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Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +00007What's New in Python 2.5 alpha 1?
8=================================
9
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 Norwitzfc76d632006-01-10 06:03:13 +000015- Patch #1400181, fix unicode string formatting to not use the locale.
16 This is how string objects work. u'%f' could use , instead of .
17 for the decimal point. Now both strings and unicode always use periods.
18
Neal Norwitz671b9e32006-01-09 07:07:12 +000019- Bug #1244610, #1392915, fix build problem on OpenBSD 3.7 and 3.8.
20 configure would break checking curses.h.
21
Georg Brandlcd4d1e82005-12-27 17:37:07 +000022- Bug #959576: The pwd module is now builtin. This allows Python to be
23 built on UNIX platforms without $HOME set.
24
Neal Norwitzc10978f2005-12-19 06:07:16 +000025- Bug #1072182, fix some potential problems if characters are signed.
26
Neal Norwitz5d0ad502005-12-19 04:27:42 +000027- Bug #889500, fix line number on SyntaxWarning for global declarations.
28
Neal Norwitzdb83eb32005-12-18 05:29:30 +000029- Bug #1378022, UTF-8 files with a leading BOM crashed the interpreter.
30
Neal Norwitze7214a12005-12-18 05:03:17 +000031- Support for converting hex strings to floats no longer works.
32 This was not portable. float('0x3') now raises a ValueError.
33
Barry Warsaw2a38a862005-12-18 01:27:35 +000034- Patch #1382163: Expose Subversion revision number to Python. New C API
35 function Py_GetBuildNumber(). New attribute sys.build_number. Build number
36 is now displayed in interactive prompt banner.
37
Georg Brandlfa166682005-12-17 21:45:17 +000038- Implementation of PEP 341 - Unification of try/except and try/finally.
39 "except" clauses can now be written together with a "finally" clause in
Neal Norwitz11ca77e2005-12-17 22:24:12 +000040 one try statement instead of two nested ones. Patch #1355913.
Georg Brandlfa166682005-12-17 21:45:17 +000041
Hye-Shik Chang835b2432005-12-17 04:38:31 +000042- Bug #1379994: Builtin unicode_escape and raw_unicode_escape codec
43 now encodes backslash correctly.
44
Martin v. Löwisb45b3152005-11-28 17:34:23 +000045- Patch #1350409: Work around signal handling bug in Visual Studio 2005.
46
Georg Brandlf06e30a2005-11-24 15:37:42 +000047- Bug #1281408: Py_BuildValue now works correct even with unsigned longs
48 and long longs.
49
Neal Norwitz67715f02005-11-09 06:59:35 +000050- SF Bug #1350188, "setdlopenflags" leads to crash upon "import"
51 It was possible dlerror() returns a NULL pointer, use a default error
52 message in this case.
53
Marc-André Lemburga5bafc42005-10-23 13:43:40 +000054- Replaced most Unicode charmap codecs with new ones using the
55 new Unicode translate string feature in the builtin charmap
56 codec; the codecs were created from the mapping tables available
57 at ftp.unicode.org and contain a few updates (e.g. the Mac OS
58 encodings now include a mapping for the Apple logo)
59
Tim Peterse3547fd2005-12-16 23:13:57 +000060- Added a few more codecs for Mac OS encodings
Marc-André Lemburga5bafc42005-10-23 13:43:40 +000061
Neal Norwitzfed9b3e2005-10-21 06:32:02 +000062- Speed up some Unicode operations.
63
64- A new AST parser implementation was completed.
65
Neal Norwitzb6570f52005-10-21 06:26:10 +000066- SF bug #1167751: fix incorrect code being for generator expressions.
Neal Norwitz16af7342005-10-21 06:25:33 +000067 The following code now raises a SyntaxError: foo(a = i for i in range(10))
68
Neal Norwitz708e51a2005-10-03 04:48:15 +000069- SF Bug #976608: fix SystemError when mtime of an imported file is -1.
70
Neal Norwitz11bd1192005-10-03 00:54:56 +000071- SF Bug #887946: fix segfault when redirecting stdin from a directory.
72 Provide a warning when a directory is passed on the command line.
73
Neal Norwitz40d37812005-10-02 01:48:49 +000074- Fix segfault with invalid coding.
75
76- SF bug #772896: unknown encoding results in MemoryError.
77
Raymond Hettinger6b27cda2005-09-24 21:23:05 +000078- All iterators now have a Boolean value of true. Formerly, some iterators
79 supported a __len__() method which evaluated to False when the iterator
80 was empty.
81
Guido van Rossum630db602005-09-20 18:49:54 +000082- On 64-bit platforms, when __len__() returns a value that cannot be
83 represented as a C int, raise OverflowError.
84
Skip Montanarof8948ca2005-09-19 03:54:46 +000085- test__locale is skipped on OS X < 10.4 (only partial locale support is
Walter Dörwald6611a8b2005-10-09 19:28:35 +000086 present).
Skip Montanarof8948ca2005-09-19 03:54:46 +000087
Georg Brandl80bbf3f2005-09-14 19:38:29 +000088- SF bug #893549: parsing keyword arguments was broken with a few format
89 codes.
90
Guido van Rossum8ee3e5a2005-09-14 18:09:42 +000091- Changes donated by Elemental Security to make it work on AIX 5.3
92 with IBM's 64-bit compiler (SF patch #1284289). This also closes SF
93 bug #105470: test_pwd fails on 64bit system (Opteron).
94
Guido van Rossum539c6622005-09-14 17:49:54 +000095- Changes donated by Elemental Security to make it work on HP-UX 11 on
96 Itanium2 with HP's 64-bit compiler (SF patch #1225212).
97
Georg Brandl4550b8d2005-08-26 06:43:52 +000098- Disallow keyword arguments for type constructors that don't use them
Georg Brandl02c42872005-08-26 06:42:30 +000099 (fixes bug #1119418).
100
Martin v. Löwisd35edda2005-08-24 08:39:24 +0000101- Forward UnicodeDecodeError into SyntaxError for source encoding errors.
102
Barry Warsawe2eca0b2005-08-15 18:14:19 +0000103- SF bug #900092: When tracing (e.g. for hotshot), restore 'return' events for
104 exceptions that cause a function to exit.
105
Raymond Hettinger9f1a6792005-07-31 01:16:36 +0000106- The implementation of set() and frozenset() was revised to use its
107 own internal data structure. Memory consumption is reduced by 1/3
108 and there are modest speed-ups as well. The API is unchanged.
109
Tim Petersde7990b2005-07-17 23:45:23 +0000110- SF bug #1238681: freed pointer is used in longobject.c:long_pow().
111
Michael W. Hudson0edc7a02005-07-12 10:21:19 +0000112- SF bug #1229429: PyObject_CallMethod failed to decrement some
113 reference counts in some error exit cases.
114
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000115- SF bug #1185883: Python's small-object memory allocator took over
116 a block managed by the platform C library whenever a realloc specified
117 a small new size. However, there's no portable way to know then how
118 much of the address space following the pointer is valid, so no
119 portable way to copy data from the C-managed block into Python's
120 small-object space without risking a memory fault. Python's small-object
121 realloc now leaves such blocks under the control of the platform C
122 realloc.
123
Michael W. Hudsonb8963812005-07-05 15:21:58 +0000124- SF bug #1232517: An overflow error was not detected properly when
125 attempting to convert a large float to an int in os.utime().
126
Raymond Hettinger3296e692005-06-29 23:29:56 +0000127- SF bug #1224347: hex longs now print with lowercase letters just
128 like their int counterparts.
129
Michael W. Hudson188d4362005-06-20 16:52:57 +0000130- SF bug #1163563: the original fix for bug #1010677 ("thread Module
131 Breaks PyGILState_Ensure()") broke badly in the case of multiple
132 interpreter states; back out that fix and do a better job (see
133 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2005-June/054258.html
134 for a longer write-up of the problem).
135
Michael W. Hudsondf888462005-06-03 14:41:55 +0000136- SF patch #1180995: marshal now uses a binary format by default when
137 serializing floats.
138
Michael W. Hudsonda85a902005-06-01 11:34:22 +0000139- SF patch #1181301: on platforms that appear to use IEEE 754 floats,
140 the routines that promise to produce IEEE 754 binary representations
141 of floats now simply copy bytes around.
142
Skip Montanarobbf12ba2005-05-20 03:07:06 +0000143- bug #967182: disallow opening files with 'wU' or 'aU' as specified by PEP
144 278.
145
Brett Cannonc3647ac2005-04-26 03:45:26 +0000146- patch #1109424: int, long, float, complex, and unicode now check for the
147 proper magic slot for type conversions when subclassed. Previously the
148 magic slot was ignored during conversion. Semantics now match the way
149 subclasses of str always behaved. int/long/float, conversion of an instance
Walter Dörwald78a78b02005-09-01 12:04:29 +0000150 to the base class has been moved to the proper nb_* magic slot and out of
Brett Cannonc3647ac2005-04-26 03:45:26 +0000151 PyNumber_*().
152 Thanks Walter Dörwald.
153
Barry Warsawc8d907c2005-04-19 23:43:40 +0000154- Descriptors defined in C with a PyGetSetDef structure, where the setter is
155 NULL, now raise an AttributeError when attempting to set or delete the
156 attribute. Previously a TypeError was raised, but this was inconsistent
157 with the equivalent pure-Python implementation.
158
Michael W. Hudson774479c2005-04-18 08:46:17 +0000159- It is now safe to call PyGILState_Release() before
160 PyEval_InitThreads() (note that if there is reason to believe there
161 are multiple threads around you still must call PyEval_InitThreads()
162 before using the Python API; this fix is for extension modules that
163 have no way of knowing if Python is multi-threaded yet).
164
Michael W. Hudsone3afc592005-04-07 10:11:19 +0000165- Typing Ctrl-C whilst raw_input() was waiting in a build with threads
166 disabled caused a crash.
167
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +0000168- Bug #1165306: instancemethod_new allowed the creation of a method
169 with im_class == im_self == NULL, which caused a crash when called.
170
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000171- Move exception finalisation later in the shutdown process - this
Anthony Baxter12b6f6c2005-03-29 13:36:16 +0000172 fixes the crash seen in bug #1165761
173
Raymond Hettinger96229b12005-03-11 06:49:40 +0000174- Added two new builtins, any() and all().
175
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +0000176- Defining a class with empty parentheses is now allowed
Brett Cannonf4189912005-04-09 02:30:16 +0000177 (e.g., ``class C(): pass`` is no longer a syntax error).
178 Patch #1176012 added support to the 'parser' module and 'compiler' package
179 (thanks to logistix for that added support).
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +0000180
Martin v. Löwis96d743e2005-03-03 23:00:26 +0000181- Patch #1115086: Support PY_LONGLONG in structmember.
182
Raymond Hettingerb67cc802005-03-03 16:45:19 +0000183- Bug #1155938: new style classes did not check that __init__() was
184 returning None.
185
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000186- Patch #802188: Report characters after line continuation character
Martin v. Löwis4bf108d2005-03-03 11:45:45 +0000187 ('\') with a specific error message.
188
Martin v. Löwisff232d72005-03-03 09:24:38 +0000189- Bug #723201: Raise a TypeError for passing bad objects to 'L' format.
190
Michael W. Hudson8e1afab2005-02-17 14:55:21 +0000191- Bug #1124295: the __name__ attribute of file objects was
192 inadvertently made inaccessible in restricted mode.
193
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000194- Bug #1074011: closing sys.std{out,err} now causes a flush() and
Martin v. Löwis8e3ca8a2005-01-23 09:41:49 +0000195 an ferror() call.
196
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000197- min() and max() now support key= arguments with the same meaning as in
198 list.sort().
199
Raymond Hettingerc34f8672005-01-02 06:17:33 +0000200- The peephole optimizer now performs simple constant folding in expressions:
201 (2+3) --> (5).
202
Raymond Hettingera422c342005-01-11 03:03:27 +0000203- set and frozenset objects can now be marshalled. SF #1098985.
204
Michael W. Hudsonfaa76482005-01-31 17:09:25 +0000205- Bug #1077106: Poor argument checking could cause memory corruption
206 in calls to os.read().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000207
Jeremy Hyltonab630502005-02-04 18:44:06 +0000208- The parser did not complain about future statements in illegal
209 positions. It once again reports a syntax error if a future
210 statement occurs after anything other than a doc string.
211
Neil Schemenauercf52c072005-08-12 17:34:58 +0000212- Change the %s format specifier for str objects so that it returns a
213 unicode instance if the argument is not an instance of basestring and
214 calling __str__ on the argument returns a unicode instance.
215
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000216Extension Modules
217-----------------
218
Martin v. Löwis11017b12006-01-14 18:12:57 +0000219- Patch #1103116: Basic AF_NETLINK support.
220
Neal Norwitz3b4fff82006-01-11 08:54:45 +0000221- Bug #1402308, (possible) segfault when using mmap.mmap(-1, ...)
222
Neal Norwitz88bbd732006-01-10 07:05:44 +0000223- Bug #1400822, _curses over{lay,write} doesn't work when passing 6 ints.
224 Also fix ungetmouse() which did not accept arguments properly.
225 The code now conforms to the documented signature.
226
Neal Norwitz5e3d8622006-01-09 06:24:35 +0000227- Bug #1400115, Fix segfault when calling curses.panel.userptr()
228 without prior setting of the userptr.
229
Neal Norwitz40c6b472006-01-05 05:43:35 +0000230- Fix 64-bit problems in bsddb.
231
Neal Norwitz8856fb72005-12-18 03:34:22 +0000232- Patch #1365916: fix some unsafe 64-bit mmap methods.
233
Hye-Shik Changc5c57e62005-12-12 11:48:32 +0000234- Bug #1290333: Added a workaround for cjkcodecs' _codecs_cn build
235 problem on AIX.
236
Georg Brandla13c2442005-11-22 19:30:31 +0000237- Bug #869197: os.setgroups rejects long integer arguments
238
Neal Norwitz0f46bbf2005-11-03 05:00:25 +0000239- Bug #1346533, select.poll() doesn't raise an error if timeout > sys.maxint
240
Neal Norwitz7b631792005-11-02 05:26:07 +0000241- Bug #1344508, Fix UNIX mmap leaking file descriptors
242
Neal Norwitzf3396542005-10-28 05:52:22 +0000243- Patch #1338314, Bug #1336623: fix tarfile so it can extract
244 REGTYPE directories from tarfiles written by old programs.
245
Gregory P. Smithe101df92006-01-24 20:09:45 +0000246- Patch #1407992, fixes broken bsddb module db associate when using
247 BerkeleyDB 3.3, 4.0 or 4.1.
248
249- Get bsddb module to build with BerkeleyDB version 4.4
250
251- Get bsddb module to build with BerkeleyDB version 3.2
Neal Norwitzfed9b3e2005-10-21 06:32:02 +0000252
Neal Norwitz484d9a42005-09-30 04:46:49 +0000253- Patch #1309009, Fix segfault in pyexpat when the XML document is in latin_1,
254 but Python incorrectly assumes it is in UTF-8 format
255
Georg Brandle677adc2005-09-29 13:40:49 +0000256- Fix parse errors in the readline module when compiling without threads.
257
Hye-Shik Chang9ceebd52005-09-24 14:58:47 +0000258- Patch #1288833: Removed thread lock from socket.getaddrinfo on
259 FreeBSD 5.3 and later versions which got thread-safe getaddrinfo(3).
260
Michael W. Hudson10402a32005-09-22 09:19:01 +0000261- Patches #1298449 and #1298499: Add some missing checks for error
262 returns in cStringIO.c.
263
Neal Norwitz058bde12005-09-21 06:44:25 +0000264- Patch #1297028: fix segfault if call type on MultibyteCodec,
265 MultibyteStreamReader, or MultibyteStreamWriter
266
Neal Norwitzcfe7dd92005-09-19 06:49:27 +0000267- Fix memory leak in posix.access().
268
Martin v. Löwis8b291e22005-09-18 08:17:56 +0000269- Patch #1213831: Fix typo in unicodedata._getcode.
270
Georg Brandlfb1ef852005-09-14 20:53:32 +0000271- Bug #1007046: os.startfile() did not accept unicode strings encoded in
272 the file system encoding.
273
Georg Brandld2e3ba72005-08-26 08:34:00 +0000274- Patch #756021: Special-case socket.inet_aton('255.255.255.255') for
275 platforms that don't have inet_aton().
Georg Brandl02760f92005-08-25 13:10:41 +0000276
Georg Brandld2e3ba72005-08-26 08:34:00 +0000277- Bug #1215928: Fix bz2.BZ2File.seek() for 64-bit file offsets.
278
279- Bug #1191043: Fix bz2.BZ2File.(x)readlines for files containing one
Georg Brandl02760f92005-08-25 13:10:41 +0000280 line without newlines.
281
Georg Brandl38387b82005-08-24 07:17:40 +0000282- Bug #728515: mmap.resize() now resizes the file on Unix as it did
283 on Windows.
284
Walter Dörwalda05834e2005-10-09 19:38:21 +0000285- Patch #1180695: Add nanosecond stat resolution, and st_gen,
Martin v. Löwisebd9d5b2005-08-09 15:00:59 +0000286 st_birthtime for FreeBSD.
287
Michael W. Hudson8137bea2005-07-27 20:24:40 +0000288- Patch #1231069: The fcntl.ioctl function now uses the 'I' code for
289 the request code argument, which results in more C-like behaviour
290 for large or negative values.
291
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000292- Bug #1234979: For the argument of thread.Lock.acquire, the Windows
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000293 implementation treated all integer values except 1 as false.
Georg Brandlaf410b52005-07-08 22:26:13 +0000294
Georg Brandl6b95f1d2005-06-03 19:47:00 +0000295- Bug #1194181: bz2.BZ2File didn't handle mode 'U' correctly.
296
Hye-Shik Chang5f937a72005-06-02 13:09:30 +0000297- Patch #1212117: os.stat().st_flags is now accessible as a attribute
298 if available on the platform.
299
Skip Montanaro5ff14922005-05-16 02:42:22 +0000300- Patch #1103951: Expose O_SHLOCK and O_EXLOCK in the posix module if
301 available on the platform.
302
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +0000303- Bug #1166660: The readline module could segfault if hook functions
304 were set in a different thread than that which called readline.
305
Raymond Hettinger4aec61e2005-03-18 21:20:23 +0000306- collections.deque objects now support a remove() method.
307
Raymond Hettinger984f9bb2005-03-09 16:38:48 +0000308- operator.itemgetter() and operator.attrgetter() now support retrieving
309 multiple fields. This provides direct support for sorting on multiple
310 keys (primary, secondary, etc).
311
Martin v. Löwisb60ae992005-03-08 09:10:29 +0000312- os.access now supports Unicode path names on non-Win32 systems.
313
Martin v. Löwisfd78a6f2005-03-04 14:37:01 +0000314- Patches #925152, #1118602: Avoid reading after the end of the buffer
315 in pyexpat.GetInputContext.
316
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000317- Patches #749830, #1144555: allow UNIX mmap size to default to current
Martin v. Löwis7fe60c02005-03-03 11:22:44 +0000318 file size.
319
Raymond Hettinger9c323f82005-02-28 19:39:44 +0000320- Added functional.partial(). See PEP309.
321
Martin v. Löwis9533e342005-02-27 20:33:25 +0000322- Patch #1093585: raise a ValueError for negative history items in readline.
323 {remove_history,replace_history}
324
Fred Drake9c131f22005-01-23 15:16:08 +0000325- The spwd module has been added, allowing access to the shadow password
326 database.
Martin v. Löwisc3001752005-01-23 09:27:24 +0000327
Martin v. Löwisfe33d0b2005-01-16 08:57:39 +0000328- stat_float_times is now True.
329
Raymond Hettingerb0900e62004-12-16 16:23:40 +0000330- array.array objects are now picklable.
331
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000332- the cPickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
333 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
334
Raymond Hettingerb2594052004-12-05 09:25:51 +0000335- itertools.islice() now accepts None for the start and step arguments.
336 This allows islice() to work more readily with slices:
337 islice(s.start, s.stop, s.step)
338
Skip Montanaro0af3ade2005-01-13 04:12:31 +0000339- datetime.datetime() now has a strptime class method which can be used to
340 create datetime object using a string and format.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000341
342Library
343-------
344
Martin v. Löwis3e865952006-01-24 15:51:21 +0000345- Patch #1349118: urllib2 now supports user:pass@ style proxy
346 specifications, raises IOErrors when proxies for unsupported protocols
347 are defined, and uses the https proxy on https redirections.
348
Georg Brandl531ceba2006-01-21 07:20:56 +0000349- Bug #902075: urllib2 now supports 'host:port' style proxy specifications.
350
351- Bug #1407902: Add support for sftp:// URIs to urlparse.
Georg Brandl89f35ac2006-01-20 17:24:23 +0000352
Georg Brandlb709c2c2006-01-20 09:07:35 +0000353- Bug #1371247: Update Windows locale identifiers in locale.py.
354
Neal Norwitzf60cd472006-01-14 07:05:13 +0000355- Bug #1394565: SimpleHTTPServer now doesn't choke on query parameters
Georg Brandl45ab2332006-01-13 17:05:56 +0000356 any more.
Georg Brandlb709c2c2006-01-20 09:07:35 +0000357
Georg Brandl4edd9892006-01-13 16:59:46 +0000358- Bug #1403410: The warnings module now doesn't get confused
359 when it can't find out the module name it generates a warning for.
Georg Brandlb709c2c2006-01-20 09:07:35 +0000360
Martin v. Löwis412ed3b2006-01-08 10:45:39 +0000361- Patch #1177307: Added a new codec utf_8_sig for UTF-8 with a BOM signature.
362
Neal Norwitzab86f8e2005-12-23 21:44:36 +0000363- Patch #1157027: cookielib mishandles RFC 2109 cookies in Netscape mode
364
Neal Norwitz338e7862005-12-23 21:27:46 +0000365- Patch #1117398: cookielib.LWPCookieJar and .MozillaCookieJar now raise
366 LoadError as documented, instead of IOError. For compatibility,
367 LoadError subclasses IOError.
368
Brett Cannon3cbd0382005-12-16 22:49:23 +0000369- Added the hashlib module. It provides secure hash functions for MD5 and
Tim Peterse3547fd2005-12-16 23:13:57 +0000370 SHA1, 224, 256, 384, and 512. Note that recent developments make the
371 historic MD5 and SHA1 unsuitable for cryptographic-strength applications.
372 In <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2005-December/058850.html>
373 Ronald L. Rivest offered this advice for Python:
374
375 "The consensus of researchers in this area (at least as
376 expressed at the NIST Hash Function Workshop 10/31/05),
377 is that SHA-256 is a good choice for the time being, but
378 that research should continue, and other alternatives may
379 arise from this research. The larger SHA's also seem OK."
Brett Cannon3cbd0382005-12-16 22:49:23 +0000380
Fredrik Lundh7e0aef02005-12-12 18:54:55 +0000381- Added a subset of Fredrik Lundh's ElementTree package. Available
382 modules are xml.etree.ElementTree, xml.etree.ElementPath, and
383 xml.etree.ElementInclude, from ElementTree 1.2.6.
384
Martin v. Löwis307021f2005-11-27 16:59:04 +0000385- Patch #1162825: Support non-ASCII characters in IDLE window titles.
386
Georg Brandl1f663572005-11-26 16:50:44 +0000387- Bug #1365984: urllib now opens "data:" URLs again.
388
Brett Cannonad07ff22005-11-23 02:15:50 +0000389- Patch #1314396: prevent deadlock for threading.Thread.join() when an exception
390 is raised within the method itself on a previous call (e.g., passing in an
391 illegal argument)
392
Brett Cannon5d0bf942005-11-02 23:04:26 +0000393- Bug #1340337: change time.strptime() to always return ValueError when there
394 is an error in the format string.
395
Georg Brandle8f24432005-10-03 14:16:44 +0000396- Patch #754022: Greatly enhanced webbrowser.py (by Oleg Broytmann).
397
Walter Dörwalda05834e2005-10-09 19:38:21 +0000398- Bug #729103: pydoc.py: Fix docother() method to accept additional
Georg Brandl8b813db2005-10-01 16:32:31 +0000399 "parent" argument.
400
Georg Brandlaa935172005-09-29 20:49:16 +0000401- Patch #1300515: xdrlib.py: Fix pack_fstring() to really use null bytes
402 for padding.
403
Georg Brandl80ba8e82005-09-29 20:16:07 +0000404- Bug #1296004: httplib.py: Limit maximal amount of data read from the
405 socket to avoid a MemoryError on Windows.
406
Matthias Klosef3f231f2005-09-20 07:02:49 +0000407- Patch #1166948: locale.py: Prefer LC_ALL, LC_CTYPE and LANG over LANGUAGE
408 to get the correct encoding.
409
410- Patch #1166938: locale.py: Parse LANGUAGE as a colon separated list of
411 languages.
412
Martin v. Löwis4ed67382005-09-18 08:34:39 +0000413- Patch #1268314: Cache lines in StreamReader.readlines for performance.
414
Brett Cannona783d062005-09-15 02:34:56 +0000415- Bug #1290505: Fix clearing the regex cache for time.strptime().
416
Martin v. Löwis5dbdc592005-08-27 10:07:56 +0000417- Bug #1167128: Fix size of a symlink in a tarfile to be 0.
418
Georg Brandl5a650a22005-08-26 08:51:34 +0000419- Patch #810023: Fix off-by-one bug in urllib.urlretrieve reporthook
420 functionality.
421
Martin v. Löwis8b595142005-08-25 11:03:38 +0000422- Bug #1163178: Make IDNA return an empty string when the input is empty.
423
Georg Brandl532efab2005-08-24 22:34:21 +0000424- Patch #848017: Make Cookie more RFC-compliant. Use CRLF as default output
425 separator and do not output trailing semicola.
426
Georg Brandlb9256022005-08-24 18:46:39 +0000427- Patch #1062060: urllib.urlretrieve() now raises a new exception, named
428 ContentTooShortException, when the actually downloaded size does not
429 match the Content-Length header.
430
Martin v. Löwis0a5d4a22005-08-24 14:55:22 +0000431- Bug #1121494: distutils.dir_utils.mkpath now accepts Unicode strings.
432
Martin v. Löwis56066d22005-08-24 07:38:12 +0000433- Bug #1178484: Return complete lines from codec stream readers
434 even if there is an exception in later lines, resulting in
Walter Dörwalda05834e2005-10-09 19:38:21 +0000435 correct line numbers for decoding errors in source code.
Martin v. Löwis56066d22005-08-24 07:38:12 +0000436
Georg Brandl6d2b3462005-08-24 07:36:17 +0000437- Bug #1192315: Disallow negative arguments to clear() in pdb.
438
Martin v. Löwisb813c532005-08-07 20:51:04 +0000439- Patch #827386: Support absolute source paths in msvccompiler.py.
440
Georg Brandl649f8e72005-08-03 07:30:12 +0000441- Patch #1105730: Apply the new implementation of commonprefix in posixpath
442 to ntpath, macpath, os2emxpath and riscospath.
443
Guido van Rossum755149f2005-07-27 00:00:44 +0000444- Fix a problem in Tkinter introduced by SF patch #869468: delete bogus
445 __hasattr__ and __delattr__ methods on class Tk that were breaking
446 Tkdnd.
447
Georg Brandl5dbda752005-07-17 20:27:41 +0000448- Bug #1015140: disambiguated the term "article id" in nntplib docs and
449 docstrings to either "article number" or "message id".
450
Georg Brandla4a8b822005-07-15 09:13:21 +0000451- Bug #1238170: threading.Thread.__init__ no longer has "kwargs={}" as a
452 parameter, but uses the usual "kwargs=None".
453
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000454- textwrap now processes text chunks at O(n) speed instead of O(n**2).
Raymond Hettinger8bfa8932005-07-15 06:53:35 +0000455 Patch #1209527 (Contributed by Connelly).
456
Georg Brandl5c5fe2f2005-07-14 06:40:47 +0000457- urllib2 has now an attribute 'httpresponses' mapping from HTTP status code
458 to W3C name (404 -> 'Not Found'). RFE #1216944.
459
Georg Brandl9e43acf2005-07-04 17:16:07 +0000460- Bug #1177468: Don't cache the /dev/urandom file descriptor for os.urandom,
461 as this can cause problems with apps closing all file descriptors.
462
Georg Brandl5284b532005-06-26 22:54:58 +0000463- Bug #839151: Fix an attempt to access sys.argv in the warnings module
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000464 it can be missing in embedded interpreters
Georg Brandl5284b532005-06-26 22:54:58 +0000465
Georg Brandl2f210b62005-06-26 22:09:06 +0000466- Bug #1155638: Fix a bug which affected HTTP 0.9 responses in httplib.
467
Georg Brandlfbff1bc2005-06-26 21:36:25 +0000468- Bug #1100201: Cross-site scripting was possible on BaseHTTPServer via
469 error messages.
470
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000471- Bug #1108948: Cookie.py produced invalid JavaScript code.
472
Raymond Hettingerda99d1c2005-06-21 07:43:58 +0000473- The tokenize module now detects and reports indentation errors.
474 Bug #1224621.
475
Raymond Hettinger68c04532005-06-10 11:05:19 +0000476- The tokenize module has a new untokenize() function to support a full
477 roundtrip from lexed tokens back to Python sourcecode. In addition,
478 the generate_tokens() function now accepts a callable argument that
479 terminates by raising StopIteration.
480
Georg Brandl9166e1a2005-06-04 09:20:03 +0000481- Bug #1196315: fix weakref.WeakValueDictionary constructor.
482
Georg Brandl268e61c2005-06-03 14:28:50 +0000483- Bug #1213894: os.path.realpath didn't resolve symlinks that were the first
484 component of the path.
485
Skip Montanaro174dd222005-05-14 20:54:16 +0000486- Patch #1120353: The xmlrpclib module provides better, more transparent,
487 support for datetime.{datetime,date,time} objects. With use_datetime set
488 to True, applications shouldn't have to fiddle with the DateTime wrapper
489 class at all.
490
Martin v. Löwis55f1bb82005-03-21 20:56:35 +0000491- distutils.commands.upload was added to support uploading distribution
492 files to PyPI.
493
Walter Dörwalda6e8a4a2005-03-31 13:57:38 +0000494- distutils.commands.register now encodes the data as UTF-8 before posting
495 them to PyPI.
496
Raymond Hettinger267b8682005-03-27 10:47:39 +0000497- decimal operator and comparison methods now return NotImplemented
498 instead of raising a TypeError when interacting with other types. This
499 allows other classes to implement __radd__ style methods and have them
500 work as expected.
501
Raymond Hettingerbea3f6f2005-03-15 04:59:17 +0000502- Bug #1163325: Decimal infinities failed to hash. Attempting to
503 hash a NaN raised an InvalidOperation instead of a TypeError.
504
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000505- Patch #918101: Add tarfile open mode r|* for auto-detection of the
Martin v. Löwis78be7df2005-03-05 12:47:42 +0000506 stream compression; add, for symmetry reasons, r:* as a synonym of r.
507
Martin v. Löwis00a73e72005-03-04 19:40:34 +0000508- Patch #1043890: Add extractall method to tarfile.
509
Martin v. Löwisc72dd382005-03-04 13:50:17 +0000510- Patch #1075887: Don't require MSVC in distutils if there is nothing
511 to build.
512
Martin v. Löwis637431b2005-03-03 23:12:42 +0000513- Patch #1103407: Properly deal with tarfile iterators when untarring
514 symbolic links on Windows.
515
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000516- Patch #645894: Use getrusage for computing the time consumption in
Martin v. Löwisa4dac402005-03-03 11:39:45 +0000517 profile.py if available.
518
Martin v. Löwisdf37c8c2005-03-03 11:08:03 +0000519- Patch #1046831: Use get_python_version where appropriate in sysconfig.py.
520
Martin v. Löwisc5574e82005-03-03 10:57:37 +0000521- Patch #1117454: Remove code to special-case cookies without values
522 in LWPCookieJar.
523
Martin v. Löwis4ea3ead2005-03-03 10:48:12 +0000524- Patch #1117339: Add cookielib special name tests.
525
Martin v. Löwise869eb12005-03-03 09:46:07 +0000526- Patch #1112812: Make bsddb/__init__.py more friendly for modulefinder.
527
Martin v. Löwisf2a8d632005-03-03 08:35:22 +0000528- Patch #1110248: SYNC_FLUSH the zlib buffer for GZipFile.flush.
529
Martin v. Löwisdf241532005-03-03 08:17:42 +0000530- Patch #1107973: Allow to iterate over the lines of a tarfile.ExFileObject.
531
Martin v. Löwis8ed338a2005-03-03 08:12:27 +0000532- Patch #1104111: Alter setup.py --help and --help-commands.
533
Martin v. Löwis4afe1542005-03-01 08:09:28 +0000534- Patch #1121234: Properly cleanup _exit and tkerror commands.
535
Martin v. Löwisc2a0ac22005-02-24 20:22:10 +0000536- Patch #1049151: xdrlib now unpacks booleans as True or False.
537
Raymond Hettingerbab41432005-02-05 01:31:19 +0000538- Fixed bug in a NameError bug in cookielib. Patch #1116583.
539
Guido van Rossumd0641422005-02-03 15:01:24 +0000540- Applied a security fix to SimpleXMLRPCserver (PSF-2005-001). This
541 disables recursive traversal through instance attributes, which can
542 be exploited in various ways.
543
Tim Peterse3547fd2005-12-16 23:13:57 +0000544- Bug #1222790: in SimpleXMLRPCServer, set the reuse-address and close-on-exec
Andrew M. Kuchling3a976052005-12-04 15:07:41 +0000545 flags on the HTTP listening socket.
546
Andrew M. Kuchlinge63fde72005-12-04 15:36:57 +0000547- Bug #792570: SimpleXMLRPCServer had problems if the request grew too large.
548 Fixed by reading the HTTP body in chunks instead of one big socket.read().
549
Tim Peterse3547fd2005-12-16 23:13:57 +0000550- Patches #893642, #1039083: add allow_none, encoding arguments to constructors of
Andrew M. Kuchling10a16de2005-12-04 16:34:40 +0000551 SimpleXMLRPCServer and CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler.
552
Martin v. Löwis1d11de62005-01-29 13:29:23 +0000553- Bug #1110478: Revert os.environ.update to do putenv again.
554
Thomas Hellerd6c6e222005-01-20 19:20:16 +0000555- Bug #1103844: fix distutils.install.dump_dirs() with negated options.
556
Martin v. Löwis22b457e2005-01-16 08:40:58 +0000557- os.{SEEK_SET, SEEK_CUR, SEEK_END} have been added for convenience.
558
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000559- Enhancements to the csv module:
560
561 + Dialects are now validated by the underlying C code, better
Georg Brandl7eb4b7d2005-07-22 21:49:32 +0000562 reflecting its capabilities, and improving its compliance with
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000563 PEP 305.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000564 + Dialect parameter parsing has been re-implemented to improve error
565 reporting.
566 + quotechar=None and quoting=QUOTE_NONE now work the way PEP 305
567 dictates.
568 + the parser now removes the escapechar prefix from escaped characters.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000569 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the writer now tests for numeric
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000570 types, rather than any object than can be represented as a numeric.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000571 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the reader now casts unquoted fields
572 to floats.
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000573 + reader now allows \r characters to be quoted (previously it only allowed
574 \n to be quoted).
Andrew McNamarac89f2842005-01-12 07:44:42 +0000575 + writer doublequote handling improved.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000576 + Dialect classes passed to the module are no longer instantiated by
577 the module before being parsed (the former validation scheme required
578 this, but the mechanism was unreliable).
579 + The dialect registry now contains instances of the internal
580 C-coded dialect type, rather than references to python objects.
581 + the internal c-coded dialect type is now immutable.
582 + register_dialect now accepts the same keyword dialect specifications
583 as the reader and writer, allowing the user to register dialects
584 without first creating a dialect class.
585 + a configurable limit to the size of parsed fields has been added -
586 previously, an unmatched quote character could result in the entire
587 file being read into the field buffer before an error was reported.
Andrew McNamara31d88962005-01-12 03:45:10 +0000588 + A new module method csv.field_size_limit() has been added that sets
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000589 the parser field size limit (returning the former limit). The initial
590 limit is 128kB.
Andrew McNamara7f2053e2005-01-12 11:17:16 +0000591 + A line_num attribute has been added to the reader object, which tracks
592 the number of lines read from the source iterator. This is not
593 the same as the number of records returned, as records can span
594 multiple lines.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000595 + reader and writer objects were not being registered with the cyclic-GC.
596 This has been fixed.
597
Brett Cannone6539c42005-01-08 02:43:53 +0000598- _DummyThread objects in the threading module now delete self.__block that is
599 inherited from _Thread since it uses up a lock allocated by 'thread'. The
600 lock primitives tend to be limited in number and thus should not be wasted on
601 a _DummyThread object. Fixes bug #1089632.
602
Raymond Hettinger97db05d2005-01-07 08:15:41 +0000603- The imghdr module now detects Exif files.
604
Raymond Hettinger6065d322004-12-20 23:51:53 +0000605- StringIO.truncate() now correctly adjusts the size attribute.
606 (Bug #951915).
607
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000608- locale.py now uses an updated locale alias table (built using
609 Tools/i18n/makelocalealias.py, a tool to parse the X11 locale
610 alias file); the encoding lookup was enhanced to use Python's
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000611 encoding alias table.
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000612
Raymond Hettinger3557f422004-12-07 12:02:02 +0000613- moved deprecated modules to Lib/lib-old: whrandom, tzparse, statcache.
614
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000615- the pickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
616 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
617
Brett Cannon84667c02004-12-07 03:25:18 +0000618- optparse now optionally imports gettext. This allows its use in setup.py.
619
Raymond Hettinger3489cad2004-12-05 05:20:42 +0000620- the pickle module no longer uses the deprecated bin parameter.
621
Raymond Hettinger1bc82f82004-12-05 03:58:17 +0000622- the shelve module no longer uses the deprecated binary parameter.
623
Raymond Hettinger6c92d762004-12-05 03:28:00 +0000624- the pstats module no longer uses the deprecated ignore() method.
625
Raymond Hettingerf3fa9462004-12-05 01:58:09 +0000626- the filecmp module no longer uses the deprecated use_statcache argument.
627
Raymond Hettinger664347b2004-12-04 21:21:53 +0000628- unittest.TestCase.run() and unittest.TestSuite.run() can now be successfully
629 extended or overridden by subclasses. Formerly, the subclassed method would
630 be ignored by the rest of the module. (Bug #1078905).
631
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000632- heapq.nsmallest() and heapq.nlargest() now support key= arguments with
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000633 the same meaning as in list.sort().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000634
Walter Dörwald36733692004-12-22 12:50:50 +0000635- Bug #1076985: ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` now calls ``read()`` only
636 once when a size argument is given. This prevents a buffer overflow in the
637 tokenizer with very long source lines.
638
Barry Warsaw538561e2006-01-01 21:48:54 +0000639- Bug #1083110: ``zlib.decompress.flush()`` would segfault if called
640 immediately after creating the object, without any intervening
641 ``.decompress()`` calls.
Andrew M. Kuchling3b585b32004-12-28 20:10:48 +0000642
Skip Montanaro05885812005-01-16 20:48:27 +0000643- The reconvert.quote function can now emit triple-quoted strings. The
644 reconvert module now has some simple documentation.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000645
Walter Dörwaldaf3b39a2005-02-18 13:22:43 +0000646- ``UserString.MutableString`` now supports negative indices in
647 ``__setitem__`` and ``__delitem__``
648
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000649- Bug #1149508: ``textwrap`` now handles hyphenated numbers (eg. "2004-03-05")
650 correctly.
651
Walter Dörwaldbc8e6422005-04-21 21:32:03 +0000652- Partial fixes for SF bugs #1163244 and #1175396: If a chunk read by
653 ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` has a trailing "\r", read one more
654 character even if the user has passed a size parameter to get a proper
655 line ending. Remove the special handling of a "\r\n" that has been split
656 between two lines.
657
Walter Dörwalda47d1c02005-08-30 10:23:14 +0000658- Bug #1251300: On UCS-4 builds the "unicode-internal" codec will now complain
659 about illegal code points. The codec now supports PEP 293 style error
660 handlers.
661
Walter Dörwald78a78b02005-09-01 12:04:29 +0000662- Bug #1235646: ``codecs.StreamRecoder.next()`` now reencodes the data it reads
Walter Dörwaldc5238b82005-09-01 11:56:53 +0000663 from the input stream, so that the output is a byte string in the correct
664 encoding instead of a unicode string.
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000665
Gustavo Niemeyer6fa0c5a2005-09-14 08:54:39 +0000666- Bug #1202493: Fixing SRE parser to handle '{}' as perl does, rather than
667 considering it exactly like a '*'.
668
Walter Dörwald007f8df2005-10-09 19:42:27 +0000669- Bug #1245379: Add "unicode-1-1-utf-7" as an alias for "utf-7" to
670 ``encodings.aliases``.
Gustavo Niemeyer6fa0c5a2005-09-14 08:54:39 +0000671
Walter Dörwald09f0dd52005-11-21 19:10:07 +0000672- ` uu.encode()`` and ``uu.decode()`` now support unicode filenames.
673
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000674Build
675-----
676
Martin v. Löwisfd9a72a2006-01-08 10:07:33 +0000677- Patch #881820: look for openpty and forkpty also in libbsd.
678
Martin v. Löwis64c33dd2006-01-03 07:42:14 +0000679- The sources of zlib are now part of the Python distribution (zlib 1.2.3).
680 The zlib module is now builtin on Windows.
681
Martin v. Löwisd5845ec2005-12-30 12:31:38 +0000682- Use -xcode=pic32 for CCSHARED on Solaris with SunPro.
683
Martin v. Löwis147fbe52005-08-07 21:09:30 +0000684- Bug #1189330: configure did not correctly determine the necessary
685 value of LINKCC if python was built with GCC 4.0.
686
Trent Mick8321b422005-07-26 02:29:21 +0000687- Upgrade Windows build to zlib 1.2.3 which eliminates a potential security
688 vulnerability in zlib 1.2.1 and 1.2.2.
689
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000690- EXTRA_CFLAGS has been introduced as an environment variable to hold compiler
691 flags that change binary compatibility. Changes were also made to
692 distutils.sysconfig to also use the environment variable when used during
Martin v. Löwisd7c795e2005-04-25 07:14:03 +0000693 compilation of the interpreter and of C extensions through distutils.
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000694
Bob Ippolitoed233462005-03-29 13:47:59 +0000695- SF patch 1171735: Darwin 8's headers are anal about POSIX compliance,
696 and linking has changed (prebinding is now deprecated, and libcc_dynamic
697 no longer exists). This configure patch makes things right.
698
Martin v. Löwise2713be2005-03-08 15:03:08 +0000699- Bug #1158607: Build with --disable-unicode again.
700
Brett Cannon46d96232005-02-16 00:07:19 +0000701- spwdmodule.c is built only if either HAVE_GETSPNAM or HAVE_HAVE_GETSPENT is
702 defined. Discovered as a result of not being able to build on OS X.
703
Brett Cannon516592f2004-12-07 00:42:59 +0000704- setup.py now uses the directories specified in LDFLAGS using the -L option
705 and in CPPFLAGS using the -I option for adding library and include
706 directories, respectively, for compiling extension modules against. This has
707 led to the core being compiled using the values in CPPFLAGS. It also removes
708 the need for the special-casing of both DarwinPorts and Fink for darwin since
709 the proper directories can be specified in LDFLAGS (``-L/sw/lib`` for Fink,
710 ``-L/opt/local/lib`` for DarwinPorts) and CPPFLAGS (``-I/sw/include`` for
711 Fink, ``-I/opt/local/include`` for DarwinPorts).
712
Brett Cannon43802422005-02-10 20:48:03 +0000713- Test in configure.in that checks for tzset no longer dependent on tm->tm_zone
714 to exist in the struct (not required by either ISO C nor the UNIX 2 spec).
715 Tests for sanity in tzname when HAVE_TZNAME defined were also defined.
716 Closes bug #1096244. Thanks Gregory Bond.
717
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000718C API
719-----
720
Raymond Hettingerbeb31012005-08-16 03:47:52 +0000721- Added a C API for set and frozenset objects.
722
Raymond Hettinger66517482004-12-03 11:45:13 +0000723- Removed PyRange_New().
724
Walter Dörwaldd1c1e102005-10-06 20:29:57 +0000725- Patch #1313939: PyUnicode_DecodeCharmap() accepts a unicode string as the
726 mapping argument now. This string is used as a mapping table. Byte values
727 greater than the length of the string and 0xFFFE are treated as undefined
728 mappings.
729
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000730
731Tests
732-----
733
Martin v. Löwis4d394df2005-01-23 09:19:22 +0000734- In test_os, st_?time is now truncated before comparing it with ST_?TIME.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000735
Hye-Shik Changaaa2f1d2005-12-10 17:44:27 +0000736- Patch #1276356: New resource "urlfetch" is implemented. This enables
737 even impatient people to run tests that require remote files.
738
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000739
740Documentation
741-------------
742
Georg Brandl8cb30772006-01-20 09:34:29 +0000743- Bug #1402224: Add warning to dl docs about crashes.
744
Georg Brandla3a93ae2006-01-20 09:14:36 +0000745- Bug #1396471: Document that Windows' ftell() can return invalid
746 values for text files with UNIX-style line endings.
747
Georg Brandl32252422005-09-14 20:42:00 +0000748- Bug #1274828: Document os.path.splitunc().
749
Georg Brandl79c122f2005-08-24 07:31:33 +0000750- Bug #1190204: Clarify which directories are searched by site.py.
751
Georg Brandl6f2bbd32005-08-24 07:26:55 +0000752- Bug #1193849: Clarify os.path.expanduser() documentation.
753
Georg Brandlf13c4ba2005-08-02 10:28:08 +0000754- Bug #1243192: re.UNICODE and re.LOCALE affect \d, \D, \s and \S.
755
Georg Brandl150db732005-07-18 08:53:17 +0000756- Bug #755617: Document the effects of os.chown() on Windows.
757
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000758- Patch #1180012: The documentation for modulefinder is now in the library reference.
759
760- Patch #1213031: Document that os.chown() accepts argument values of -1.
761
762- Bug #1190563: Document os.waitpid() return value with WNOHANG flag.
763
764- Bug #1175022: Correct the example code for property().
765
Georg Brandl40c71652005-06-25 21:08:46 +0000766- Document the IterableUserDict class in the UserDict module.
767 Closes bug #1166582.
768
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000769- Remove all latent references for "Macintosh" that referred to semantics for
770 Mac OS 9 and change to reflect the state for OS X.
771 Closes patch #1095802. Thanks Jack Jansen.
772
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000773Mac
774---
775
776
Hye-Shik Chang4e422812005-07-17 02:36:59 +0000777New platforms
778-------------
779
780- FreeBSD 7 support is added.
781
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000782
783Tools/Demos
784-----------
785
Georg Brandl56897312005-08-24 18:32:30 +0000786- Added two new files to Tools/scripts: pysource.py, which recursively
787 finds Python source files, and findnocoding.py, which finds Python
788 source files that need an encoding declaration.
789 Patch #784089, credits to Oleg Broytmann.
790
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000791- Bug #1072853: pindent.py used an uninitialized variable.
792
Martin v. Löwisab9ec162005-04-09 10:53:34 +0000793- Patch #1177597: Correct Complex.__init__.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000794
Barry Warsaw538561e2006-01-01 21:48:54 +0000795- Fixed a display glitch in Pynche, which could cause the right arrow to
796 wiggle over by a pixel.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000797
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000798What's New in Python 2.4 final?
799===============================
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000800
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000801*Release date: 30-NOV-2004*
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000802
803Core and builtins
804-----------------
805
806- Bug 875692: Improve signal handling, especially when using threads, by
807 forcing an early re-execution of PyEval_EvalFrame() "periodic" code when
808 things_to_do is not cleared by Py_MakePendingCalls().
809
810
Anthony Baxter4277ed82004-11-30 11:53:10 +0000811What's New in Python 2.4 (release candidate 1)
812==============================================
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000813
Anthony Baxter5cc727a2004-11-18 12:32:27 +0000814*Release date: 18-NOV-2004*
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000815
816Core and builtins
817-----------------
818
Tim Petersfb1ffb02004-11-08 04:30:21 +0000819- Bug 1061968: Fixes in 2.4a3 to address thread bug 1010677 reintroduced
820 the years-old thread shutdown race bug 225673. Numeric history lesson
821 aside, all bugs in all three reports are fixed now.
822
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000823
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000824Library
825-------
826
827- Bug 1052242: If exceptions are raised by an atexit handler function an
828 attempt is made to execute the remaining handlers. The last exception
829 raised is re-raised.
830
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000831- ``doctest``'s new support for adding ``pdb.set_trace()`` calls to
832 doctests was broken in a dramatic but shallow way. Fixed.
833
Tim Petersbbc0d442004-11-13 16:18:32 +0000834- Bug 1065388: ``calendar``'s ``day_name``, ``day_abbr``, ``month_name``,
835 and ``month_abbr`` attributes emulate sequences of locale-correct
836 spellings of month and day names. Because the locale can change at
837 any time, the correct spelling is recomputed whenever one of these is
838 indexed. In the worst case, the index may be a slice object, so these
839 recomputed every day or month name each time they were indexed. This is
840 much slower than necessary in the usual case, when the index is just an
841 integer. In that case, only the single spelling needed is recomputed
842 now; and, when the index is a slice object, only the spellings needed
843 by the slice are recomputed now.
844
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000845- Patch 1061679: Added ``__all__`` to pickletools.py.
Tim Peters90cf2122004-11-06 23:45:48 +0000846
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000847Build
848-----
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000849
Brett Cannon7d28e962004-11-07 01:19:00 +0000850- Bug 1034277 / Patch 1035255: Remove compilation of core against CoreServices
851 and CoreFoundation on OS X. Involved removing PyMac_GetAppletScriptFile()
852 which has no known users. Thanks Bob Ippolito.
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000853
854C API
855-----
856
Raymond Hettinger39e92ea2004-11-18 09:41:45 +0000857- The PyRange_New() function is deprecated.
858
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000859
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000860What's New in Python 2.4 beta 2?
861================================
862
Anthony Baxter9f41f3a2004-11-03 06:21:37 +0000863*Release date: 03-NOV-2004*
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000864
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000865License
866-------
867
868The Python Software Foundation changed the license under which Python
869is released, to remove Python version numbers. There were no other
870changes to the license. So, for example, wherever the license for
871Python 2.3 said "Python 2.3", the new license says "Python". The
872intent is to make it possible to refer to the PSF license in a more
873durable way. For example, some people say they're confused by that
874the Open Source Initiative's entry for the Python Software Foundation
875License::
876
877 http://www.opensource.org/licenses/PythonSoftFoundation.php
878
879says "Python 2.1.1" all over it, wondering whether it applies only
880to Python 2.1.1.
881
882The official name of the new license is the Python Software Foundation
883License Version 2.
884
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000885Core and builtins
886-----------------
887
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +0000888- Bug #1055820 Cyclic garbage collection was not protecting against that
889 calling a live weakref to a piece of cyclic trash could resurrect an
890 insane mutation of the trash if any Python code ran during gc (via
891 running a dead object's __del__ method, running another callback on a
892 weakref to a dead object, or via any Python code run in any other thread
893 that managed to obtain the GIL while a __del__ or callback was running
894 in the thread doing gc). The most likely symptom was "impossible"
Andrew M. Kuchlingb2a739d2005-11-22 15:14:44 +0000895 ``AttributeError`` exceptions, appearing seemingly at random, on weakly
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +0000896 referenced objects. The cure was to clear all weakrefs to unreachable
897 objects before allowing any callbacks to run.
898
Raymond Hettinger561fbf12004-10-26 01:52:37 +0000899- Bug #1054139 _PyString_Resize() now invalidates its cached hash value.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000900
901Extension Modules
902-----------------
903
Raymond Hettinger9047c8f2004-10-24 00:10:06 +0000904- Bug #1048870: the compiler now generates distinct code objects for
905 functions with identical bodies. This was producing confusing
906 traceback messages which pointed to the function where the code
907 object was first defined rather than the function being executed.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000908
909Library
910-------
911
Barry Warsaw8c72eae2004-11-01 03:52:43 +0000912- Patch #1056967 changes the semantics of Template.safe_substitute() so that
913 no ValueError is raised on an 'invalid' match group. Now the delimiter is
914 returned.
915
Raymond Hettinger2ef7e6c2004-10-24 00:32:24 +0000916- Bug #1052503 pdb.runcall() was not passing along keyword arguments.
917
Raymond Hettingerc64aab82004-10-20 08:21:57 +0000918- Bug #902037: XML.sax.saxutils.prepare_input_source() now combines relative
919 paths with a base path before checking os.path.isfile().
920
Raymond Hettingere54e7262004-10-20 07:17:16 +0000921- The whichdb module can now be run from the command line.
922
Brett Cannon8abcc5d2004-10-18 01:37:57 +0000923- Bug #1045381: time.strptime() can now infer the date using %U or %W (week of
924 the year) when the day of the week and year are also specified.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000925
Andrew M. Kuchling0d19bae2004-10-19 19:54:41 +0000926- Bug #1048816: fix bug in Ctrl-K at start of line in curses.textpad.Textbox
927
Andrew M. Kuchling66e80ba2004-10-20 11:56:15 +0000928- Bug #1017553: fix bug in tarfile.filemode()
929
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000930- Patch #737473: fix bug that old source code is shown in tracebacks even if
Hye-Shik Chang182ac852004-10-26 09:16:42 +0000931 the source code is updated and reloaded.
932
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000933Build
934-----
935
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000936- Patch #1044395: --enable-shared is allowed in FreeBSD also.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000937
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000938What's New in Python 2.4 beta 1?
939================================
940
Anthony Baxter6a587c12004-10-15 08:07:21 +0000941*Release date: 15-OCT-2004*
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000942
943Core and builtins
944-----------------
945
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000946- Patch #975056: Restartable signals were not correctly disabled on
Anthony Baxtere4f8a482004-10-13 14:55:56 +0000947 BSD systems. Consistently use PyOS_setsig() instead of signal().
948
Tim Peters263091e2004-10-10 01:58:44 +0000949- The internal portable implementation of thread-local storage (TLS), used
950 by the ``PyGILState_Ensure()``/``PyGILState_Release()`` API, was not
951 thread-correct. This could lead to a variety of problems, up to and
952 including segfaults. See bug 1041645 for an example.
953
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000954- Added a command line option, -m module, which searches sys.path for the
955 module and then runs it. (Contributed by Nick Coghlan.)
956
Raymond Hettinger2c31a052004-09-22 18:44:21 +0000957- The bytecode optimizer now folds tuples of constants into a single
958 constant.
959
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000960- SF bug #513866: Float/long comparison anomaly. Prior to 2.4b1, when
961 an integer was compared to a float, the integer was coerced to a float.
962 That could yield spurious overflow errors (if the integer was very
963 large), and to anomalies such as
964 ``long(1e200)+1 == 1e200 == long(1e200)-1``. Coercion to float is no
965 longer performed, and cases like ``long(1e200)-1 < 1e200``,
966 ``long(1e200)+1 > 1e200`` and ``(1 << 20000) > 1e200`` are computed
967 correctly now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000968
969Extension modules
970-----------------
971
Tim Peterscf8997f2004-10-01 02:13:16 +0000972- ``collections.deque`` objects didn't play quite right with garbage
973 collection, which could lead to a segfault in a release build, or
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000974 an assert failure in a debug build. Also, added overflow checks,
975 better detection of mutation during iteration, and shielded deque
976 comparisons from unusual subclass overrides of the __iter__() method.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000977
978Library
979-------
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000980
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000981- Patch 1046644: distutils build_ext grew two new options - --swig for
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000982 specifying the swig executable to use, and --swig-opts to specify
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000983 options to pass to swig. --swig-opts="-c++" is the new way to spell
984 --swig-cpp.
985
Anthony Baxter22dcf662004-10-13 15:54:17 +0000986- Patch 983206: distutils now obeys environment variable LDSHARED, if
987 it is set.
988
Andrew M. Kuchling518d3932004-10-12 15:32:10 +0000989- Added Peter Astrand's subprocess.py module. See PEP 324 for details.
Fredrik Lundh5b3687d2004-10-12 15:26:28 +0000990
Brett Cannon4f35c712004-10-06 02:11:37 +0000991- time.strptime() now properly escapes timezones and all other locale-specific
992 strings for regex-specific symbols. Was breaking under Japanese Windows when
993 the timezone was specified as "Tokyo (standard time)".
994 Closes bug #1039270.
995
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000996- Updates for the email package:
Brett Cannon06a30b02004-10-22 06:22:54 +0000997
Barry Warsaw418de1f2004-10-11 14:32:47 +0000998 + email.Utils.formatdate() grew a 'usegmt' argument for HTTP support.
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000999 + All deprecated APIs that in email 2.x issued warnings have been removed:
1000 _encoder argument to the MIMEText constructor, Message.add_payload(),
1001 Utils.dump_address_pair(), Utils.decode(), Utils.encode()
1002 + New deprecations: Generator.__call__(), Message.get_type(),
1003 Message.get_main_type(), Message.get_subtype(), the 'strict' argument to
1004 the Parser constructor. These will be removed in email 3.1.
1005 + Support for Python earlier than 2.3 has been removed (see PEP 291).
1006 + All defect classes have been renamed to end in 'Defect'.
1007 + Some FeedParser fixes; also a MultipartInvariantViolationDefect will be
1008 added to messages that claim to be multipart but really aren't.
1009 + Updates to documentation.
1010
Raymond Hettinger596ba4d2004-09-24 03:41:05 +00001011- re's findall() and finditer() functions now take an optional flags argument
1012 just like the compile(), search(), and match() functions. Also, documented
1013 the previously existing start and stop parameters for the findall() and
1014 finditer() methods of regular expression objects.
1015
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +00001016- rfc822 Messages now support iterating over the headers.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001017
Martin v. Löwisf3c56112004-09-18 09:08:52 +00001018- The (undocumented) tarfile.Tarfile.membernames has been removed;
1019 applications should use the getmember function.
1020
Martin v. Löwis39a31782004-09-18 09:03:49 +00001021- httplib now offers symbolic constants for the HTTP status codes.
1022
Tim Peters528ca532004-09-16 01:30:50 +00001023- SF bug #1028306: Trying to compare a ``datetime.date`` to a
1024 ``datetime.datetime`` mistakenly compared only the year, month and day.
1025 Now it acts like a mixed-type comparison: ``False`` for ``==``,
1026 ``True`` for ``!=``, and raises ``TypeError`` for other comparison
1027 operators. Because datetime is a subclass of date, comparing only the
1028 base class (date) members can still be done, if that's desired, by
1029 forcing using of the approprate date method; e.g.,
1030 ``a_date.__eq__(a_datetime)`` is true if and only if the year, month
1031 and day members of ``a_date`` and ``a_datetime`` are equal.
1032
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001033- bdist_rpm now supports command line options --force-arch,
1034 {pre,post}-install, {pre,post}-uninstall, and
Martin v. Löwis23c48a12004-09-10 06:32:54 +00001035 {prep,build,install,clean,verify}-script.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001036
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +00001037- SF patch #998993: The UTF-8 and the UTF-16 stateful decoders now support
1038 decoding incomplete input (when the input stream is temporarily exhausted).
1039 ``codecs.StreamReader`` now implements buffering, which enables proper
1040 readline support for the UTF-16 decoders. ``codecs.StreamReader.read()``
1041 has a new argument ``chars`` which specifies the number of characters to
1042 return. ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` and
1043 ``codecs.StreamReader.readlines()`` have a new argument ``keepends``.
1044 Trailing "\n"s will be stripped from the lines if ``keepends`` is false.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001045
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +00001046- The documentation for doctest is greatly expanded, and now covers all
1047 the new public features (of which there are many).
1048
Walter Dörwald5011d0c2004-09-13 08:53:15 +00001049- ``doctest.master`` was put back in, and ``doctest.testmod()`` once again
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001050 updates it. This isn't good, because every ``testmod()`` call
1051 contributes to bloating the "hidden" state of ``doctest.master``, but
1052 some old code apparently relies on it. For now, all we can do is
1053 encourage people to stitch doctests together via doctest's unittest
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +00001054 integration features instead.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001055
Skip Montanaro82d0eec2004-09-14 17:58:31 +00001056- httplib now handles ipv6 address/port pairs.
1057
David Goodger68a1abd2004-10-03 15:40:25 +00001058- SF bug #1017864: ConfigParser now correctly handles default keys,
1059 processing them with ``ConfigParser.optionxform`` when supplied,
1060 consistent with the handling of config file entries and runtime-set
1061 options.
1062
David Goodger1cbf2062004-10-03 15:55:09 +00001063- SF bug #997050: Document, test, & check for non-string values in
1064 ConfigParser. Moved the new string-only restriction added in
1065 rev. 1.65 to the SafeConfigParser class, leaving existing
1066 ConfigParser & RawConfigParser behavior alone, and documented the
1067 conditions under which non-string values work.
1068
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001069Build
1070-----
1071
Brett Cannonbfef8692004-09-28 04:08:11 +00001072- Building on darwin now includes /opt/local/include and /opt/local/lib for
1073 building extension modules. This is so as to include software installed as
1074 a DarwinPorts port <http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/>
1075
Tim Peters862f0592004-09-23 19:11:32 +00001076- pyport.h now defines a Py_IS_NAN macro. It works as-is when the
1077 platform C computes true for ``x != x`` if and only if X is a NaN.
1078 Other platforms can override the default definition with a platform-
1079 specific spelling in that platform's pyconfig.h. You can also override
1080 pyport.h's default Py_IS_INFINITY definition now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001081
1082C API
1083-----
1084
Tim Peters7f468f22004-10-11 02:40:51 +00001085- SF patch 1044089: New function ``PyEval_ThreadsInitialized()`` returns
1086 non-zero if PyEval_InitThreads() has been called.
1087
1088- The undocumented and unused extern int ``_PyThread_Started`` was removed.
1089
Tim Peters84705582004-10-10 02:47:33 +00001090- The C API calls ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
1091 are two of the very few advertised as being safe to call without holding
1092 the GIL. However, this wasn't true in a debug build, as bug 1041645
1093 demonstrated. In a debug build, Python redirects the ``PyMem`` family
1094 of calls to Python's small-object allocator, to get the benefit of
1095 its extra debugging capabilities. But Python's small-object allocator
1096 isn't threadsafe, relying on the GIL to avoid the expense of doing its
1097 own locking. ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
1098 call the platform ``malloc()`` directly now, regardless of build type.
1099
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +00001100- PyLong_AsUnsignedLong[Mask] now support int objects as well.
1101
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +00001102- SF patch #998993: ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF8Stateful`` and
1103 ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF16Stateful`` have been added, which implement stateful
1104 decoding.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001105
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001106Tests
1107-----
1108
1109- test__locale ported to unittest
1110
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001111Mac
1112---
1113
Just van Rossumdd3c8372004-10-03 16:27:09 +00001114- ``plistlib`` now supports non-dict root objects. There is also a new
1115 interface for reading and writing plist files: ``readPlist(pathOrFile)``
1116 and ``writePlist(rootObject, pathOrFile)``
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001117
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001118Tools/Demos
1119-----------
1120
Tim Peters130e37f2004-10-03 19:03:19 +00001121- The text file comparison scripts ``ndiff.py`` and ``diff.py`` now
1122 read the input files in universal-newline mode. This spares them
1123 from consuming a great deal of time to deduce the useless result that,
1124 e.g., a file with Windows line ends and a file with Linux line ends
1125 have no lines in common.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001126
1127
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001128What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
1129=================================
1130
Anthony Baxtere13943a2004-09-02 16:37:15 +00001131*Release date: 02-SEP-2004*
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001132
1133Core and builtins
1134-----------------
1135
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001136- SF patch #1007189: ``from ... import ...`` statements now allow the name
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001137 list to be surrounded by parentheses.
1138
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +00001139- Some speedups for long arithmetic, thanks to Trevor Perrin. Gradeschool
1140 multiplication was sped a little by optimizing the C code. Gradeschool
1141 squaring was sped by about a factor of 2, by exploiting that about half
1142 the digit products are duplicates in a square. Because exponentiation
1143 uses squaring often, this also speeds long power. For example, the time
1144 to compute 17**1000000 dropped from about 14 seconds to 9 on my box due
1145 to this much. The cutoff for Karatsuba multiplication was raised,
1146 since gradeschool multiplication got quicker, and the cutoff was
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +00001147 aggressively small regardless. The exponentiation algorithm was switched
1148 from right-to-left to left-to-right, which is more efficient for small
1149 bases. In addition, if the exponent is large, the algorithm now does
1150 5 bits (instead of 1 bit) at a time. That cut the time to compute
1151 17**1000000 on my box in half again, down to about 4.5 seconds.
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +00001152
Tim Petersc8854432004-08-25 02:14:08 +00001153- OverflowWarning is no longer generated. PEP 237 scheduled this to
1154 occur in Python 2.3, but since OverflowWarning was disabled by default,
1155 nobody realized it was still being generated. On the chance that user
1156 code is still using them, the Python builtin OverflowWarning, and
1157 corresponding C API PyExc_OverflowWarning, will exist until Python 2.5.
1158
Martin v. Löwis336e85f2004-08-19 11:31:58 +00001159- Py_InitializeEx has been added.
1160
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +00001161- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
1162 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
1163
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +00001164- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
1165 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
1166 modified the list.
1167
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +00001168- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
1169 functions is now writable.
1170
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +00001171- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
1172 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
1173 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
1174 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
1175
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +00001176- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
1177 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
1178 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
1179 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
1180 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +00001181
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +00001182- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
1183 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
1184
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001185Extension modules
1186-----------------
1187
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +00001188- difflib now supports HTML side-by-side diff.
1189
Martin v. Löwisdc3883f2004-08-29 15:46:35 +00001190- os.urandom has been added for systems that support sources of random
1191 data.
1192
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +00001193- Patch 1012740: truncate() on a writeable cStringIO now resets the
1194 position to the end of the stream. This is consistent with the original
1195 StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was
1196 supposed to have been truncated away.
1197
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +00001198- Added socket.socketpair().
1199
Dave Cole3203efb2004-08-26 00:37:31 +00001200- Added CurrentByteIndex, CurrentColumnNumber, CurrentLineNumber
1201 members to xml.parsers.expat.XMLParser object.
1202
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001203- The mpz, rotor, and xreadlines modules, all deprecated in earlier
Andrew M. Kuchling00873432004-08-31 13:50:43 +00001204 versions of Python, have now been removed.
1205
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001206Library
1207-------
1208
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +00001209- Patch #934356: if a module defines __all__, believe that rather than using
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001210 heuristics for filtering out imported names.
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +00001211
Johannes Gijsbersae882f72004-08-30 10:19:56 +00001212- Patch #941486: added os.path.lexists(), which returns True for broken
1213 symlinks, unlike os.path.exists().
1214
Raymond Hettinger356a4592004-08-30 06:14:31 +00001215- the random module now uses os.urandom() for seeding if it is available.
1216 Added a new generator based on os.urandom().
1217
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +00001218- difflib and diff.py can now generate HTML.
1219
Martin v. Löwiscae9e672004-08-25 13:04:53 +00001220- bdist_rpm now includes version and release in the BuildRoot, and
1221 replaces - by ``_`` in version and release.
Martin v. Löwiscf525242004-08-25 13:00:34 +00001222
Martin v. Löwis9f5c0c42004-08-25 11:37:43 +00001223- distutils build/build_scripts now has an -e option to specify the
1224 path to the Python interpreter for installed scripts.
1225
Barry Warsaw8bee7612004-08-25 02:22:30 +00001226- PEP 292 classes Template and SafeTemplate are added to the string module.
1227
Martin v. Löwis75b9da42004-08-18 13:57:44 +00001228- tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
1229
Martin v. Löwisdeacce22004-08-18 12:46:26 +00001230- HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
1231
Johannes Gijsbersc473c992004-08-18 12:40:31 +00001232- Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
1233 Percivall.
1234
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +00001235- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
1236 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
1237
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +00001238- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
1239 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
1240 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +00001241 than creating a new one.
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +00001242
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001243- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
1244 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
1245 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
1246 and exponent.
1247
1248- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
1249
1250- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
Georg Brandl08c02db2005-07-22 18:39:19 +00001251 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatibility and atexit
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001252 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
1253
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001254- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
1255 to the readline module.
1256
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +00001257- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001258 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
1259 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +00001260
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +00001261- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
1262 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
1263 contains symlinks.
1264
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +00001265- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
1266 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
1267
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +00001268- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
1269 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
1270 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1271
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +00001272- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
1273 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
1274 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
1275 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
1276 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
1277 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
1278 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
1279 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
1280 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
1281 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
1282 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
1283 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
1284 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
1285
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +00001286- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
1287
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001288Tools/Demos
1289-----------
1290
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001291- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
1292 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
1293
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +00001294- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
1295
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001296Build
1297-----
1298
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +00001299- Backward incompatibility: longintrepr.h now triggers a compile-time
1300 error if SHIFT (the number of bits in a Python long "digit") isn't
1301 divisible by 5. This new requirement allows simple code for the new
1302 5-bits-at-a-time long_pow() implementation. If necessary, the
1303 restriction could be removed (by complicating long_pow(), or by
1304 falling back to the 1-bit-at-a-time algorithm), but there are no
1305 plans to do so.
1306
Brett Cannoncc8a4f62004-08-26 01:44:07 +00001307- bug #991962: When building with --disable-toolbox-glue on Darwin no
1308 attempt to build Mac-specific modules occurs.
1309
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +00001310- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
1311 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
1312
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001313- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
1314 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
1315
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +00001316- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
1317 GNU/k*BSD systems.
1318
Hye-Shik Chang3ba5bfc2004-08-19 17:52:37 +00001319- bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings
1320 found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64.
1321
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001322C API
1323-----
1324
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001325..
1326
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001327Documentation
1328-------------
1329
Neal Norwitz5268c392004-08-21 15:13:52 +00001330- patch #1005936, bug #1009373: fix index entries which contain
1331 an underscore when viewed with Acrobat.
1332
1333- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if
1334 it contains symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment
1335 since 1992, but is now in the library reference as well.
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +00001336
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001337New platforms
1338-------------
1339
Hye-Shik Changf64700a2004-08-18 15:13:41 +00001340- FreeBSD 6 is now supported.
1341
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001342Tests
1343-----
1344
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001345..
1346
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001347Windows
1348-------
1349
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +00001350- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
1351 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
1352 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
1353 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
1354 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
1355 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
1356 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
1357 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
1358 the problem.
1359
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001360Mac
1361---
1362
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001363..
1364
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001365
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001366What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
1367=================================
1368
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +00001369*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001370
1371Core and builtins
1372-----------------
1373
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +00001374- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
1375 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
1376 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
1377 sensitive code.
1378
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001379- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001380 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so::
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001381
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001382 @staticmethod
1383 def foo(bar):
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001384
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +00001385 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001386
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001387- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
1388 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
1389 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
1390 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
1391 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
1392 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
1393 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
1394 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
1395 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
1396 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
1397 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
1398
1399 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
1400 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
1401 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
1402 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
1403 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
1404 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
1405 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
1406
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +00001407- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
1408 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
1409
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +00001410- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001411 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +00001412
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001413- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001414 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001415 which was missing for no apparent reason.
1416
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001417- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001418 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
1419 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
1420
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001421- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
1422 types that support garbage collection.
1423
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +00001424- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
1425
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +00001426- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
1427 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
1428 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
1429 Jython.
1430
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001431- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
1432
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +00001433- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
1434 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
1435
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +00001436- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
1437 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
1438 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +00001439
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +00001440- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
1441 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
1442 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
1443
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001444Extension modules
1445-----------------
1446
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +00001447- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
1448
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001449Library
1450-------
1451
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +00001452- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
1453 TIS-620
1454
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +00001455- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
1456 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
1457 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
1458 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
1459 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
1460 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
1461 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
1462 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
1463 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
1464 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
1465
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +00001466- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
1467
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +00001468- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
1469 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
1470 same as when the argument is omitted).
1471 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
1472
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +00001473- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
1474
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +00001475- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
1476 schemes are offered.
1477
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +00001478- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
1479
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +00001480- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
1481 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
1482 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
1483
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +00001484- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
1485
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +00001486- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
1487 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
1488
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +00001489- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
1490 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
1491 when dummy_threading is being used.
1492
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +00001493- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
1494 from a tarfile.
1495
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001496- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001497 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001498
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +00001499- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
1500 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
1501 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
1502 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
1503
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +00001504- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
1505 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
1506
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +00001507- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
1508 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
1509 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
1510 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
1511 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
1512 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
1513 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
1514 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
1515 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
1516 by some other method in progress).
1517
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001518- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
1519 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
1520 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +00001521
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +00001522- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
1523
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +00001524- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
1525 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
1526 AM Kuchling.
1527
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +00001528- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
1529 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
1530 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
1531
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +00001532- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
1533 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
1534 instead of unsigned.
1535
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001536- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +00001537 no longer part of the public API.
1538
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +00001539- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
1540 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
1541 string methods of the same name).
1542
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001543- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +00001544 SF patch 945642.
1545
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001546- doctest unittest integration improvements:
1547
1548 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
1549
1550 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
1551 DocTestSuites.
1552
1553- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
1554 that provide thread-local data.
1555
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001556- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
1557 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
1558
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001559- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
1560
1561- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
1562 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
1563 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
1564
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001565- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
1566
1567 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
1568 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
1569 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001570
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001571 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
1572 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
1573 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
1574 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
1575
1576 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
1577 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
1578
1579 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
1580 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
1581 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
1582 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
1583
1584 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
1585 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
1586 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
1587 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
1588 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
1589
1590 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
1591 wrapping help output.
1592
1593 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
1594 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
1595 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001596
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001597C API
1598-----
1599
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001600- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
1601 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
1602 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
1603 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
1604 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
1605 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
1606 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
1607 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
1608 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
1609 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
1610 its visible semantics have not changed.
1611
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001612- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
1613 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
1614
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001615Documentation
1616-------------
1617
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001618- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001619
1620 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +00001621 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001622
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +00001623 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001624
1625 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
1626
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001627- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001628
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001629Tests
1630-----
1631
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001632- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +00001633 platforms that use the Makefile.
1634
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001635- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
1636 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
1637 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
1638
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001639
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001640What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
1641=================================
1642
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +00001643*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001644
1645Core and builtins
1646-----------------
1647
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +00001648- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
1649 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
1650 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
1651 objects now (one object instead of three).
1652
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +00001653- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
1654 Windows DLLs.
1655
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +00001656- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
1657 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +00001658
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +00001659- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
1660 a new .pyc magic.
1661
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +00001662- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
1663 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
1664 be there.
1665
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +00001666- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
1667 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
1668 the LC_NUMERIC category.
1669
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +00001670- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
1671 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
1672 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
1673
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +00001674- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
1675
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +00001676- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
1677 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
1678 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +00001679
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +00001680- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
1681 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
1682
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +00001683- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
1684
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001685- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001686 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001687
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +00001688- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
1689
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +00001690- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
1691
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +00001692- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
1693 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
1694
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +00001695- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
1696 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
1697 Fixes bug #858016 .
1698
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +00001699- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
1700 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
1701 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
1702
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +00001703- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
1704 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
1705 improves their performance (about 35%).
1706
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +00001707- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
1708 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
1709 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
1710
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +00001711- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
1712 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
1713 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
1714 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
1715
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001716- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
1717 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
Walter Dörwald09515af2005-03-18 10:28:24 +00001718 list comprehensions, and the list constructor (when the input iterable
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001719 length is not known).
1720
1721- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
1722 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +00001723 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
1724 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001725 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
1726
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +00001727- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
1728 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
1729
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +00001730- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
1731 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
1732 keyword arguments.
1733
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +00001734- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
1735 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
1736 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
1737
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +00001738- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
1739 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
1740 cases.
1741
1742- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
1743 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
1744 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
1745 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
1746 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
1747 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
1748 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
1749 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
1750 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
1751 a release build.
1752
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +00001753- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
1754 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
1755
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001756- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001757 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001758
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +00001759- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
1760 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
1761 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
1762 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
1763 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
1764 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
1765 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
1766 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
1767 destroyed.
1768
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +00001769- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
1770 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
1771 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
1772 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
1773 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
1774 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
1775 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
1776 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
1777
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +00001778- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
1779 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
1780 character other than a space.
1781
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +00001782- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
1783 by the function object or by the method object, the function
1784 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
1785 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
1786 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
1787 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
1788 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
1789 attributes with the same name.
1790
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001791- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
1792 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
1793 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
1794 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
1795 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
1796 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
1797 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
1798 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
1799 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
1800 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
1801 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
1802 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
1803 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
1804 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +00001805
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +00001806- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
1807 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
1808 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
1809 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
1810 This has been repaired.
1811
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001812- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
1813
1814- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
1815
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +00001816- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
1817 over a sequence.
1818
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001819- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001820 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001821
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +00001822- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
1823
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +00001824- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
1825 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
1826 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
1827 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
1828 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
1829 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
1830 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
1831 records with equal keys is unchanged).
1832
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +00001833- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
1834 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
1835 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
1836
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +00001837- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
1838 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
1839 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
1840 freelist.
1841
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +00001842- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
1843 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
1844
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +00001845- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
1846 number.
1847
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +00001848- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
1849 a TypeError exception.
1850
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +00001851- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
1852 820195.
1853
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +00001854- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
1855 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
1856 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
1857
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001858- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001859 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
1860 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +00001861
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +00001862- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
1863 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
1864 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
1865
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001866- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
1867 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001868 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001869
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001870- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +00001871 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
1872 the first call.
1873
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001874
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001875Extension modules
1876-----------------
1877
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +00001878- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
1879 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
1880
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001881- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
1882 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
1883 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
1884 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
1885 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
1886 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
1887 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +00001888
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +00001889- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
1890
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +00001891- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
1892
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +00001893- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
1894 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
1895
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +00001896- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
1897 fewer false positives.
1898
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +00001899- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
1900 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
1901
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001902- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +00001903 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
1904
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +00001905- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001906 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +00001907 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
Raymond Hettinger6ab78cd2004-08-29 07:50:43 +00001908 Also, array.array() and array.extend() now accept any iterable argument
1909 for repeated appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +00001910
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +00001911- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
1912 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
1913 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
1914 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
1915
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +00001916- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
1917 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
1918 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
1919 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
1920 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
1921 #897625.
1922
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +00001923- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
1924 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
1925
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +00001926- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
1927 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
1928 and pops on either side of the deque.
1929
1930- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
1931 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
1932
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +00001933- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
1934 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
1935 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
1936 other functions that expect a function argument.
1937
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +00001938- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
1939
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001940- os.getsid was added.
1941
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +00001942- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
1943 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
1944 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
1945
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +00001946- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
1947
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +00001948- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
1949
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +00001950- readline.clear_history was added.
1951
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +00001952- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
1953
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +00001954- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
1955
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +00001956- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
1957
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +00001958- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
1959
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +00001960- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
1961
1962- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
1963
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +00001964- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
1965
1966- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
1967
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001968- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
1969 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
1970 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
1971
1972- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
1973 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
1974 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
1975 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
1976 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
1977 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
1978 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
1979
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +00001980- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
1981 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
1982 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
1983 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001984
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001985- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001986 iterators from a single iterable.
1987
1988- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
1989 of raising a TypeError exception.
1990
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +00001991- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
1992 as parameter.
1993
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001994Library
1995-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001996
Georg Brandlf0de6a12005-08-22 18:02:59 +00001997- Bug #1266283: The new function "lexists" is now in os.path.__all__.
1998
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +00001999- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
2000 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
2001 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002002
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +00002003- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
2004 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
2005 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +00002006
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +00002007- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +00002008
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +00002009- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
2010 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +00002011
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +00002012- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
2013 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
2014
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00002015- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
2016
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00002017- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00002018 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00002019
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00002020- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00002021 that generate a -debuginfo.rpm
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00002022
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +00002023- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
2024
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +00002025- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
2026 on cygwin and mingw32.
2027
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +00002028- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
2029
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +00002030- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
2031 module.
2032
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +00002033- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
2034 installation scheme for all platforms.
2035
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00002036- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +00002037 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00002038
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00002039- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
2040 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
2041 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
2042
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +00002043- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
2044 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
2045 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
2046
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +00002047- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
2048
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +00002049- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
2050
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +00002051- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
2052 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
2053
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +00002054- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
2055 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
2056 type pattern with the same value exists.
2057
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +00002058- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
2059 when run from the command prompt).
2060
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00002061- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
2062 not taken into consideration when caching value.
2063
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +00002064- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
2065 default sort).
2066
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +00002067- Added global runctx function to profile module
2068
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +00002069- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
2070
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +00002071- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
2072
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +00002073- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
2074
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00002075- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +00002076 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
2077 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
2078 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
2079 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
2080 accordingly.
2081
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +00002082- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
2083 decoding standards.
2084
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +00002085- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
2086 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
2087 called for all requests.
2088
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +00002089- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
2090 they are passed to the compiler.
2091
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +00002092- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
2093 indent, width and depth.
2094
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +00002095- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
2096 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
2097
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +00002098- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
2099 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
2100
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +00002101- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
2102
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +00002103- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
2104
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00002105- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
2106
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +00002107- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
2108 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
2109
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +00002110- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +00002111 for better performance.
2112
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00002113- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +00002114
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +00002115- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
2116 a string).
2117
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +00002118- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
2119
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +00002120- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
2121
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +00002122- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
2123
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +00002124- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
2125
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +00002126- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
2127 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
2128 list of fieldnames.
2129
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +00002130- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
2131 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
2132
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +00002133- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
2134
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +00002135- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
2136 empty lists.
2137
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +00002138- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
2139 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
2140 and shelves.
2141
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +00002142- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
2143 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
2144
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00002145- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +00002146 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
2147 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00002148
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +00002149- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
2150 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +00002151 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +00002152
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00002153- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +00002154 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
2155 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
2156
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00002157- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
2158 and removed in Py2.4.
2159
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +00002160- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
2161
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +00002162- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
2163
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002164Tools/Demos
2165-----------
2166
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +00002167- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
2168 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
2169
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +00002170- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
2171
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +00002172- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
2173 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
2174 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
2175 destination in situations where both files are given.
2176
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +00002177- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
2178 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
2179 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
2180 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
2181
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +00002182- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
2183
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +00002184- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
2185 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
2186 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
2187 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
2188 now.
2189
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002190- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
2191 in effect
2192
2193- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
2194 C-c C-h
2195
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +00002196- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
2197 -d option was given.
2198
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002199Build
2200-----
2201
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +00002202- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
2203 build under OS X.
2204
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +00002205- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
2206 --enable-profiling.
2207
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +00002208- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
2209 is configured --with-tsc.
2210
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +00002211- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
2212 on AMD64.
2213
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +00002214- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
2215 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
2216
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00002217- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
2218 removed.
2219
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00002220- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
2221 supported (see PEP 11).
2222
2223- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
2224
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00002225- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
2226
2227- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
2228 (see PEP 11).
2229
2230- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
2231 sizeof(char) must be 1.
2232
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002233C API
2234-----
2235
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00002236- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
2237 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
2238 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
2239
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00002240- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
2241 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
2242 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
2243 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
2244
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00002245- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
2246 generator objects.
2247
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00002248- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
2249 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00002250 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
2251 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00002252
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00002253- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
2254 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
2255
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00002256- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
2257 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
2258 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
2259 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
2260 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
2261
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00002262- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
2263 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
2264 about 10% faster.
2265
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00002266- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
2267 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
2268
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00002269- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
2270 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
2271 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
2272 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
2273
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002274Windows
2275-------
2276
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00002277- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
2278 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
2279 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
2280 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
2281
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00002282- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
2283 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
2284 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
2285
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002286
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002287What's New in Python 2.3 final?
2288===============================
2289
2290*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
2291
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002292IDLE
2293----
2294
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00002295- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
2296 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
2297 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
2298 context-menu actions.
2299
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002300- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
2301 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
2302 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
2303 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
2304 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
2305 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
2306 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
2307 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
2308 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
2309
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002310
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002311What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
2312=============================================
2313
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00002314*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002315
2316Core and builtins
2317-----------------
2318
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00002319- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002320 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00002321 comment at the end are still unsupported.
2322
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002323Extension modules
2324-----------------
2325
2326- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
2327 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
2328 than once. This has been fixed.
2329
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00002330- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
2331 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
2332 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
2333 call.
2334
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002335- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
2336
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002337Library
2338-------
2339
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002340- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
2341 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
2342
2343- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
2344 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
2345 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
2346 restored.
2347
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00002348IDLE
2349----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002350
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00002351- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002352
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002353Build
2354-----
2355
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002356- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
2357 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
2358
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002359C API
2360-----
2361
2362Windows
2363-------
2364
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00002365- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
2366 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
2367
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002368- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
2369
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002370Mac
2371---
2372
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002373- Various fixes to pimp.
2374
2375- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
2376
2377- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
2378 more problems than it solves.
2379
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002380
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002381What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
2382=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002383
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00002384*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
2385
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002386Core and builtins
2387-----------------
2388
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00002389- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
2390 by sys.setcheckinterval().
2391
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002392- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
2393 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002394 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002395
2396- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
2397 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
2398 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002399 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002400
2401- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
2402 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002403
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002404- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
2405 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
2406 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
2407
2408- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002409 770247.
2410
2411- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002412
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002413Extension modules
2414-----------------
2415
2416- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
2417 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
2418
2419- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
2420
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002421- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
2422
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00002423- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
2424 contained within the _strptime module.
2425
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002426- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
2427 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
2428
2429- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002430 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
2431
2432- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
2433 the find_class attribute, if present.
2434
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002435- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002436
2437 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
2438 (SF bug 763298).
2439
2440 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00002441 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
2442 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
2443 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002444
2445 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
2446
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002447Library
2448-------
2449
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002450- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
2451
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00002452- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
2453 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
2454 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
2455 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
2456 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
2457 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
2458 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
2459 or Tester().
2460
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002461- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
2462 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
2463 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
2464 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
2465 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
2466 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
2467 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
2468 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
2469 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00002470
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002471 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00002472
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00002473- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
2474 weren't before was an oversight.
2475
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002476- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
2477 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
2478
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00002479- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
2480 when there are no lines.
2481
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00002482- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
2483 which could occur with Tk 8.4
2484
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002485- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
2486 to child processes.
2487
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002488- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
2489
2490- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
2491
2492- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
2493 xmlrpclib.
2494
2495- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
2496 responses.
2497
2498- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
2499 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
2500
2501- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
2502 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
2503 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
2504
2505- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
2506 used as patterns.
2507
2508- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
2509 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
2510 than Tk 8.3.
2511
2512- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
2513
2514- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002515
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002516Tools/Demos
2517-----------
2518
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002519- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
2520
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00002521- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
2522
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002523- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002524
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002525Build
2526-----
2527
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002528- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
2529
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002530- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
2531
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002532- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
2533 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002534
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002535- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
2536 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
2537 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002538
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002539C API
2540-----
2541
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002542- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
2543 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
2544
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002545Windows
2546-------
2547
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002548- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
2549 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
2550 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
2551 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
2552 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
2553 Python exception ::
2554
2555 thread.error: can't start new thread
2556
2557 is raised now.
2558
2559- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
2560 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
2561 instead of from DLL teardown.
2562
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002563Mac
2564---
2565
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002566- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00002567 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002568 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
2569 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
2570 the executable in the bundle.
2571
2572- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002573
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00002574- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
2575
2576- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
2577 on Panther.
2578
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002579What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
2580================================
2581
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002582*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002583
2584Core and builtins
2585-----------------
2586
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00002587- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
2588 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
2589 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
2590 with the -i option.
2591
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00002592- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
2593 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
2594
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002595- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
2596 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
2597
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00002598- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
2599 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
2600 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
2601 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
2602 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
2603 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
2604 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
2605 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
2606 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
2607 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
2608 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
2609 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
2610 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00002611
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002612- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
2613 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
2614 embedded in a lambda expression.
2615
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00002616- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
2617 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
2618 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
2619 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
2620 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
2621
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002622- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
2623 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
2624 matches the restriction on classic classes.
2625
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00002626- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
2627 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
2628
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00002629- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
2630 It's writable again.
2631
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002632- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
2633 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
2634 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002635 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002636
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002637- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
2638 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
2639 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
2640
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002641Extension modules
2642-----------------
2643
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00002644- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
2645 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
2646
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002647- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
2648 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
2649 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
2650 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
2651
2652- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
2653 collection.
2654
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00002655- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
2656 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
2657 unique within a single program run.
2658
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00002659- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
2660 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
2661
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00002662- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
2663 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
2664
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00002665- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
2666 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00002667
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00002668- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
2669
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00002670- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
2671 Fixes SF bug #730685.
2672
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00002673- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
2674 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
2675 for many BSD-derived systems.
2676
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002677
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002678Library
2679-------
2680
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00002681- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
2682 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
2683 primary ones:
2684
2685 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
2686 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
2687 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
2688
2689 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
2690 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
2691 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
2692 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
2693 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
2694 framework features (which doctest lacks).
2695
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00002696- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
2697 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
2698 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
2699 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
2700 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
2701 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
2702 argument.
2703
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002704- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
2705 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
2706 in the archive.
2707
2708- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
2709 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
2710
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00002711- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
2712 569574).
2713
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002714- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
2715 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
2716 no more.
2717
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002718- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
2719 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
2720 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
2721 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
2722 code coverage.
2723
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002724- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
2725 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
2726 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002727 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
2728 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002729
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002730- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
2731 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
2732 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00002733 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002734
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00002735- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
2736
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00002737- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
2738 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
2739 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
2740 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
2741
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00002742- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
2743 handling.
2744
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00002745- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
2746 __doc__ of data descriptors.
2747
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00002748- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
2749 in socket.py.
2750
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00002751- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
2752
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00002753- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
2754 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
2755 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
2756 opener with proxy support.
2757
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002758- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
2759
2760- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
2761
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002762Tools/Demos
2763-----------
2764
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00002765- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
2766
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002767- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
2768
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002769- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
2770 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00002771
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00002772- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
2773 files.
2774
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002775Build
2776-----
2777
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002778- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00002779 different root directory.
2780
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002781C API
2782-----
2783
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00002784- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
2785 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
2786 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
2787 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
2788 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
2789 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
2790 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
2791 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
2792 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
2793 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
2794
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002795- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
2796 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
2797 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
2798 from Python.
2799
2800
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002801New platforms
2802-------------
2803
2804None this time.
2805
2806Tests
2807-----
2808
2809- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
2810 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
2811
2812Windows
2813-------
2814
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00002815- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
2816
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00002817- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
2818 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
2819 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
2820 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
2821 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
2822 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
2823 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
2824 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
2825 that's what it's for.
2826
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002827Mac
2828---
2829
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00002830- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
2831 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
2832 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
2833 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00002834- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
2835 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
2836- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002837
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002838SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
2839------------------------------------
2840
2841430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
2842598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
2843622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
2844661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
2845683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
2846697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
2847713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
2848724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
2849727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
2850729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
2851730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
2852731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
2853732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
2854733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
2855735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
2856740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
2857744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
2858745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
2859747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
2860749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
2861751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
2862753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
2863755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
2864757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
2865760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
2866
2867
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002868What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
2869================================
2870
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00002871*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002872
2873Core and builtins
2874-----------------
2875
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00002876- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
2877 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
2878
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00002879- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
2880 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
2881 and cannot be strings).
2882
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00002883- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
2884 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
2885 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
2886 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
2887
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00002888- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
2889 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
2890 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
2891 Python itself.
2892
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00002893- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
2894 the referenced object, if it has one.
2895
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00002896- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
2897 the thread started at
2898 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
2899
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00002900- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
2901 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
2902 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
2903 placed on a list index.
2904
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00002905- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
2906 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
2907 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
2908 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
2909
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002910- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
2911 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
2912 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
2913 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
2914 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
2915 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
2916 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
2917
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00002918- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
2919 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
2920 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
2921 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
2922 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
2923
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00002924- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
2925 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00002926
2927- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
2928 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
2929 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
2930 #693195.)
2931
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00002932- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
2933 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002934
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002935- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00002936 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002937 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
2938 interpreter executions, would fail.
2939
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002940- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00002941 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00002942 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002943
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002944Extension modules
2945-----------------
2946
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00002947- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
2948 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
2949 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
2950 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
2951
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00002952- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
2953 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
2954
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00002955- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
2956 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
2957 and Greg Chapman.)
2958
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002959- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
2960 recursively.
2961
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00002962- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00002963 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
2964 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
2965 leaks.
2966
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00002967- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
2968
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00002969- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
2970 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
2971 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
2972 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
2973 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
2974 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
2975 #705836.
2976
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002977- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00002978 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
2979
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00002980- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
2981 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
2982 See SF bug #692416.
2983
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00002984- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
2985 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
2986
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00002987- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
2988 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
2989 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002990
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002991- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00002992 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
2993 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
2994
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00002995- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
2996 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
2997 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
2998 timeouts to work properly.
2999
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003000Library
3001-------
3002
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00003003- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
3004 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
3005 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
3006 future release.
3007
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00003008- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
3009 for querying platform dependent features.
3010
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00003011- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00003012
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00003013- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
3014 pickle protocol versions.
3015
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00003016- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
3017 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
3018 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
3019
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00003020- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
3021
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00003022- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
3023 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
3024 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
3025 modules.
3026
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00003027- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
3028 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
3029 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
3030
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00003031- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
3032 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
3033
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00003034- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
3035 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
3036 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
3037
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00003038- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00003039 MS Office extensions.
3040
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00003041- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
3042 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
3043
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00003044- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
3045 execution speed of expressions and statements.
3046
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003047- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
3048 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
3049 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
3050 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
3051 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
3052 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
3053
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00003054- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
3055 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
3056 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003057
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00003058- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
3059 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
3060 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
3061
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00003062- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
3063
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00003064- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
3065 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
3066 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
3067
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003068Tools/Demos
3069-----------
3070
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00003071- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
3072 See the module docstring for details.
3073
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003074Build
3075-----
3076
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00003077- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
3078 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003079
3080C API
3081-----
3082
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00003083- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
3084
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00003085- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
3086 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
3087 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
3088
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00003089- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
3090 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00003091
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00003092 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
3093 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
3094 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00003095
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00003096- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00003097 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
3098
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00003099- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
3100 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
3101 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003102
3103New platforms
3104-------------
3105
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00003106None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003107
3108Tests
3109-----
3110
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00003111- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
3112 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003113
3114Windows
3115-------
3116
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00003117- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
3118 function.
3119
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00003120- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
3121 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003122
3123Mac
3124---
3125
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00003126- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
3127 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00003128
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00003129- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
3130 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003131
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00003132- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
3133 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
3134 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00003135
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00003136- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00003137 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
3138 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00003139
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00003140- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
3141 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003142
3143
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003144What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
3145=================================
3146
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00003147*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003148
3149Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00003150-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003151
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00003152- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
3153 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
3154 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
3155
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00003156- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
3157 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
3158 (SF patch #664376.)
3159
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00003160- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
3161 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
3162 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
3163 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
3164 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
3165 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00003166 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00003167
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00003168- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
3169 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
3170 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
3171 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003172 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00003173
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00003174- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
3175 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
3176 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
3177 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
3178 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
3179 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
3180 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
3181 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
3182 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
3183 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
3184 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
3185
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00003186- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
3187 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
3188 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
3189 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
3190 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
3191 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
3192
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00003193- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
3194 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
3195
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00003196- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
3197 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
3198 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
3199 case.)
3200
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00003201- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
3202 passed as unicode strings.
3203
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00003204- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
3205 See SF bug #683467.
3206
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00003207- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
3208 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
3209
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00003210- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
3211
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00003212- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
3213
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00003214- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
3215 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
3216 arguments.
3217
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00003218- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
3219 See SF bug #667147.
3220
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00003221- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003222 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00003223 See SF bug #676155.
3224
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00003225- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00003226 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00003227 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
3228 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
3229 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
3230 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
3231 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
3232 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00003233
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003234Extension modules
3235-----------------
3236
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00003237- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
3238 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
3239 tp_as_number pointer.
3240
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00003241- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
3242 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
3243 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
3244 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
3245 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
3246
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003247- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
3248
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00003249- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
3250
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00003251- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00003252 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00003253 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
3254 patch #678531.)
3255
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00003256- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
3257 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
3258
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00003259- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
3260 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
3261
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00003262- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
3263
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00003264- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
3265 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
3266 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
3267
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003268- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
3269
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00003270- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
3271 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
3272
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003273- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003274
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003275- datetime changes:
3276
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00003277 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
3278
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00003279 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
3280 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
3281 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
3282 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
3283 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
3284 now.
3285
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003286 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003287 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
3288 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003289
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003290 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003291 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003292 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
3293 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
3294 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
3295 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003296
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00003297 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
3298 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
3299 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003300 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
3301
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00003302 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
3303 by a later example coded by Guido.
3304
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003305 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003306 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
3307 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
3308 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003309 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
3310 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
3311
3312 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
3313 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
3314 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
3315 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
3316 tzinfo subclass instance.
3317
3318 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
3319 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
3320 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
3321 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
3322 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
3323 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
3324 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
3325 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003326
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003327 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
3328 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
3329 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
3330 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
3331 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003332 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
3333
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003334 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003335
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003336 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
3337 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
3338 as a naive datetime object.
3339
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00003340 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
3341 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
3342 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
3343
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00003344 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
3345 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
3346 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
3347 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
3348 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
3349 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
3350 comparison.
3351
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003352 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
3353 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
3354 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
3355 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003356 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003357
3358 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003359
3360 and ::
3361
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003362 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
3363
3364 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
3365 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
3366 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
3367 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
3368
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00003369 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
3370 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
3371 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
3372 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
3373 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
3374
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003375 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
3376 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00003377 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
3378 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003379
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003380Library
3381-------
3382
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003383- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
3384 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
3385
3386- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
3387 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
3388 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
3389 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
3390 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
3391 See PEP 307 for details.
3392
3393- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
3394 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
3395
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00003396- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
3397 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00003398 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003399 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
3400 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00003401 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00003402
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00003403- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
3404 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
3405
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003406- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
3407 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
3408 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
3409
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00003410- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
3411
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00003412- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
3413 exception.
3414
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00003415- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
3416 class.
3417
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00003418- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
3419 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
3420 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
3421
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00003422- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
3423 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
3424
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003425- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00003426 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
3427 See SF bug #659228.
3428
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00003429- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
3430 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
3431 See SF patch #651082.
3432
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00003433- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003434
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00003435- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
3436 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
3437
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003438- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003439 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003440
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00003441- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
3442 DOS paths from other platforms.
3443
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003444Tools/Demos
3445-----------
3446
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003447- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
3448 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
3449 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
3450 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
3451 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
3452 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
3453 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
3454 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
3455 example:
3456
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00003457 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
3458 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003459
3460 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
3461
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003462
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003463Build
3464-----
3465
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003466- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
3467 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
3468 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003469 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
3470
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003471 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
3472
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00003473- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
3474 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
3475 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
3476 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
3477 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
3478 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
3479 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
3480 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
3481 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
3482
3483- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
3484 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
3485 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
3486 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
3487
3488- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
3489 from the Tools/scripts directory.
3490
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003491C API
3492-----
3493
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003494- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
3495 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00003496
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00003497- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
3498 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
3499 tp_as_number pointer.
3500
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00003501- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
3502 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
3503 (SF #681367)
3504
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00003505- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
3506 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
3507 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
3508 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00003509
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003510Tests
3511-----
3512
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00003513- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003514 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
3515 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
3516 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
3517 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
3518 pydoc.)
3519
3520- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
3521
3522- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003523
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003524Windows
3525-------
3526
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00003527- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
3528 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
3529 time).
3530
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00003531- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
3532 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
3533
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00003534- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
3535 release without strong cryptography.
3536
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003537- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003538 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003539
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003540- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
3541 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
3542
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003543Mac
3544---
3545
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003546- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
3547 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003548
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00003549- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
3550 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
3551 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003552
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003553- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
3554 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003555
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003556- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
3557 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
3558 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
3559 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003560
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003561- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00003562 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
3563 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
3564 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003565
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003566
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003567What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003568=================================
3569
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00003570*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003571
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003572Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003573--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003574
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00003575- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
3576
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003577- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
3578 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003579 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003580 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003581 a different meaning than before.
3582
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003583- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003584 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003585 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003586
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003587- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003588 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003589 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003590
3591- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
3592 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
3593 and deallocation.
3594
3595- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
3596 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
3597
3598- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
3599 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
3600 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
3601 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
3602 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
3603
3604- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
3605 now detected by the garbage collector.
3606
3607- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
3608 [SF bug 519621]
3609
3610- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
3611 identifier.
3612
3613- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
3614 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
3615 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
3616 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
3617 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
3618 [SF bug 563060]
3619
3620- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
3621 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
3622 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
3623 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
3624 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
3625
3626- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
3627 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
3628 not called. [SF bug #537450]
3629
3630- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
3631
3632- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
3633 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
3634 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
3635 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
3636 state of the slots would be lost.)
3637
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003638Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003639-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003640
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003641- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003642 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
3643 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
3644 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
3645 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003646 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
3647 Jython 2.1.
3648
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003649- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003650 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003651 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
3652 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
3653 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
3654 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
3655 these, see PEP 302.
3656
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003657- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
3658 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
3659 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
3660
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00003661- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
3662 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
3663 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
3664
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00003665- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
3666 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
3667 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
3668
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003669- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
3670 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
3671 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
3672 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
3673 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
3674 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
3675 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
3676 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
3677 releases or implementations.
3678
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003679- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003680 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
3681 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003682
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00003683- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
3684 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
3685
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003686- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
3687 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
3688 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
3689
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00003690- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
3691 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
3692
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003693- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
3694 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003695 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
3696 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003697
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00003698- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
3699 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
3700 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
3701 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
3702 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
3703
3704 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
3705 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
3706 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
3707 pattern.
3708
3709 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
3710 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
3711 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
3712 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
3713
3714 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
3715 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
3716 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
3717 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
3718 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
3719 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
3720
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00003721- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
3722 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
3723 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
3724 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
3725 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
3726 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
3727 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
3728 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00003729
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00003730- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
3731 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
3732 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
3733 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
3734 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003735 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
3736 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
3737 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
3738 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
3739 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
3740 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
3741 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003742
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003743- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
3744 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
3745
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00003746- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
3747 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
3748 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
3749 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
3750 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
3751 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
3752 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
3753 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
3754 to Zack Weinberg!
3755
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00003756- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
3757 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
3758 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
3759 type. This has been fixed now.
3760
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00003761- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
3762 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
3763 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
3764
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003765- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
3766 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
3767 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
3768 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
3769 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
3770 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
3771 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
3772 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00003773 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003774
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00003775- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
3776 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
3777 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00003778
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003779- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
3780 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
3781 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
3782 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
3783 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
3784 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
3785 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
3786 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003787 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003788 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
3789 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
3790
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00003791- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
3792 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
3793 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
3794 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
3795 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
3796 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
3797 this.)
3798
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003799- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
3800 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003801 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003802 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003803 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
3804 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00003805 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
3806 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003807
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003808- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
3809 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
3810 currently running.
3811
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00003812- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
3813 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
3814 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
3815 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
3816
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00003817- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
3818 as directory names.
3819
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00003820- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
3821 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
3822
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00003823- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
3824 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
3825
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003826- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00003827 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
3828 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003829
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00003830- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
3831 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
3832 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
3833 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
3834 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
3835
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003836- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
3837 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
3838 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
3839 removed.
3840
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00003841- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
3842 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
3843 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
3844
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00003845- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
3846 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
3847 to __debug__.
3848
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00003849- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
3850 string to the left with zeros. For example,
3851 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
3852
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00003853- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
3854 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
3855 deprecated now.
3856
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00003857- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
3858 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
3859 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00003860
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00003861- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
3862 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
3863 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
3864 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
3865 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00003866
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00003867- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
3868 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
3869
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003870- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
3871 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
3872 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003873 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003874 is backward compatible.
3875
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00003876- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
3877 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
3878 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
3879 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
3880 could access a pointer to freed memory.
3881
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00003882- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
3883 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
3884 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
3885 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
3886 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
3887 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003888
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00003889- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
3890 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
3891
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003892- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
3893 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
3894
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003895- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
3896 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
3897 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
3898 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
3899 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
3900
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00003901- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
3902 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
3903 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
3904
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003905- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00003906 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
3907
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00003908- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
3909 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
3910 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00003911
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00003912- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
3913 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
3914
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00003915- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
3916 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
3917 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
3918
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00003919- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
3920
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003921Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003922-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003923
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00003924- Added three operators to the operator module:
3925 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
3926 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
3927 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
3928
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00003929- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
3930
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003931- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
3932 archives.
3933
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003934- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
3935 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
3936 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
3937
3938 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
3939
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003940- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
3941 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
3942 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00003943 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003944
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00003945- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
3946 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
3947 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
3948 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003949 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
3950 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
3951 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
3952 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00003953
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00003954- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
3955 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00003956
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00003957- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
3958
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00003959- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
3960 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
3961
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00003962- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
3963 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
3964 supported.
3965
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00003966- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
3967
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00003968- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
3969 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00003970
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00003971- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
3972 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
3973
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003974- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
3975
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003976- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
3977 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
3978
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00003979- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
3980 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
3981 functions but callable type objects.
3982
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003983- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003984 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003985 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003986
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00003987- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
3988 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00003989
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00003990- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
3991 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00003992
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00003993- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
3994 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
3995 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
3996 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
3997
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00003998- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
3999 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00004000
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00004001- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
4002 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
4003 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
4004 and __imul__.
4005
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00004006- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00004007 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
4008 is called.
4009
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00004010- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
4011 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
4012 interpreter was compiled.
4013
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00004014- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
4015 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
4016 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00004017 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00004018 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
4019 1, not 2.
4020
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00004021- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
4022 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
4023 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
4024 limit.
4025
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00004026- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
4027 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
4028 bug #623464.
4029
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00004030- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
4031 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
4032 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
4033 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
4034
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004035Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004036-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004037
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00004038- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
4039
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00004040- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
4041 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
4042 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
4043 with Python 2.3a2.
4044
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00004045- os.path exposes getctime.
4046
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004047- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004048 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004049 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004050 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004051 unit tests of floating point results.
4052
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00004053- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
4054 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
4055 has been increased.
4056
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00004057- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
4058 executed.
4059
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00004060- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
4061 postinstallation script.
4062
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00004063- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
4064 test the current module.
4065
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004066- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00004067 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
4068 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
4069 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
4070 this behavior needs to be controlled.
4071
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00004072- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00004073 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00004074 Ward's Optik package.
4075
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00004076- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
4077 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
4078 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
4079 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
4080
4081- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
4082 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00004083 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00004084
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00004085- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
4086 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
4087 shelf are binary pickles.
4088
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00004089- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
4090 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
4091
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00004092- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
4093 modules are iterators now.
4094
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00004095- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
4096 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
4097 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
4098 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
4099 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
4100 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00004101
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00004102- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
4103 with their entity value.
4104
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00004105- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
4106
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00004107- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
4108 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00004109
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00004110- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
4111 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00004112 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00004113
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00004114- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
4115 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
4116 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
4117 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
4118 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
4119 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
4120 main():
4121
4122 import locale
4123 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
4124
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00004125- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
4126 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
4127
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00004128- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
4129 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
4130 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
4131 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
4132 to the new standard.
4133
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00004134- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
4135 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
4136 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
4137 an extension to the database.
4138
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00004139- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
4140 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
4141 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
4142 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00004143 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00004144
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00004145- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00004146 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00004147
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00004148- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
4149 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
4150 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
4151 bounded integers.
4152
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00004153- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
4154 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
4155 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
4156 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
4157 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
4158 in existence.
4159
4160 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
4161 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
4162 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
4163 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
4164 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
4165 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
4166
4167 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
4168 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
4169 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
4170 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
4171
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00004172- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
4173 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
4174 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
4175
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00004176- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
4177
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00004178- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
4179 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
4180 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
4181 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
4182
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00004183- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
4184 argument.
4185
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00004186- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
4187 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
4188 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
4189 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
4190 [SF patch 560794].
4191
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00004192- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
4193 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
4194 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00004195 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
4196 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
4197 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00004198
4199- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
4200 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00004201
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00004202- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
4203 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
4204 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
4205 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00004206
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00004207- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
4208 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
4209 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
4210 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
4211 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
4212
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00004213- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00004214
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00004215- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
4216
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00004217- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
4218 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
4219 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
4220 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
4221 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
4222 identical to None.
4223
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00004224- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
4225 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
4226 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
4227 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
4228 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
4229 results now.
4230
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00004231- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
4232 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
4233
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00004234- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
4235 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
4236 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
4237 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
4238 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
4239 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
4240 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
4241 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
4242
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00004243- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
4244
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00004245- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
4246 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
4247
4248- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
4249 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
4250 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
4251 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
4252 and other systems.
4253
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00004254- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
4255 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
4256 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
4257 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 +00004258 work well with these.
4259
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00004260- compileall now supports quiet operation.
4261
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004262- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00004263 connections.
4264
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00004265- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
4266 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
4267 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
4268
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00004269- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
4270 sets
4271
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00004272- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
4273 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
4274 name.
4275
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00004276- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
4277 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
4278 passed in.
4279
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004280- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00004281 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00004282 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
4283 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00004284
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00004285- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
4286
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00004287- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
4288
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00004289- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
4290 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
4291 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
4292
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00004293- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
4294 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
4295 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
4296 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00004297 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00004298
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004299- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00004300 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004301 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00004302
4303- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
4304 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
4305 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
4306
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004307- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00004308 the value of its expression argument.
4309
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00004310- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
4311 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
4312 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
4313
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00004314- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
4315 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
4316 skipstone browser was included.
4317
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00004318- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
4319 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
4320
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004321Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004322-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004323
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00004324- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
4325 names in addition to accepting file names.
4326
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00004327- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
4328 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
4329 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
4330 still used and useful.)
4331
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00004332- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
4333 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
4334 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
4335 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00004336
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00004337- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
4338 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
4339 the generated binary.
4340
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004341Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004342-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004343
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00004344- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
4345
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00004346- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
4347 except in the hands of experts.
4348
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00004349- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00004350 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
4351 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
4352 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00004353
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00004354- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
4355 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
4356 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
4357 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
4358 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
4359 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
4360 builds.
4361
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00004362- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
4363 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
4364 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
4365 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
4366 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
4367 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
4368 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
4369 new type.
4370
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00004371- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00004372
4373 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
4374 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
4375 positive infinities.
4376
4377 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
4378 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
4379 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
4380 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
4381 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
4382 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
4383 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
4384
4385 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
4386
4387 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
4388
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00004389- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
4390 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
4391 size of the executable.
4392
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00004393- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
4394 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
4395 configure script. On other platforms, remove
4396 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00004397
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00004398- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
4399
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00004400- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
4401 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
4402 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00004403
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00004404- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
4405 well as Unix.
4406
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00004407- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
4408 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
4409 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
4410 modules in the README file for details.
4411
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004412C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004413-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004414
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004415- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
4416 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004417 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00004418 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004419 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004420
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004421- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
4422 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
4423 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
4424 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
4425 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
4426 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004427 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004428 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
4429 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
4430 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
4431 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
4432 aligned.)
4433
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00004434- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
4435 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
4436 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
4437
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00004438- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
4439 level.
4440
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00004441- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
4442 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
4443 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
4444 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
4445 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
4446
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00004447- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
4448 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
4449 code.
4450
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00004451- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
4452 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
4453 adjusting for negative indices.
4454
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00004455- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
4456 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
4457 object.
4458
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00004459- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
4460 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
4461 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
4462
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004463- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
4464 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00004465
4466- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
4467
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00004468- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
4469 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
4470 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
4471 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
4472
4473- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
4474
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00004475- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00004476
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004477- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00004478 without going through the buffer API.
4479
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004480- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00004481
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00004482- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
4483 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
4484 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
4485 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
4486
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004487- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
4488 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
4489
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004490- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00004491 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
4492
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004493New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004494-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004495
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00004496- OpenVMS is now supported.
4497
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00004498- AtheOS is now supported.
4499
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00004500- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
4501
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00004502- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
4503
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004504Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004505-----
4506
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00004507- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
4508 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
4509 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004510
4511Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004512-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004513
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004514- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
4515 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
4516 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
4517 bugs.
4518 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004519 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00004520 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
4521 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004522 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00004523
4524- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00004525 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004526
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00004527- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
4528 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
4529
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004530- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
4531 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004532 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004533 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
4534
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00004535- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
4536 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
4537 use files" uninstall option).
4538
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00004539- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
4540
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004541- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
4542 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
4543
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004544- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
4545 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
4546 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
4547
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004548- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
4549 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
4550 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
4551 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
4552 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004553 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
4554 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
4555 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004556
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004557- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004558 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004559 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
4560 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
4561 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
4562 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
4563 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
4564 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
4565 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
4566 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
4567 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
4568 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
4569 work around.
4570
4571- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
4572 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
4573 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
4574 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
4575 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
4576 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
4577 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
4578 specified with O_CREAT too).
4579
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004580Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004581----
4582
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004583- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004584
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00004585- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
4586 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
4587 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
4588
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004589- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
4590 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
4591 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
4592
4593- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
4594 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
4595 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
4596 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
4597 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
4598 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
4599 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
4600 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00004601
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00004602- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
4603 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
4604 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004605
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004606- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
4607 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
4608 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
4609 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
4610 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004611
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004612- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
4613 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
4614 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004615
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004616- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
4617 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004618
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004619- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
4620 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
4621 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
4622 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
4623 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004624
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004625- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
4626 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
4627 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
4628
4629- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
4630 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
4631 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004632
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004633- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
4634 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
4635 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
4636 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004637 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004638
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004639- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
4640 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004641
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004642- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
4643 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00004644
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004645- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00004646 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004647 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
4648 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004649
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00004650
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004651What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004652===============================
4653
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004654*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
4655
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004656Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004657--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004658
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004659- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
4660 with a custom metaclass.
4661
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004662Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004663-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004664
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004665- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
4666 are proxies.
4667
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004668Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004669-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004670
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004671- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
4672 very short strings.
4673
4674- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
4675 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
4676 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
4677 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
4678 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
4679
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004680Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004681-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004682
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004683- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
4684 close or delete time).
4685
4686- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
4687 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
4688
4689- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
4690
4691- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004692 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004693
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004694Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004695-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004696
4697Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004698-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004699
4700C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004701-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004702
4703New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004704-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004705
4706Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004707-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004708
4709Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004710-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004711
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004712- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
4713
4714- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
4715 instances are deleted at process exit time.
4716
4717- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
4718 deleted at process exit time.
4719
4720- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
4721 in backslash.
4722
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004723Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004724----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004725
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004726- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
4727 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
4728 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
4729
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004730
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00004731What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004732===========================
4733
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004734*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
4735
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004736Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004737--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004738
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004739- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
4740 been extensively updated. See
4741
4742 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
4743
4744 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
4745
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00004746- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
4747 deleted!
4748
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00004749- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
4750 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
4751 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
4752 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
4753 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
4754
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004755- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
4756
4757 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
4758 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
4759
4760 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
4761 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
4762 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
4763 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
4764 supported anyway.
4765
4766 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
4767 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
4768
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00004769- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
4770 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
4771 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
4772 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
4773 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004774
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00004775- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
4776 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
4777 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
4778
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004779Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004780-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004781
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004782- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
4783 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
4784 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
4785 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
4786 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
4787 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00004788 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
4789 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
4790 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
4791 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004792
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00004793- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
4794 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
4795 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
4796
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004797Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004798-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004799
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004800- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
4801
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004802Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004803-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004804
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00004805- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
4806 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
4807 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
4808 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
4809 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
4810 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
4811
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00004812- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
4813
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00004814- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
4815
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00004816- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
4817
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004818- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
4819 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
4820 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
4821
4822- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
4823
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004824Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004825-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004826
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004827- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
4828 off a search on Google.
4829
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004830Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004831-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004832
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004833- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
4834 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
4835 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
4836 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
4837 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
4838 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
4839 other platforms should do likewise.
4840
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00004841- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
4842 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
4843 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
4844
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004845C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004846-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004847
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004848- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
4849 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
4850 producing key-value pairs.
4851
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004852- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004853 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004854 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
4855 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
4856 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
4857 previously went unchallenged.
4858
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004859New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004860-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004861
4862Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004863-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004864
4865Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004866-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004867
4868Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004869----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004870
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00004871- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
4872 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004873
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004874- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
4875 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
4876 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
4877 home.
4878
4879
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004880What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004881===========================
4882
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004883*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
4884
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004885Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004886--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004887
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004888- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
4889 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004890
4891 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004892 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004893
4894 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
4895 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004896 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004897 This needs to be documented.
4898
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00004899- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
4900 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
4901
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00004902- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
4903 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
4904 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
4905
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00004906- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
4907 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
4908
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004909- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
4910 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
4911 class forbids it).
4912
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00004913- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
4914 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
4915 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
4916
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004917- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
4918
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004919Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004920-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004921
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004922- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
4923 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004924 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004925
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004926- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
4927 (like 1 + '').
4928
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004929Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004930-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004931
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004932- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
4933 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
4934 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
4935 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004936 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004937 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
4938
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00004939- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
4940 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
4941 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
4942 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
4943
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004944- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
4945 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004946 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
4947 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
4948 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004949
4950- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
4951 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004952
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00004953- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
4954 bytes on its input.
4955
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004956Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004957-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004958
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004959- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00004960 convenience function.
4961
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004962- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
4963 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
4964 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004965 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
4966 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
4967 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
4968 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
4969 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
4970 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004971
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00004972- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
4973 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
4974 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
4975 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
4976
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00004977- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
4978 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
4979 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
4980
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004981- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
4982 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
4983 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
4984 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
4985
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004986- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
4987 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004988 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004989 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
4990 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
4991 new -l and -e options.
4992
4993- statcache is now deprecated.
4994
4995- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
4996 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004997 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004998 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
4999 time properly taken into account.
5000
5001- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
5002 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
5003 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
5004 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
5005
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005006Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005007-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005008
5009Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005010-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005011
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005012- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
5013 is built with libdb3 if available.
5014
5015- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
5016
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005017C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005018-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005019
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00005020- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
5021 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
5022 PySequence_Size().
5023
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005024- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
5025
5026- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
5027 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
5028 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
5029
5030- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
5031 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
5032
5033- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
5034 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
5035
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005036New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005037-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005038
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00005039- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
5040 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
5041
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00005042- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
5043 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
5044
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00005045- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
5046
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005047Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005048-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005049
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00005050- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
5051 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
5052
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005053Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005054-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005055
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005056Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005057----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005058
5059- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
5060 removed completely in the next release.
5061
5062- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
5063 OSX.
5064
5065- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
5066 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
5067
5068- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
5069
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005070
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005071What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005072===========================
5073
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005074*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
5075
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005076Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005077--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005078
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00005079- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00005080 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00005081 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00005082 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
5083 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00005084 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
5085 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00005086 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
5087 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00005088
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00005089- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
5090 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
5091
5092- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
5093 class methods, static methods, and properties.
5094
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005095Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005096-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005097
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00005098- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
5099 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
5100 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
5101 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
5102 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
5103 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
5104 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
5105 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
5106
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005107- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
5108 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
5109 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
5110 example).
5111
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00005112- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00005113 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005114 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005115 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00005116
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00005117- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
5118 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
5119 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00005120 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00005121
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005122- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
5123 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
5124 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
5125 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
5126 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
5127 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
5128
5129 isinstance(x, (A, B))
5130
5131 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
5132
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005133Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005134-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005135
5136- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
5137
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00005138- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
5139
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00005140- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
5141 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00005142
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00005143- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
5144 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
5145 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
5146 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
5147 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
5148 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00005149 attributes.
5150
5151- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
5152 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
5153 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00005154
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005155- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
5156 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
5157 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005158
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00005159- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
5160 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
5161 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005162 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
5163 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
5164
5165- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
5166 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00005167
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005168Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005169-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00005170
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00005171- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
5172 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
5173
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00005174- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
5175 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
5176 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
5177 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
5178
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00005179- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
5180 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
5181 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
5182 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
5183
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00005184 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
5185 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
5186 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
5187 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
5188 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
5189 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
5190 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
5191 without losing information).
5192
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00005193- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00005194 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
5195 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
5196 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
5197 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
5198 module).
5199
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00005200 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00005201 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
5202 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
5203 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
5204 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00005205
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00005206- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00005207 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
5208 encoding.
5209
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00005210- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
5211 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
5212
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005213- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005214 to allow saving the message body to a file.
5215
5216- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
5217 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
5218 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
5219 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
5220
5221- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
5222
5223- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
5224 ON, and OFF.
5225
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00005226- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
5227 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
5228
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00005229Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005230-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00005231
5232- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
5233 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
5234 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005235
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005236- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
5237 been added: -X and -E.
5238
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005239Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005240-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005241
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005242- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
5243 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
5244
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005245C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005246-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005247
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00005248- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
5249 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
5250 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
5251 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
5252 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
5253
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00005254- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
5255 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
5256 as long) arguments.
5257
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00005258- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
5259 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
5260 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
5261 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
5262 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
5263 report any bugs or strange behavior).
5264
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00005265- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
5266 input.
5267
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005268New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005269-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005270
5271Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005272-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005273
5274Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005275-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005276
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00005277- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
5278 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
5279 is created for .py and .pyw files.
5280
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005281- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
5282 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
5283 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005284 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005285
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005286 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
5287 # (SIGINT) behavior.
5288 import signal
5289 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005290
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005291 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005292 while 1:
5293 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005294 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005295 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
5296 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
5297 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
5298 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005299
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005300
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005301What's New in Python 2.2a4?
5302===========================
5303
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005304*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
5305
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005306Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005307--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005308
5309- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
5310 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
5311 documentation for all operations on list objects.
5312
5313- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
5314 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
5315 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
5316 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
5317 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
5318 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
5319 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005320
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00005321- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005322 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00005323 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
5324 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
5325 associate a docstring with a property.
5326
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005327- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
5328 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
5329 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
5330 other built-in object types.
5331
5332- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
5333 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
5334 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
5335 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
5336 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
5337
5338- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
5339 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
5340
5341- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
5342 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005343 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005344 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
5345 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
5346 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
5347 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
5348 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
5349
5350- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
5351 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
5352 class.
5353
5354- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
5355 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
5356 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
5357 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
5358
5359- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
5360 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
5361 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
5362 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
5363
5364- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
5365 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
5366
5367- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
5368 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
5369 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
5370 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
5371 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005372 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005373 with the same value as s.
5374
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00005375- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
5376
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005377Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005378----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005379
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00005380- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
5381
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00005382- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
5383 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
5384 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
5385 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
5386 objects.
5387
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005388- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
5389 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00005390 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
5391 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
5392
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005393- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
5394 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
5395 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
5396
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005397Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005398-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005399
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00005400- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
5401 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
5402 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
5403 by the instances.
5404
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00005405- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
5406 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
5407 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
5408
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005409- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
5410 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
5411 before the entire comparison is complete.
5412
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00005413- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
5414 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
5415 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
5416
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00005417- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
5418 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
5419 getwriter().
5420
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005421- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
5422 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
5423
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00005424- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005425 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
5426 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
5427
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00005428- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
5429 iterable object.
5430
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005431- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
5432 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005433
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005434- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
5435 authentication.
5436
5437- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
5438 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005439
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005440- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00005441 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
5442 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
5443 a sample driver.)
5444
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005445Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005446-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005447
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005448- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
5449 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
5450 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
5451 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
5452 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
5453 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
5454 kernel has large file support.
5455
5456- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
5457 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
5458 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
5459 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
5460 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
5461
5462- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
5463 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
5464 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
5465
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005466C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005467-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005468
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005469- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
5470 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
5471
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005472New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005473-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005474
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005475- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
5476 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
5477
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005478Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005479-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005480
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005481- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
5482 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
5483 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
5484 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
5485 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
5486
5487- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
5488 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
5489 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
5490 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
5491
5492- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
5493 especially in regard to reporting errors.
5494
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005495Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005496-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005497
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005498- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005499 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
5500 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005501
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005502
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005503What's New in Python 2.2a3?
5504===========================
5505
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005506*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
5507
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005508Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005509----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005510
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005511- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
5512 big to represent as a C double.
5513
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00005514- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
5515 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
5516 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
5517 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
5518 restriction).
5519
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00005520- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
5521 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
5522 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
5523 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
5524 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
5525
5526 >>> dir([])
5527 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
5528 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
5529 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
5530 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
5531 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
5532 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
5533 'reverse', 'sort']
5534
5535 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
5536
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005537- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005538 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
5539 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
5540 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
5541 OverflowError exception.
5542
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00005543- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005544 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005545 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
5546 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
5547 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
5548 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
5549 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00005550 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005551 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
5552 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
5553
5554 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
5555 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
5556 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
5557 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005558
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005559- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005560 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
5561 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
5562 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
5563 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
5564 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
5565 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
5566 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
5567 once it is created.
5568
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00005569- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
5570 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
5571 (key, value) pairs.
5572
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005573- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005574 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
5575 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
5576
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00005577- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
5578 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
5579 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
5580 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
5581 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005582
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005583- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005584 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
5585 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
5586
5587 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
5588
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005589- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00005590 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
5591
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005592Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005593-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005594
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005595- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00005596 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
5597 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005598
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00005599- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
5600 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
5601 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
5602 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
5603 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
5604 in this area anymore).
5605
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00005606- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
5607 threading.Timer.
5608
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00005609- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
5610 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
5611
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005612- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005613 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
5614
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005615- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00005616 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
5617 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
5618 converted to Python longs.
5619
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005620- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005621 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
5622
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00005623- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
5624 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
5625 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
5626
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005627Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005628-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005629
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005630- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
5631 division operators as per PEP 238.
5632
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005633Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005634-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005635
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005636- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
5637 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
5638 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
5639 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
5640
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005641C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005642-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005643
5644- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005645
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005646- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
5647 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005648 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005649
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005650 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
5651 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005652 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005653 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005654
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005655- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005656 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
5657 module:
5658
5659 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005660
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005661 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
5662 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005663
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005664 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
5665 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005666
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005667 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
5668
5669 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
5670
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005671- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005672 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
5673 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
5674 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005675
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005676New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005677-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005678
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00005679- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
5680 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
5681 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
5682 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
5683 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005684
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005685Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005686-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005687
5688Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005689-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005690
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005691- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
5692 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
5693 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
5694 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00005695 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
5696 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
5697 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
5698 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
5699 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005700
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005701- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00005702 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
5703
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005704
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005705What's New in Python 2.2a2?
5706===========================
5707
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005708*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
5709
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005710Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005711-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005712
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00005713- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
5714 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
5715
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005716- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
5717 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
5718 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005719
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00005720- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
5721 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
5722 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
5723 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005724
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005725- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
5726
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005727- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005728
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005729Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005730-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005731
5732- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00005733 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005734 the module docstring for details.
5735
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005736Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005737-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005738
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005739- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005740 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
5741 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
5742 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005743
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005744- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
5745 Nick Mathewson.
5746
5747Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005748----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005749
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005750- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
5751 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
5752 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
5753 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
5754 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
5755 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
5756 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
5757 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
5758
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00005759- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
5760 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
5761 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
5762 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
5763
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00005764- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
5765 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
5766 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
5767 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
5768 come a long way).
5769
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005770- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
5771 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
5772 write filters for these warnings).
5773
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00005774- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
5775 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
5776 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
5777 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
5778 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
5779
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00005780- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
5781 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
5782 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
5783 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
5784 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
5785 older distribution.
5786
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005787Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005788-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005789
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005790- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
5791 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005792 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005793
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005794- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
5795 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
5796 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
5797
5798- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
5799
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005800- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
5801
5802- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
5803
5804- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
5805
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005806- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005807
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00005808- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
5809
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005810New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005811-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005812
5813C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005814-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005815
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005816- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
5817 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
5818 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
5819 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
5820 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
5821 against buffer overruns.
5822
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005823- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005824 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
5825 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005826 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
5827 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
5828 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
5829
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005830- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
5831 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
5832 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
5833 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
5834 deprecated.
5835
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005836Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005837-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005838
5839- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
5840 relevant is found.
5841
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005842
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005843What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005844===========================
5845
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005846*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
5847
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005848Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005849----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005850
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005851- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
5852 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
5853 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
5854 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
5855 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
5856 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
5857 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
5858 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005859 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005860 repaired.
5861
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005862- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00005863 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005864 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
5865 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
5866 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
5867 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
5868 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
5869 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
5870 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
5871 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
5872
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00005873- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
5874 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
5875 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
5876 leading BMO character).
5877
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005878- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
5879 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
5880 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
5881
5882 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
5883 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
5884 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005885
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005886 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
5887 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
5888 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
5889 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
5890 for various simple to use conversions.
5891
5892 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
5893 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
5894
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005895 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5896 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
5897 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
5898 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
5899 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5900 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
5901 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5902 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
5903 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5904 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
5905 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5906 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
5907 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5908 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
5909 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005910
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005911- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
5912 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
5913 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005914 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005915 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005916
5917 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005918 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
5919 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
5920 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
5921 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
5922 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005923 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
5924 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005925
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005926 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
5927 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
5928 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005929 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005930
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00005931- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
5932 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
5933 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
5934 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
5935 floating arithmetic,
5936
5937 x = 9007199254740992.0
5938 print long(x)
5939
5940 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
5941 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
5942 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
5943 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
5944 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
5945 functions are of good quality).
5946
5947 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
5948 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
5949 algorithms to break.
5950
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00005951- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
5952 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
5953 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
5954 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
5955 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
5956 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
5957 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
5958 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
5959 order.
5960
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005961- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
5962 operation along the most common code paths.
5963
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005964- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
5965 the same as dict.has_key(x).
5966
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00005967- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
5968 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
5969 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
5970 {}.update(UserDict())
5971
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005972- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
5973 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
5974 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
5975 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
5976 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
5977 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
5978 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
5979 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
5980
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005981- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005982 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005983
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005984 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00005985 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
5986 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00005987 join() method of strings
5988 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005989 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
5990 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005991 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00005992 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005993
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00005994- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
5995 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
5996
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005997- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
5998 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
5999
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00006000- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
6001 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
6002 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
6003 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
6004
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00006005- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
6006 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00006007 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00006008 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
6009 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00006010
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00006011- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
6012
6013
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006014Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006015-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006016
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00006017- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00006018 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00006019 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
6020 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
6021
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00006022- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
6023 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
6024
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00006025- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
6026 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
6027 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
6028 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
6029
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00006030- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
6031 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
6032 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
6033
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00006034- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
6035
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00006036- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
6037
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00006038- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
6039 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
6040 that are still imported into string.py).
6041
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006042- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
6043
6044- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
6045 Now it does.
6046
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00006047- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
6048
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00006049- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
6050 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
6051 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
6052 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
6053 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00006054 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
6055 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00006056
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00006057- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
6058 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
6059 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
6060 'help(object)'.
6061
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006062Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006063-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006064
6065- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00006066 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006067 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
6068 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
6069
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00006070- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00006071 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
6072 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006073
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00006074C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006075-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00006076
6077- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
6078 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006079
6080----
6081
6082**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**