 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00004011 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00004012
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00004013- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
4014 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
4015 shelf are binary pickles.
4016
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00004017- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
4018 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
4019
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00004020- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
4021 modules are iterators now.
4022
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00004023- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
4024 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
4025 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
4026 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
4027 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
4028 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00004029
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00004030- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
4031 with their entity value.
4032
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00004033- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
4034
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00004035- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
4036 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00004037
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00004038- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
4039 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00004040 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00004041
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00004042- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
4043 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
4044 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
4045 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
4046 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
4047 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
4048 main():
4049
4050 import locale
4051 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
4052
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00004053- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
4054 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
4055
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00004056- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
4057 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
4058 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
4059 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
4060 to the new standard.
4061
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00004062- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
4063 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
4064 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
4065 an extension to the database.
4066
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00004067- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
4068 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
4069 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
4070 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00004071 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00004072
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00004073- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00004074 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00004075
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00004076- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
4077 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
4078 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
4079 bounded integers.
4080
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00004081- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
4082 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
4083 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
4084 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
4085 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
4086 in existence.
4087
4088 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
4089 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
4090 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
4091 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
4092 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
4093 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
4094
4095 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
4096 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
4097 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
4098 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
4099
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00004100- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
4101 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
4102 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
4103
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00004104- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
4105
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00004106- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
4107 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
4108 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
4109 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
4110
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00004111- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
4112 argument.
4113
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00004114- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
4115 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
4116 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
4117 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
4118 [SF patch 560794].
4119
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00004120- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
4121 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
4122 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00004123 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
4124 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
4125 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00004126
4127- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
4128 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00004129
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00004130- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
4131 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
4132 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
4133 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00004134
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00004135- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
4136 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
4137 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
4138 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
4139 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
4140
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00004141- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00004142
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00004143- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
4144
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00004145- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
4146 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
4147 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
4148 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
4149 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
4150 identical to None.
4151
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00004152- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
4153 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
4154 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
4155 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
4156 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
4157 results now.
4158
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00004159- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
4160 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
4161
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00004162- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
4163 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
4164 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
4165 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
4166 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
4167 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
4168 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
4169 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
4170
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00004171- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
4172
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00004173- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
4174 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
4175
4176- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
4177 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
4178 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
4179 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
4180 and other systems.
4181
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00004182- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
4183 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
4184 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
4185 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 +00004186 work well with these.
4187
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00004188- compileall now supports quiet operation.
4189
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004190- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00004191 connections.
4192
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00004193- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
4194 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
4195 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
4196
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00004197- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
4198 sets
4199
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00004200- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
4201 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
4202 name.
4203
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00004204- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
4205 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
4206 passed in.
4207
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004208- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00004209 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00004210 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
4211 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00004212
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00004213- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
4214
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00004215- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
4216
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00004217- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
4218 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
4219 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
4220
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00004221- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
4222 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
4223 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
4224 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00004225 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00004226
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004227- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00004228 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004229 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00004230
4231- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
4232 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
4233 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
4234
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004235- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00004236 the value of its expression argument.
4237
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00004238- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
4239 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
4240 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
4241
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00004242- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
4243 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
4244 skipstone browser was included.
4245
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00004246- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
4247 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
4248
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004249Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004250-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004251
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00004252- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
4253 names in addition to accepting file names.
4254
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00004255- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
4256 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
4257 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
4258 still used and useful.)
4259
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00004260- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
4261 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
4262 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
4263 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00004264
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00004265- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
4266 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
4267 the generated binary.
4268
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004269Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004270-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004271
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00004272- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
4273
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00004274- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
4275 except in the hands of experts.
4276
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00004277- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00004278 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
4279 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
4280 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00004281
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00004282- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
4283 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
4284 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
4285 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
4286 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
4287 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
4288 builds.
4289
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00004290- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
4291 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
4292 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
4293 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
4294 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
4295 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
4296 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
4297 new type.
4298
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00004299- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00004300
4301 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
4302 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
4303 positive infinities.
4304
4305 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
4306 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
4307 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
4308 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
4309 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
4310 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
4311 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
4312
4313 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
4314
4315 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
4316
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00004317- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
4318 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
4319 size of the executable.
4320
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00004321- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
4322 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
4323 configure script. On other platforms, remove
4324 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00004325
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00004326- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
4327
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00004328- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
4329 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
4330 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00004331
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00004332- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
4333 well as Unix.
4334
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00004335- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
4336 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
4337 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
4338 modules in the README file for details.
4339
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004340C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004341-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004342
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004343- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
4344 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004345 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00004346 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004347 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004348
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004349- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
4350 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
4351 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
4352 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
4353 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
4354 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004355 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004356 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
4357 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
4358 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
4359 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
4360 aligned.)
4361
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00004362- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
4363 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
4364 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
4365
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00004366- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
4367 level.
4368
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00004369- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
4370 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
4371 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
4372 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
4373 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
4374
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00004375- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
4376 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
4377 code.
4378
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00004379- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
4380 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
4381 adjusting for negative indices.
4382
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00004383- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
4384 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
4385 object.
4386
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00004387- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
4388 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
4389 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
4390
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004391- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
4392 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00004393
4394- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
4395
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00004396- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
4397 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
4398 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
4399 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
4400
4401- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
4402
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00004403- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00004404
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004405- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00004406 without going through the buffer API.
4407
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004408- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00004409
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00004410- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
4411 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
4412 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
4413 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
4414
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004415- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
4416 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
4417
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004418- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00004419 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
4420
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004421New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004422-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004423
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00004424- OpenVMS is now supported.
4425
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00004426- AtheOS is now supported.
4427
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00004428- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
4429
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00004430- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
4431
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004432Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004433-----
4434
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00004435- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
4436 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
4437 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004438
4439Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004440-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004441
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004442- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
4443 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
4444 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
4445 bugs.
4446 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004447 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00004448 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
4449 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004450 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00004451
4452- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00004453 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004454
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00004455- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
4456 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
4457
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004458- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
4459 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004460 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004461 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
4462
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00004463- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
4464 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
4465 use files" uninstall option).
4466
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00004467- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
4468
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004469- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
4470 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
4471
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004472- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
4473 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
4474 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
4475
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004476- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
4477 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
4478 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
4479 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
4480 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004481 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
4482 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
4483 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004484
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004485- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004486 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004487 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
4488 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
4489 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
4490 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
4491 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
4492 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
4493 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
4494 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
4495 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
4496 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
4497 work around.
4498
4499- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
4500 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
4501 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
4502 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
4503 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
4504 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
4505 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
4506 specified with O_CREAT too).
4507
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004508Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004509----
4510
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004511- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004512
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00004513- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
4514 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
4515 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
4516
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004517- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
4518 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
4519 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
4520
4521- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
4522 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
4523 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
4524 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
4525 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
4526 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
4527 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
4528 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00004529
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00004530- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
4531 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
4532 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004533
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004534- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
4535 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
4536 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
4537 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
4538 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004539
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004540- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
4541 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
4542 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004543
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004544- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
4545 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004546
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004547- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
4548 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
4549 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
4550 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
4551 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004552
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004553- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
4554 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
4555 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
4556
4557- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
4558 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
4559 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004560
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004561- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
4562 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
4563 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
4564 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004565 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004566
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004567- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
4568 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004569
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004570- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
4571 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00004572
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004573- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00004574 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004575 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
4576 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004577
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00004578
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004579What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004580===============================
4581
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004582*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
4583
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004584Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004585--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004586
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004587- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
4588 with a custom metaclass.
4589
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004590Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004591-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004592
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004593- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
4594 are proxies.
4595
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004596Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004597-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004598
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004599- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
4600 very short strings.
4601
4602- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
4603 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
4604 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
4605 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
4606 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
4607
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004608Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004609-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004610
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004611- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
4612 close or delete time).
4613
4614- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
4615 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
4616
4617- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
4618
4619- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004620 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004621
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004622Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004623-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004624
4625Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004626-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004627
4628C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004629-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004630
4631New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004632-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004633
4634Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004635-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004636
4637Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004638-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004639
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004640- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
4641
4642- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
4643 instances are deleted at process exit time.
4644
4645- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
4646 deleted at process exit time.
4647
4648- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
4649 in backslash.
4650
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004651Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004652----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004653
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004654- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
4655 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
4656 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
4657
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004658
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00004659What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004660===========================
4661
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004662*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
4663
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004664Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004665--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004666
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004667- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
4668 been extensively updated. See
4669
4670 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
4671
4672 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
4673
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00004674- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
4675 deleted!
4676
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00004677- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
4678 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
4679 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
4680 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
4681 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
4682
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004683- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
4684
4685 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
4686 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
4687
4688 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
4689 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
4690 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
4691 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
4692 supported anyway.
4693
4694 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
4695 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
4696
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00004697- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
4698 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
4699 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
4700 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
4701 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004702
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00004703- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
4704 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
4705 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
4706
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004707Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004708-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004709
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004710- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
4711 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
4712 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
4713 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
4714 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
4715 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00004716 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
4717 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
4718 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
4719 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004720
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00004721- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
4722 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
4723 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
4724
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004725Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004726-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004727
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004728- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
4729
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004730Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004731-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004732
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00004733- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
4734 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
4735 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
4736 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
4737 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
4738 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
4739
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00004740- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
4741
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00004742- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
4743
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00004744- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
4745
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004746- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
4747 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
4748 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
4749
4750- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
4751
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004752Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004753-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004754
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004755- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
4756 off a search on Google.
4757
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004758Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004759-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004760
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004761- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
4762 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
4763 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
4764 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
4765 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
4766 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
4767 other platforms should do likewise.
4768
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00004769- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
4770 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
4771 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
4772
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004773C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004774-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004775
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004776- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
4777 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
4778 producing key-value pairs.
4779
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004780- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004781 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004782 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
4783 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
4784 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
4785 previously went unchallenged.
4786
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004787New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004788-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004789
4790Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004791-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004792
4793Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004794-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004795
4796Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004797----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004798
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00004799- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
4800 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004801
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004802- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
4803 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
4804 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
4805 home.
4806
4807
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004808What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004809===========================
4810
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004811*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
4812
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004813Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004814--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004815
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004816- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
4817 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004818
4819 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004820 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004821
4822 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
4823 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004824 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004825 This needs to be documented.
4826
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00004827- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
4828 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
4829
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00004830- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
4831 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
4832 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
4833
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00004834- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
4835 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
4836
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004837- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
4838 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
4839 class forbids it).
4840
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00004841- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
4842 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
4843 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
4844
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004845- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
4846
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004847Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004848-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004849
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004850- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
4851 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004852 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004853
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004854- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
4855 (like 1 + '').
4856
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004857Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004858-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004859
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004860- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
4861 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
4862 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
4863 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004864 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004865 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
4866
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00004867- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
4868 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
4869 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
4870 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
4871
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004872- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
4873 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004874 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
4875 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
4876 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004877
4878- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
4879 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004880
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00004881- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
4882 bytes on its input.
4883
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004884Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004885-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004886
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004887- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00004888 convenience function.
4889
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004890- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
4891 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
4892 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004893 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
4894 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
4895 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
4896 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
4897 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
4898 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004899
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00004900- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
4901 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
4902 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
4903 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
4904
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00004905- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
4906 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
4907 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
4908
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004909- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
4910 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
4911 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
4912 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
4913
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004914- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
4915 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004916 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004917 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
4918 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
4919 new -l and -e options.
4920
4921- statcache is now deprecated.
4922
4923- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
4924 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004925 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004926 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
4927 time properly taken into account.
4928
4929- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
4930 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
4931 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
4932 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
4933
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004934Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004935-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004936
4937Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004938-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004939
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004940- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
4941 is built with libdb3 if available.
4942
4943- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
4944
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004945C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004946-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004947
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00004948- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
4949 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
4950 PySequence_Size().
4951
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004952- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
4953
4954- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
4955 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
4956 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
4957
4958- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
4959 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
4960
4961- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
4962 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
4963
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004964New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004965-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004966
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004967- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
4968 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
4969
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00004970- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
4971 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
4972
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004973- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
4974
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004975Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004976-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004977
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004978- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
4979 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
4980
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004981Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004982-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004983
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004984Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004985----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004986
4987- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
4988 removed completely in the next release.
4989
4990- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
4991 OSX.
4992
4993- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
4994 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
4995
4996- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
4997
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004998
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004999What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005000===========================
5001
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005002*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
5003
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005004Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005005--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005006
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00005007- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00005008 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00005009 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00005010 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
5011 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00005012 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
5013 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00005014 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
5015 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00005016
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00005017- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
5018 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
5019
5020- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
5021 class methods, static methods, and properties.
5022
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005023Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005024-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005025
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00005026- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
5027 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
5028 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
5029 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
5030 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
5031 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
5032 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
5033 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
5034
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005035- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
5036 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
5037 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
5038 example).
5039
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00005040- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00005041 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005042 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005043 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00005044
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00005045- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
5046 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
5047 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00005048 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00005049
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005050- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
5051 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
5052 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
5053 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
5054 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
5055 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
5056
5057 isinstance(x, (A, B))
5058
5059 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
5060
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005061Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005062-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005063
5064- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
5065
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00005066- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
5067
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00005068- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
5069 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00005070
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00005071- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
5072 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
5073 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
5074 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
5075 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
5076 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00005077 attributes.
5078
5079- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
5080 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
5081 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00005082
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005083- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
5084 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
5085 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005086
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00005087- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
5088 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
5089 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005090 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
5091 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
5092
5093- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
5094 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00005095
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005096Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005097-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00005098
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00005099- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
5100 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
5101
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00005102- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
5103 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
5104 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
5105 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
5106
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00005107- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
5108 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
5109 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
5110 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
5111
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00005112 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
5113 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
5114 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
5115 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
5116 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
5117 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
5118 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
5119 without losing information).
5120
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00005121- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00005122 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
5123 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
5124 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
5125 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
5126 module).
5127
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00005128 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00005129 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
5130 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
5131 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
5132 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00005133
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00005134- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00005135 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
5136 encoding.
5137
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00005138- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
5139 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
5140
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005141- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005142 to allow saving the message body to a file.
5143
5144- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
5145 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
5146 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
5147 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
5148
5149- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
5150
5151- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
5152 ON, and OFF.
5153
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00005154- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
5155 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
5156
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00005157Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005158-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00005159
5160- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
5161 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
5162 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005163
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005164- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
5165 been added: -X and -E.
5166
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005167Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005168-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005169
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005170- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
5171 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
5172
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005173C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005174-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005175
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00005176- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
5177 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
5178 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
5179 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
5180 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
5181
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00005182- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
5183 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
5184 as long) arguments.
5185
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00005186- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
5187 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
5188 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
5189 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
5190 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
5191 report any bugs or strange behavior).
5192
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00005193- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
5194 input.
5195
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005196New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005197-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005198
5199Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005200-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005201
5202Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005203-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005204
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00005205- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
5206 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
5207 is created for .py and .pyw files.
5208
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005209- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
5210 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
5211 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005212 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005213
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005214 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
5215 # (SIGINT) behavior.
5216 import signal
5217 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005218
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005219 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005220 while 1:
5221 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005222 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005223 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
5224 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
5225 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
5226 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005227
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005228
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005229What's New in Python 2.2a4?
5230===========================
5231
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005232*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
5233
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005234Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005235--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005236
5237- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
5238 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
5239 documentation for all operations on list objects.
5240
5241- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
5242 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
5243 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
5244 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
5245 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
5246 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
5247 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005248
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00005249- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005250 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00005251 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
5252 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
5253 associate a docstring with a property.
5254
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005255- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
5256 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
5257 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
5258 other built-in object types.
5259
5260- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
5261 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
5262 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
5263 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
5264 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
5265
5266- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
5267 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
5268
5269- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
5270 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005271 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005272 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
5273 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
5274 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
5275 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
5276 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
5277
5278- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
5279 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
5280 class.
5281
5282- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
5283 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
5284 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
5285 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
5286
5287- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
5288 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
5289 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
5290 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
5291
5292- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
5293 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
5294
5295- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
5296 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
5297 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
5298 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
5299 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005300 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005301 with the same value as s.
5302
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00005303- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
5304
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005305Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005306----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005307
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00005308- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
5309
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00005310- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
5311 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
5312 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
5313 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
5314 objects.
5315
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005316- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
5317 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00005318 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
5319 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
5320
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005321- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
5322 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
5323 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
5324
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005325Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005326-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005327
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00005328- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
5329 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
5330 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
5331 by the instances.
5332
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00005333- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
5334 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
5335 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
5336
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005337- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
5338 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
5339 before the entire comparison is complete.
5340
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00005341- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
5342 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
5343 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
5344
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00005345- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
5346 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
5347 getwriter().
5348
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005349- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
5350 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
5351
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00005352- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005353 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
5354 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
5355
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00005356- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
5357 iterable object.
5358
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005359- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
5360 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005361
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005362- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
5363 authentication.
5364
5365- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
5366 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005367
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005368- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00005369 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
5370 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
5371 a sample driver.)
5372
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005373Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005374-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005375
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005376- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
5377 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
5378 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
5379 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
5380 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
5381 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
5382 kernel has large file support.
5383
5384- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
5385 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
5386 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
5387 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
5388 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
5389
5390- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
5391 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
5392 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
5393
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005394C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005395-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005396
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005397- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
5398 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
5399
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005400New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005401-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005402
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005403- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
5404 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
5405
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005406Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005407-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005408
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005409- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
5410 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
5411 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
5412 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
5413 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
5414
5415- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
5416 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
5417 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
5418 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
5419
5420- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
5421 especially in regard to reporting errors.
5422
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005423Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005424-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005425
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005426- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005427 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
5428 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005429
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005430
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005431What's New in Python 2.2a3?
5432===========================
5433
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005434*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
5435
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005436Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005437----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005438
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005439- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
5440 big to represent as a C double.
5441
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00005442- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
5443 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
5444 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
5445 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
5446 restriction).
5447
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00005448- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
5449 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
5450 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
5451 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
5452 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
5453
5454 >>> dir([])
5455 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
5456 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
5457 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
5458 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
5459 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
5460 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
5461 'reverse', 'sort']
5462
5463 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
5464
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005465- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005466 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
5467 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
5468 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
5469 OverflowError exception.
5470
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00005471- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005472 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005473 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
5474 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
5475 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
5476 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
5477 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00005478 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005479 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
5480 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
5481
5482 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
5483 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
5484 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
5485 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005486
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005487- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005488 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
5489 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
5490 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
5491 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
5492 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
5493 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
5494 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
5495 once it is created.
5496
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00005497- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
5498 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
5499 (key, value) pairs.
5500
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005501- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005502 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
5503 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
5504
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00005505- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
5506 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
5507 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
5508 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
5509 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005510
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005511- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005512 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
5513 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
5514
5515 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
5516
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005517- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00005518 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
5519
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005520Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005521-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005522
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005523- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00005524 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
5525 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005526
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00005527- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
5528 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
5529 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
5530 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
5531 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
5532 in this area anymore).
5533
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00005534- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
5535 threading.Timer.
5536
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00005537- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
5538 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
5539
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005540- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005541 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
5542
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005543- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00005544 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
5545 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
5546 converted to Python longs.
5547
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005548- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005549 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
5550
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00005551- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
5552 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
5553 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
5554
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005555Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005556-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005557
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005558- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
5559 division operators as per PEP 238.
5560
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005561Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005562-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005563
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005564- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
5565 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
5566 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
5567 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
5568
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005569C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005570-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005571
5572- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005573
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005574- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
5575 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005576 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005577
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005578 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
5579 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005580 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005581 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005582
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005583- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005584 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
5585 module:
5586
5587 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005588
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005589 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
5590 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005591
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005592 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
5593 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005594
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005595 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
5596
5597 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
5598
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005599- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005600 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
5601 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
5602 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005603
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005604New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005605-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005606
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00005607- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
5608 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
5609 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
5610 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
5611 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005612
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005613Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005614-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005615
5616Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005617-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005618
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005619- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
5620 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
5621 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
5622 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00005623 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
5624 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
5625 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
5626 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
5627 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005628
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005629- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00005630 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
5631
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005632
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005633What's New in Python 2.2a2?
5634===========================
5635
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005636*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
5637
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005638Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005639-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005640
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00005641- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
5642 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
5643
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005644- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
5645 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
5646 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005647
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00005648- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
5649 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
5650 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
5651 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005652
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005653- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
5654
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005655- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005656
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005657Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005658-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005659
5660- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00005661 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005662 the module docstring for details.
5663
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005664Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005665-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005666
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005667- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005668 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
5669 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
5670 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005671
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005672- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
5673 Nick Mathewson.
5674
5675Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005676----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005677
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005678- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
5679 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
5680 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
5681 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
5682 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
5683 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
5684 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
5685 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
5686
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00005687- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
5688 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
5689 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
5690 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
5691
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00005692- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
5693 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
5694 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
5695 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
5696 come a long way).
5697
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005698- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
5699 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
5700 write filters for these warnings).
5701
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00005702- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
5703 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
5704 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
5705 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
5706 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
5707
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00005708- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
5709 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
5710 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
5711 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
5712 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
5713 older distribution.
5714
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005715Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005716-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005717
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005718- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
5719 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005720 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005721
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005722- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
5723 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
5724 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
5725
5726- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
5727
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005728- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
5729
5730- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
5731
5732- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
5733
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005734- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005735
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00005736- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
5737
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005738New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005739-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005740
5741C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005742-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005743
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005744- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
5745 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
5746 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
5747 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
5748 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
5749 against buffer overruns.
5750
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005751- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005752 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
5753 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005754 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
5755 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
5756 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
5757
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005758- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
5759 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
5760 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
5761 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
5762 deprecated.
5763
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005764Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005765-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005766
5767- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
5768 relevant is found.
5769
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005770
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005771What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005772===========================
5773
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005774*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
5775
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005776Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005777----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005778
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005779- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
5780 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
5781 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
5782 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
5783 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
5784 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
5785 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
5786 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005787 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005788 repaired.
5789
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005790- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00005791 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005792 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
5793 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
5794 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
5795 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
5796 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
5797 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
5798 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
5799 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
5800
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00005801- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
5802 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
5803 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
5804 leading BMO character).
5805
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005806- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
5807 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
5808 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
5809
5810 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
5811 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
5812 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005813
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005814 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
5815 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
5816 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
5817 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
5818 for various simple to use conversions.
5819
5820 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
5821 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
5822
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005823 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5824 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
5825 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
5826 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
5827 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5828 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
5829 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5830 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
5831 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5832 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
5833 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5834 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
5835 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5836 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
5837 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005838
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005839- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
5840 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
5841 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005842 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005843 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005844
5845 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005846 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
5847 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
5848 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
5849 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
5850 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005851 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
5852 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005853
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005854 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
5855 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
5856 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005857 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005858
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00005859- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
5860 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
5861 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
5862 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
5863 floating arithmetic,
5864
5865 x = 9007199254740992.0
5866 print long(x)
5867
5868 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
5869 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
5870 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
5871 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
5872 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
5873 functions are of good quality).
5874
5875 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
5876 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
5877 algorithms to break.
5878
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00005879- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
5880 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
5881 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
5882 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
5883 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
5884 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
5885 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
5886 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
5887 order.
5888
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005889- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
5890 operation along the most common code paths.
5891
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005892- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
5893 the same as dict.has_key(x).
5894
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00005895- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
5896 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
5897 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
5898 {}.update(UserDict())
5899
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005900- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
5901 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
5902 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
5903 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
5904 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
5905 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
5906 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
5907 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
5908
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005909- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005910 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005911
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005912 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00005913 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
5914 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00005915 join() method of strings
5916 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005917 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
5918 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005919 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00005920 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005921
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00005922- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
5923 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
5924
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005925- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
5926 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
5927
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00005928- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
5929 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
5930 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
5931 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
5932
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005933- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
5934 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005935 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005936 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
5937 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00005938
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00005939- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
5940
5941
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005942Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005943-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005944
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005945- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005946 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005947 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
5948 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
5949
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00005950- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
5951 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
5952
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00005953- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
5954 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
5955 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
5956 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
5957
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00005958- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
5959 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
5960 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
5961
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00005962- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
5963
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00005964- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
5965
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00005966- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
5967 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
5968 that are still imported into string.py).
5969
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005970- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
5971
5972- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
5973 Now it does.
5974
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005975- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
5976
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005977- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
5978 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
5979 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
5980 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
5981 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005982 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
5983 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005984
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00005985- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
5986 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
5987 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
5988 'help(object)'.
5989
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005990Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005991-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005992
5993- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005994 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005995 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
5996 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
5997
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005998- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005999 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
6000 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006001
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00006002C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006003-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00006004
6005- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
6006 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006007
6008----
6009
6010**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**