blob: bf682a22646bf1ade3612acf0754324985ccbfbe [file] [log] [blame]
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +00007What's New in Python 2.5 alpha 1?
8=================================
9
Anthony Baxter12b6f6c2005-03-29 13:36:16 +000010*Release date: XX-XXX-2006*
11
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000012Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Martin v. Löwisb45b3152005-11-28 17:34:23 +000015- Patch #1350409: Work around signal handling bug in Visual Studio 2005.
16
Georg Brandlf06e30a2005-11-24 15:37:42 +000017- Bug #1281408: Py_BuildValue now works correct even with unsigned longs
18 and long longs.
19
Neal Norwitz67715f02005-11-09 06:59:35 +000020- SF Bug #1350188, "setdlopenflags" leads to crash upon "import"
21 It was possible dlerror() returns a NULL pointer, use a default error
22 message in this case.
23
Marc-André Lemburga5bafc42005-10-23 13:43:40 +000024- Replaced most Unicode charmap codecs with new ones using the
25 new Unicode translate string feature in the builtin charmap
26 codec; the codecs were created from the mapping tables available
27 at ftp.unicode.org and contain a few updates (e.g. the Mac OS
28 encodings now include a mapping for the Apple logo)
29
30- Added a few more codecs for Mac OS encodings
31
Neal Norwitzfed9b3e2005-10-21 06:32:02 +000032- Speed up some Unicode operations.
33
34- A new AST parser implementation was completed.
35
Neal Norwitzb6570f52005-10-21 06:26:10 +000036- SF bug #1167751: fix incorrect code being for generator expressions.
Neal Norwitz16af7342005-10-21 06:25:33 +000037 The following code now raises a SyntaxError: foo(a = i for i in range(10))
38
Neal Norwitz708e51a2005-10-03 04:48:15 +000039- SF Bug #976608: fix SystemError when mtime of an imported file is -1.
40
Neal Norwitz11bd1192005-10-03 00:54:56 +000041- SF Bug #887946: fix segfault when redirecting stdin from a directory.
42 Provide a warning when a directory is passed on the command line.
43
Neal Norwitz40d37812005-10-02 01:48:49 +000044- Fix segfault with invalid coding.
45
46- SF bug #772896: unknown encoding results in MemoryError.
47
Raymond Hettinger6b27cda2005-09-24 21:23:05 +000048- All iterators now have a Boolean value of true. Formerly, some iterators
49 supported a __len__() method which evaluated to False when the iterator
50 was empty.
51
Guido van Rossum630db602005-09-20 18:49:54 +000052- On 64-bit platforms, when __len__() returns a value that cannot be
53 represented as a C int, raise OverflowError.
54
Skip Montanarof8948ca2005-09-19 03:54:46 +000055- test__locale is skipped on OS X < 10.4 (only partial locale support is
Walter Dörwald6611a8b2005-10-09 19:28:35 +000056 present).
Skip Montanarof8948ca2005-09-19 03:54:46 +000057
Georg Brandl80bbf3f2005-09-14 19:38:29 +000058- SF bug #893549: parsing keyword arguments was broken with a few format
59 codes.
60
Guido van Rossum8ee3e5a2005-09-14 18:09:42 +000061- Changes donated by Elemental Security to make it work on AIX 5.3
62 with IBM's 64-bit compiler (SF patch #1284289). This also closes SF
63 bug #105470: test_pwd fails on 64bit system (Opteron).
64
Guido van Rossum539c6622005-09-14 17:49:54 +000065- Changes donated by Elemental Security to make it work on HP-UX 11 on
66 Itanium2 with HP's 64-bit compiler (SF patch #1225212).
67
Georg Brandl4550b8d2005-08-26 06:43:52 +000068- Disallow keyword arguments for type constructors that don't use them
Georg Brandl02c42872005-08-26 06:42:30 +000069 (fixes bug #1119418).
70
Martin v. Löwisd35edda2005-08-24 08:39:24 +000071- Forward UnicodeDecodeError into SyntaxError for source encoding errors.
72
Barry Warsawe2eca0b2005-08-15 18:14:19 +000073- SF bug #900092: When tracing (e.g. for hotshot), restore 'return' events for
74 exceptions that cause a function to exit.
75
Raymond Hettinger9f1a6792005-07-31 01:16:36 +000076- The implementation of set() and frozenset() was revised to use its
77 own internal data structure. Memory consumption is reduced by 1/3
78 and there are modest speed-ups as well. The API is unchanged.
79
Tim Petersde7990b2005-07-17 23:45:23 +000080- SF bug #1238681: freed pointer is used in longobject.c:long_pow().
81
Michael W. Hudson0edc7a02005-07-12 10:21:19 +000082- SF bug #1229429: PyObject_CallMethod failed to decrement some
83 reference counts in some error exit cases.
84
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +000085- SF bug #1185883: Python's small-object memory allocator took over
86 a block managed by the platform C library whenever a realloc specified
87 a small new size. However, there's no portable way to know then how
88 much of the address space following the pointer is valid, so no
89 portable way to copy data from the C-managed block into Python's
90 small-object space without risking a memory fault. Python's small-object
91 realloc now leaves such blocks under the control of the platform C
92 realloc.
93
Michael W. Hudsonb8963812005-07-05 15:21:58 +000094- SF bug #1232517: An overflow error was not detected properly when
95 attempting to convert a large float to an int in os.utime().
96
Raymond Hettinger3296e692005-06-29 23:29:56 +000097- SF bug #1224347: hex longs now print with lowercase letters just
98 like their int counterparts.
99
Michael W. Hudson188d4362005-06-20 16:52:57 +0000100- SF bug #1163563: the original fix for bug #1010677 ("thread Module
101 Breaks PyGILState_Ensure()") broke badly in the case of multiple
102 interpreter states; back out that fix and do a better job (see
103 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2005-June/054258.html
104 for a longer write-up of the problem).
105
Michael W. Hudsondf888462005-06-03 14:41:55 +0000106- SF patch #1180995: marshal now uses a binary format by default when
107 serializing floats.
108
Michael W. Hudsonda85a902005-06-01 11:34:22 +0000109- SF patch #1181301: on platforms that appear to use IEEE 754 floats,
110 the routines that promise to produce IEEE 754 binary representations
111 of floats now simply copy bytes around.
112
Skip Montanarobbf12ba2005-05-20 03:07:06 +0000113- bug #967182: disallow opening files with 'wU' or 'aU' as specified by PEP
114 278.
115
Brett Cannonc3647ac2005-04-26 03:45:26 +0000116- patch #1109424: int, long, float, complex, and unicode now check for the
117 proper magic slot for type conversions when subclassed. Previously the
118 magic slot was ignored during conversion. Semantics now match the way
119 subclasses of str always behaved. int/long/float, conversion of an instance
Walter Dörwald78a78b02005-09-01 12:04:29 +0000120 to the base class has been moved to the proper nb_* magic slot and out of
Brett Cannonc3647ac2005-04-26 03:45:26 +0000121 PyNumber_*().
122 Thanks Walter Dörwald.
123
Barry Warsawc8d907c2005-04-19 23:43:40 +0000124- Descriptors defined in C with a PyGetSetDef structure, where the setter is
125 NULL, now raise an AttributeError when attempting to set or delete the
126 attribute. Previously a TypeError was raised, but this was inconsistent
127 with the equivalent pure-Python implementation.
128
Michael W. Hudson774479c2005-04-18 08:46:17 +0000129- It is now safe to call PyGILState_Release() before
130 PyEval_InitThreads() (note that if there is reason to believe there
131 are multiple threads around you still must call PyEval_InitThreads()
132 before using the Python API; this fix is for extension modules that
133 have no way of knowing if Python is multi-threaded yet).
134
Michael W. Hudsone3afc592005-04-07 10:11:19 +0000135- Typing Ctrl-C whilst raw_input() was waiting in a build with threads
136 disabled caused a crash.
137
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +0000138- Bug #1165306: instancemethod_new allowed the creation of a method
139 with im_class == im_self == NULL, which caused a crash when called.
140
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000141- Move exception finalisation later in the shutdown process - this
Anthony Baxter12b6f6c2005-03-29 13:36:16 +0000142 fixes the crash seen in bug #1165761
143
Raymond Hettinger96229b12005-03-11 06:49:40 +0000144- Added two new builtins, any() and all().
145
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +0000146- Defining a class with empty parentheses is now allowed
Brett Cannonf4189912005-04-09 02:30:16 +0000147 (e.g., ``class C(): pass`` is no longer a syntax error).
148 Patch #1176012 added support to the 'parser' module and 'compiler' package
149 (thanks to logistix for that added support).
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +0000150
Martin v. Löwis96d743e2005-03-03 23:00:26 +0000151- Patch #1115086: Support PY_LONGLONG in structmember.
152
Raymond Hettingerb67cc802005-03-03 16:45:19 +0000153- Bug #1155938: new style classes did not check that __init__() was
154 returning None.
155
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000156- Patch #802188: Report characters after line continuation character
Martin v. Löwis4bf108d2005-03-03 11:45:45 +0000157 ('\') with a specific error message.
158
Martin v. Löwisff232d72005-03-03 09:24:38 +0000159- Bug #723201: Raise a TypeError for passing bad objects to 'L' format.
160
Michael W. Hudson8e1afab2005-02-17 14:55:21 +0000161- Bug #1124295: the __name__ attribute of file objects was
162 inadvertently made inaccessible in restricted mode.
163
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000164- Bug #1074011: closing sys.std{out,err} now causes a flush() and
Martin v. Löwis8e3ca8a2005-01-23 09:41:49 +0000165 an ferror() call.
166
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000167- min() and max() now support key= arguments with the same meaning as in
168 list.sort().
169
Raymond Hettingerc34f8672005-01-02 06:17:33 +0000170- The peephole optimizer now performs simple constant folding in expressions:
171 (2+3) --> (5).
172
Raymond Hettingera422c342005-01-11 03:03:27 +0000173- set and frozenset objects can now be marshalled. SF #1098985.
174
Michael W. Hudsonfaa76482005-01-31 17:09:25 +0000175- Bug #1077106: Poor argument checking could cause memory corruption
176 in calls to os.read().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000177
Jeremy Hyltonab630502005-02-04 18:44:06 +0000178- The parser did not complain about future statements in illegal
179 positions. It once again reports a syntax error if a future
180 statement occurs after anything other than a doc string.
181
Neil Schemenauercf52c072005-08-12 17:34:58 +0000182- Change the %s format specifier for str objects so that it returns a
183 unicode instance if the argument is not an instance of basestring and
184 calling __str__ on the argument returns a unicode instance.
185
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000186Extension Modules
187-----------------
188
Georg Brandla13c2442005-11-22 19:30:31 +0000189- Bug #869197: os.setgroups rejects long integer arguments
190
Neal Norwitz0f46bbf2005-11-03 05:00:25 +0000191- Bug #1346533, select.poll() doesn't raise an error if timeout > sys.maxint
192
Neal Norwitz7b631792005-11-02 05:26:07 +0000193- Bug #1344508, Fix UNIX mmap leaking file descriptors
194
Neal Norwitzf3396542005-10-28 05:52:22 +0000195- Patch #1338314, Bug #1336623: fix tarfile so it can extract
196 REGTYPE directories from tarfiles written by old programs.
197
Neal Norwitzfed9b3e2005-10-21 06:32:02 +0000198- Get bsddb module to build with BSD DB version 3.2
199
Neal Norwitz484d9a42005-09-30 04:46:49 +0000200- Patch #1309009, Fix segfault in pyexpat when the XML document is in latin_1,
201 but Python incorrectly assumes it is in UTF-8 format
202
Georg Brandle677adc2005-09-29 13:40:49 +0000203- Fix parse errors in the readline module when compiling without threads.
204
Hye-Shik Chang9ceebd52005-09-24 14:58:47 +0000205- Patch #1288833: Removed thread lock from socket.getaddrinfo on
206 FreeBSD 5.3 and later versions which got thread-safe getaddrinfo(3).
207
Michael W. Hudson10402a32005-09-22 09:19:01 +0000208- Patches #1298449 and #1298499: Add some missing checks for error
209 returns in cStringIO.c.
210
Neal Norwitz058bde12005-09-21 06:44:25 +0000211- Patch #1297028: fix segfault if call type on MultibyteCodec,
212 MultibyteStreamReader, or MultibyteStreamWriter
213
Neal Norwitzcfe7dd92005-09-19 06:49:27 +0000214- Fix memory leak in posix.access().
215
Martin v. Löwis8b291e22005-09-18 08:17:56 +0000216- Patch #1213831: Fix typo in unicodedata._getcode.
217
Georg Brandlfb1ef852005-09-14 20:53:32 +0000218- Bug #1007046: os.startfile() did not accept unicode strings encoded in
219 the file system encoding.
220
Georg Brandld2e3ba72005-08-26 08:34:00 +0000221- Patch #756021: Special-case socket.inet_aton('255.255.255.255') for
222 platforms that don't have inet_aton().
Georg Brandl02760f92005-08-25 13:10:41 +0000223
Georg Brandld2e3ba72005-08-26 08:34:00 +0000224- Bug #1215928: Fix bz2.BZ2File.seek() for 64-bit file offsets.
225
226- Bug #1191043: Fix bz2.BZ2File.(x)readlines for files containing one
Georg Brandl02760f92005-08-25 13:10:41 +0000227 line without newlines.
228
Georg Brandl38387b82005-08-24 07:17:40 +0000229- Bug #728515: mmap.resize() now resizes the file on Unix as it did
230 on Windows.
231
Walter Dörwalda05834e2005-10-09 19:38:21 +0000232- Patch #1180695: Add nanosecond stat resolution, and st_gen,
Martin v. Löwisebd9d5b2005-08-09 15:00:59 +0000233 st_birthtime for FreeBSD.
234
Michael W. Hudson8137bea2005-07-27 20:24:40 +0000235- Patch #1231069: The fcntl.ioctl function now uses the 'I' code for
236 the request code argument, which results in more C-like behaviour
237 for large or negative values.
238
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000239- Bug #1234979: For the argument of thread.Lock.acquire, the Windows
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000240 implementation treated all integer values except 1 as false.
Georg Brandlaf410b52005-07-08 22:26:13 +0000241
Georg Brandl6b95f1d2005-06-03 19:47:00 +0000242- Bug #1194181: bz2.BZ2File didn't handle mode 'U' correctly.
243
Hye-Shik Chang5f937a72005-06-02 13:09:30 +0000244- Patch #1212117: os.stat().st_flags is now accessible as a attribute
245 if available on the platform.
246
Skip Montanaro5ff14922005-05-16 02:42:22 +0000247- Patch #1103951: Expose O_SHLOCK and O_EXLOCK in the posix module if
248 available on the platform.
249
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +0000250- Bug #1166660: The readline module could segfault if hook functions
251 were set in a different thread than that which called readline.
252
Raymond Hettinger4aec61e2005-03-18 21:20:23 +0000253- collections.deque objects now support a remove() method.
254
Raymond Hettinger984f9bb2005-03-09 16:38:48 +0000255- operator.itemgetter() and operator.attrgetter() now support retrieving
256 multiple fields. This provides direct support for sorting on multiple
257 keys (primary, secondary, etc).
258
Martin v. Löwisb60ae992005-03-08 09:10:29 +0000259- os.access now supports Unicode path names on non-Win32 systems.
260
Martin v. Löwisfd78a6f2005-03-04 14:37:01 +0000261- Patches #925152, #1118602: Avoid reading after the end of the buffer
262 in pyexpat.GetInputContext.
263
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000264- Patches #749830, #1144555: allow UNIX mmap size to default to current
Martin v. Löwis7fe60c02005-03-03 11:22:44 +0000265 file size.
266
Raymond Hettinger9c323f82005-02-28 19:39:44 +0000267- Added functional.partial(). See PEP309.
268
Martin v. Löwis9533e342005-02-27 20:33:25 +0000269- Patch #1093585: raise a ValueError for negative history items in readline.
270 {remove_history,replace_history}
271
Fred Drake9c131f22005-01-23 15:16:08 +0000272- The spwd module has been added, allowing access to the shadow password
273 database.
Martin v. Löwisc3001752005-01-23 09:27:24 +0000274
Martin v. Löwisfe33d0b2005-01-16 08:57:39 +0000275- stat_float_times is now True.
276
Raymond Hettingerb0900e62004-12-16 16:23:40 +0000277- array.array objects are now picklable.
278
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000279- the cPickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
280 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
281
Raymond Hettingerb2594052004-12-05 09:25:51 +0000282- itertools.islice() now accepts None for the start and step arguments.
283 This allows islice() to work more readily with slices:
284 islice(s.start, s.stop, s.step)
285
Skip Montanaro0af3ade2005-01-13 04:12:31 +0000286- datetime.datetime() now has a strptime class method which can be used to
287 create datetime object using a string and format.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000288
289Library
290-------
291
Martin v. Löwis307021f2005-11-27 16:59:04 +0000292- Patch #1162825: Support non-ASCII characters in IDLE window titles.
293
Georg Brandl1f663572005-11-26 16:50:44 +0000294- Bug #1365984: urllib now opens "data:" URLs again.
295
Brett Cannonad07ff22005-11-23 02:15:50 +0000296- Patch #1314396: prevent deadlock for threading.Thread.join() when an exception
297 is raised within the method itself on a previous call (e.g., passing in an
298 illegal argument)
299
Brett Cannon5d0bf942005-11-02 23:04:26 +0000300- Bug #1340337: change time.strptime() to always return ValueError when there
301 is an error in the format string.
302
Georg Brandle8f24432005-10-03 14:16:44 +0000303- Patch #754022: Greatly enhanced webbrowser.py (by Oleg Broytmann).
304
Walter Dörwalda05834e2005-10-09 19:38:21 +0000305- Bug #729103: pydoc.py: Fix docother() method to accept additional
Georg Brandl8b813db2005-10-01 16:32:31 +0000306 "parent" argument.
307
Georg Brandlaa935172005-09-29 20:49:16 +0000308- Patch #1300515: xdrlib.py: Fix pack_fstring() to really use null bytes
309 for padding.
310
Georg Brandl80ba8e82005-09-29 20:16:07 +0000311- Bug #1296004: httplib.py: Limit maximal amount of data read from the
312 socket to avoid a MemoryError on Windows.
313
Matthias Klosef3f231f2005-09-20 07:02:49 +0000314- Patch #1166948: locale.py: Prefer LC_ALL, LC_CTYPE and LANG over LANGUAGE
315 to get the correct encoding.
316
317- Patch #1166938: locale.py: Parse LANGUAGE as a colon separated list of
318 languages.
319
Martin v. Löwis4ed67382005-09-18 08:34:39 +0000320- Patch #1268314: Cache lines in StreamReader.readlines for performance.
321
Brett Cannona783d062005-09-15 02:34:56 +0000322- Bug #1290505: Fix clearing the regex cache for time.strptime().
323
Martin v. Löwis5dbdc592005-08-27 10:07:56 +0000324- Bug #1167128: Fix size of a symlink in a tarfile to be 0.
325
Georg Brandl5a650a22005-08-26 08:51:34 +0000326- Patch #810023: Fix off-by-one bug in urllib.urlretrieve reporthook
327 functionality.
328
Martin v. Löwis8b595142005-08-25 11:03:38 +0000329- Bug #1163178: Make IDNA return an empty string when the input is empty.
330
Georg Brandl532efab2005-08-24 22:34:21 +0000331- Patch #848017: Make Cookie more RFC-compliant. Use CRLF as default output
332 separator and do not output trailing semicola.
333
Georg Brandlb9256022005-08-24 18:46:39 +0000334- Patch #1062060: urllib.urlretrieve() now raises a new exception, named
335 ContentTooShortException, when the actually downloaded size does not
336 match the Content-Length header.
337
Martin v. Löwis0a5d4a22005-08-24 14:55:22 +0000338- Bug #1121494: distutils.dir_utils.mkpath now accepts Unicode strings.
339
Martin v. Löwis56066d22005-08-24 07:38:12 +0000340- Bug #1178484: Return complete lines from codec stream readers
341 even if there is an exception in later lines, resulting in
Walter Dörwalda05834e2005-10-09 19:38:21 +0000342 correct line numbers for decoding errors in source code.
Martin v. Löwis56066d22005-08-24 07:38:12 +0000343
Georg Brandl6d2b3462005-08-24 07:36:17 +0000344- Bug #1192315: Disallow negative arguments to clear() in pdb.
345
Martin v. Löwisb813c532005-08-07 20:51:04 +0000346- Patch #827386: Support absolute source paths in msvccompiler.py.
347
Georg Brandl649f8e72005-08-03 07:30:12 +0000348- Patch #1105730: Apply the new implementation of commonprefix in posixpath
349 to ntpath, macpath, os2emxpath and riscospath.
350
Guido van Rossum755149f2005-07-27 00:00:44 +0000351- Fix a problem in Tkinter introduced by SF patch #869468: delete bogus
352 __hasattr__ and __delattr__ methods on class Tk that were breaking
353 Tkdnd.
354
Georg Brandl5dbda752005-07-17 20:27:41 +0000355- Bug #1015140: disambiguated the term "article id" in nntplib docs and
356 docstrings to either "article number" or "message id".
357
Georg Brandla4a8b822005-07-15 09:13:21 +0000358- Bug #1238170: threading.Thread.__init__ no longer has "kwargs={}" as a
359 parameter, but uses the usual "kwargs=None".
360
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000361- textwrap now processes text chunks at O(n) speed instead of O(n**2).
Raymond Hettinger8bfa8932005-07-15 06:53:35 +0000362 Patch #1209527 (Contributed by Connelly).
363
Georg Brandl5c5fe2f2005-07-14 06:40:47 +0000364- urllib2 has now an attribute 'httpresponses' mapping from HTTP status code
365 to W3C name (404 -> 'Not Found'). RFE #1216944.
366
Georg Brandl9e43acf2005-07-04 17:16:07 +0000367- Bug #1177468: Don't cache the /dev/urandom file descriptor for os.urandom,
368 as this can cause problems with apps closing all file descriptors.
369
Georg Brandl5284b532005-06-26 22:54:58 +0000370- Bug #839151: Fix an attempt to access sys.argv in the warnings module
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000371 it can be missing in embedded interpreters
Georg Brandl5284b532005-06-26 22:54:58 +0000372
Georg Brandl2f210b62005-06-26 22:09:06 +0000373- Bug #1155638: Fix a bug which affected HTTP 0.9 responses in httplib.
374
Georg Brandlfbff1bc2005-06-26 21:36:25 +0000375- Bug #1100201: Cross-site scripting was possible on BaseHTTPServer via
376 error messages.
377
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000378- Bug #1108948: Cookie.py produced invalid JavaScript code.
379
Raymond Hettingerda99d1c2005-06-21 07:43:58 +0000380- The tokenize module now detects and reports indentation errors.
381 Bug #1224621.
382
Raymond Hettinger68c04532005-06-10 11:05:19 +0000383- The tokenize module has a new untokenize() function to support a full
384 roundtrip from lexed tokens back to Python sourcecode. In addition,
385 the generate_tokens() function now accepts a callable argument that
386 terminates by raising StopIteration.
387
Georg Brandl9166e1a2005-06-04 09:20:03 +0000388- Bug #1196315: fix weakref.WeakValueDictionary constructor.
389
Georg Brandl268e61c2005-06-03 14:28:50 +0000390- Bug #1213894: os.path.realpath didn't resolve symlinks that were the first
391 component of the path.
392
Skip Montanaro174dd222005-05-14 20:54:16 +0000393- Patch #1120353: The xmlrpclib module provides better, more transparent,
394 support for datetime.{datetime,date,time} objects. With use_datetime set
395 to True, applications shouldn't have to fiddle with the DateTime wrapper
396 class at all.
397
Martin v. Löwis55f1bb82005-03-21 20:56:35 +0000398- distutils.commands.upload was added to support uploading distribution
399 files to PyPI.
400
Walter Dörwalda6e8a4a2005-03-31 13:57:38 +0000401- distutils.commands.register now encodes the data as UTF-8 before posting
402 them to PyPI.
403
Raymond Hettinger267b8682005-03-27 10:47:39 +0000404- decimal operator and comparison methods now return NotImplemented
405 instead of raising a TypeError when interacting with other types. This
406 allows other classes to implement __radd__ style methods and have them
407 work as expected.
408
Raymond Hettingerbea3f6f2005-03-15 04:59:17 +0000409- Bug #1163325: Decimal infinities failed to hash. Attempting to
410 hash a NaN raised an InvalidOperation instead of a TypeError.
411
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000412- Patch #918101: Add tarfile open mode r|* for auto-detection of the
Martin v. Löwis78be7df2005-03-05 12:47:42 +0000413 stream compression; add, for symmetry reasons, r:* as a synonym of r.
414
Martin v. Löwis00a73e72005-03-04 19:40:34 +0000415- Patch #1043890: Add extractall method to tarfile.
416
Martin v. Löwisc72dd382005-03-04 13:50:17 +0000417- Patch #1075887: Don't require MSVC in distutils if there is nothing
418 to build.
419
Martin v. Löwis637431b2005-03-03 23:12:42 +0000420- Patch #1103407: Properly deal with tarfile iterators when untarring
421 symbolic links on Windows.
422
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000423- Patch #645894: Use getrusage for computing the time consumption in
Martin v. Löwisa4dac402005-03-03 11:39:45 +0000424 profile.py if available.
425
Martin v. Löwisdf37c8c2005-03-03 11:08:03 +0000426- Patch #1046831: Use get_python_version where appropriate in sysconfig.py.
427
Martin v. Löwisc5574e82005-03-03 10:57:37 +0000428- Patch #1117454: Remove code to special-case cookies without values
429 in LWPCookieJar.
430
Martin v. Löwis4ea3ead2005-03-03 10:48:12 +0000431- Patch #1117339: Add cookielib special name tests.
432
Martin v. Löwise869eb12005-03-03 09:46:07 +0000433- Patch #1112812: Make bsddb/__init__.py more friendly for modulefinder.
434
Martin v. Löwisf2a8d632005-03-03 08:35:22 +0000435- Patch #1110248: SYNC_FLUSH the zlib buffer for GZipFile.flush.
436
Martin v. Löwisdf241532005-03-03 08:17:42 +0000437- Patch #1107973: Allow to iterate over the lines of a tarfile.ExFileObject.
438
Martin v. Löwis8ed338a2005-03-03 08:12:27 +0000439- Patch #1104111: Alter setup.py --help and --help-commands.
440
Martin v. Löwis4afe1542005-03-01 08:09:28 +0000441- Patch #1121234: Properly cleanup _exit and tkerror commands.
442
Martin v. Löwisc2a0ac22005-02-24 20:22:10 +0000443- Patch #1049151: xdrlib now unpacks booleans as True or False.
444
Raymond Hettingerbab41432005-02-05 01:31:19 +0000445- Fixed bug in a NameError bug in cookielib. Patch #1116583.
446
Guido van Rossumd0641422005-02-03 15:01:24 +0000447- Applied a security fix to SimpleXMLRPCserver (PSF-2005-001). This
448 disables recursive traversal through instance attributes, which can
449 be exploited in various ways.
450
Andrew M. Kuchling3a976052005-12-04 15:07:41 +0000451- Bug #1222790: in SimpleXMLRPCServer, set the reuse-address and close-on-exec
452 flags on the HTTP listening socket.
453
Andrew M. Kuchlinge63fde72005-12-04 15:36:57 +0000454- Bug #792570: SimpleXMLRPCServer had problems if the request grew too large.
455 Fixed by reading the HTTP body in chunks instead of one big socket.read().
456
Martin v. Löwis1d11de62005-01-29 13:29:23 +0000457- Bug #1110478: Revert os.environ.update to do putenv again.
458
Thomas Hellerd6c6e222005-01-20 19:20:16 +0000459- Bug #1103844: fix distutils.install.dump_dirs() with negated options.
460
Martin v. Löwis22b457e2005-01-16 08:40:58 +0000461- os.{SEEK_SET, SEEK_CUR, SEEK_END} have been added for convenience.
462
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000463- Enhancements to the csv module:
464
465 + Dialects are now validated by the underlying C code, better
Georg Brandl7eb4b7d2005-07-22 21:49:32 +0000466 reflecting its capabilities, and improving its compliance with
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000467 PEP 305.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000468 + Dialect parameter parsing has been re-implemented to improve error
469 reporting.
470 + quotechar=None and quoting=QUOTE_NONE now work the way PEP 305
471 dictates.
472 + the parser now removes the escapechar prefix from escaped characters.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000473 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the writer now tests for numeric
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000474 types, rather than any object than can be represented as a numeric.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000475 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the reader now casts unquoted fields
476 to floats.
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000477 + reader now allows \r characters to be quoted (previously it only allowed
478 \n to be quoted).
Andrew McNamarac89f2842005-01-12 07:44:42 +0000479 + writer doublequote handling improved.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000480 + Dialect classes passed to the module are no longer instantiated by
481 the module before being parsed (the former validation scheme required
482 this, but the mechanism was unreliable).
483 + The dialect registry now contains instances of the internal
484 C-coded dialect type, rather than references to python objects.
485 + the internal c-coded dialect type is now immutable.
486 + register_dialect now accepts the same keyword dialect specifications
487 as the reader and writer, allowing the user to register dialects
488 without first creating a dialect class.
489 + a configurable limit to the size of parsed fields has been added -
490 previously, an unmatched quote character could result in the entire
491 file being read into the field buffer before an error was reported.
Andrew McNamara31d88962005-01-12 03:45:10 +0000492 + A new module method csv.field_size_limit() has been added that sets
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000493 the parser field size limit (returning the former limit). The initial
494 limit is 128kB.
Andrew McNamara7f2053e2005-01-12 11:17:16 +0000495 + A line_num attribute has been added to the reader object, which tracks
496 the number of lines read from the source iterator. This is not
497 the same as the number of records returned, as records can span
498 multiple lines.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000499 + reader and writer objects were not being registered with the cyclic-GC.
500 This has been fixed.
501
Brett Cannone6539c42005-01-08 02:43:53 +0000502- _DummyThread objects in the threading module now delete self.__block that is
503 inherited from _Thread since it uses up a lock allocated by 'thread'. The
504 lock primitives tend to be limited in number and thus should not be wasted on
505 a _DummyThread object. Fixes bug #1089632.
506
Raymond Hettinger97db05d2005-01-07 08:15:41 +0000507- The imghdr module now detects Exif files.
508
Raymond Hettinger6065d322004-12-20 23:51:53 +0000509- StringIO.truncate() now correctly adjusts the size attribute.
510 (Bug #951915).
511
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000512- locale.py now uses an updated locale alias table (built using
513 Tools/i18n/makelocalealias.py, a tool to parse the X11 locale
514 alias file); the encoding lookup was enhanced to use Python's
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000515 encoding alias table.
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000516
Raymond Hettinger3557f422004-12-07 12:02:02 +0000517- moved deprecated modules to Lib/lib-old: whrandom, tzparse, statcache.
518
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000519- the pickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
520 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
521
Brett Cannon84667c02004-12-07 03:25:18 +0000522- optparse now optionally imports gettext. This allows its use in setup.py.
523
Raymond Hettinger3489cad2004-12-05 05:20:42 +0000524- the pickle module no longer uses the deprecated bin parameter.
525
Raymond Hettinger1bc82f82004-12-05 03:58:17 +0000526- the shelve module no longer uses the deprecated binary parameter.
527
Raymond Hettinger6c92d762004-12-05 03:28:00 +0000528- the pstats module no longer uses the deprecated ignore() method.
529
Raymond Hettingerf3fa9462004-12-05 01:58:09 +0000530- the filecmp module no longer uses the deprecated use_statcache argument.
531
Raymond Hettinger664347b2004-12-04 21:21:53 +0000532- unittest.TestCase.run() and unittest.TestSuite.run() can now be successfully
533 extended or overridden by subclasses. Formerly, the subclassed method would
534 be ignored by the rest of the module. (Bug #1078905).
535
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000536- heapq.nsmallest() and heapq.nlargest() now support key= arguments with
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000537 the same meaning as in list.sort().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000538
Walter Dörwald36733692004-12-22 12:50:50 +0000539- Bug #1076985: ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` now calls ``read()`` only
540 once when a size argument is given. This prevents a buffer overflow in the
541 tokenizer with very long source lines.
542
Andrew M. Kuchling3b585b32004-12-28 20:10:48 +0000543- Bug #1083110: ``zlib.decompress.flush()`` would segfault if called immediately
544 after creating the object, without any intervening ``.decompress()`` calls.
545
Skip Montanaro05885812005-01-16 20:48:27 +0000546- The reconvert.quote function can now emit triple-quoted strings. The
547 reconvert module now has some simple documentation.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000548
Walter Dörwaldaf3b39a2005-02-18 13:22:43 +0000549- ``UserString.MutableString`` now supports negative indices in
550 ``__setitem__`` and ``__delitem__``
551
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000552- Bug #1149508: ``textwrap`` now handles hyphenated numbers (eg. "2004-03-05")
553 correctly.
554
Walter Dörwaldbc8e6422005-04-21 21:32:03 +0000555- Partial fixes for SF bugs #1163244 and #1175396: If a chunk read by
556 ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` has a trailing "\r", read one more
557 character even if the user has passed a size parameter to get a proper
558 line ending. Remove the special handling of a "\r\n" that has been split
559 between two lines.
560
Walter Dörwalda47d1c02005-08-30 10:23:14 +0000561- Bug #1251300: On UCS-4 builds the "unicode-internal" codec will now complain
562 about illegal code points. The codec now supports PEP 293 style error
563 handlers.
564
Walter Dörwald78a78b02005-09-01 12:04:29 +0000565- Bug #1235646: ``codecs.StreamRecoder.next()`` now reencodes the data it reads
Walter Dörwaldc5238b82005-09-01 11:56:53 +0000566 from the input stream, so that the output is a byte string in the correct
567 encoding instead of a unicode string.
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000568
Gustavo Niemeyer6fa0c5a2005-09-14 08:54:39 +0000569- Bug #1202493: Fixing SRE parser to handle '{}' as perl does, rather than
570 considering it exactly like a '*'.
571
Walter Dörwald007f8df2005-10-09 19:42:27 +0000572- Bug #1245379: Add "unicode-1-1-utf-7" as an alias for "utf-7" to
573 ``encodings.aliases``.
Gustavo Niemeyer6fa0c5a2005-09-14 08:54:39 +0000574
Walter Dörwald09f0dd52005-11-21 19:10:07 +0000575- ` uu.encode()`` and ``uu.decode()`` now support unicode filenames.
576
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000577Build
578-----
579
Martin v. Löwis147fbe52005-08-07 21:09:30 +0000580- Bug #1189330: configure did not correctly determine the necessary
581 value of LINKCC if python was built with GCC 4.0.
582
Trent Mick8321b422005-07-26 02:29:21 +0000583- Upgrade Windows build to zlib 1.2.3 which eliminates a potential security
584 vulnerability in zlib 1.2.1 and 1.2.2.
585
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000586- EXTRA_CFLAGS has been introduced as an environment variable to hold compiler
587 flags that change binary compatibility. Changes were also made to
588 distutils.sysconfig to also use the environment variable when used during
Martin v. Löwisd7c795e2005-04-25 07:14:03 +0000589 compilation of the interpreter and of C extensions through distutils.
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000590
Bob Ippolitoed233462005-03-29 13:47:59 +0000591- SF patch 1171735: Darwin 8's headers are anal about POSIX compliance,
592 and linking has changed (prebinding is now deprecated, and libcc_dynamic
593 no longer exists). This configure patch makes things right.
594
Martin v. Löwise2713be2005-03-08 15:03:08 +0000595- Bug #1158607: Build with --disable-unicode again.
596
Brett Cannon46d96232005-02-16 00:07:19 +0000597- spwdmodule.c is built only if either HAVE_GETSPNAM or HAVE_HAVE_GETSPENT is
598 defined. Discovered as a result of not being able to build on OS X.
599
Brett Cannon516592f2004-12-07 00:42:59 +0000600- setup.py now uses the directories specified in LDFLAGS using the -L option
601 and in CPPFLAGS using the -I option for adding library and include
602 directories, respectively, for compiling extension modules against. This has
603 led to the core being compiled using the values in CPPFLAGS. It also removes
604 the need for the special-casing of both DarwinPorts and Fink for darwin since
605 the proper directories can be specified in LDFLAGS (``-L/sw/lib`` for Fink,
606 ``-L/opt/local/lib`` for DarwinPorts) and CPPFLAGS (``-I/sw/include`` for
607 Fink, ``-I/opt/local/include`` for DarwinPorts).
608
Brett Cannon43802422005-02-10 20:48:03 +0000609- Test in configure.in that checks for tzset no longer dependent on tm->tm_zone
610 to exist in the struct (not required by either ISO C nor the UNIX 2 spec).
611 Tests for sanity in tzname when HAVE_TZNAME defined were also defined.
612 Closes bug #1096244. Thanks Gregory Bond.
613
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000614
615C API
616-----
617
Raymond Hettingerbeb31012005-08-16 03:47:52 +0000618- Added a C API for set and frozenset objects.
619
Raymond Hettinger66517482004-12-03 11:45:13 +0000620- Removed PyRange_New().
621
Walter Dörwaldd1c1e102005-10-06 20:29:57 +0000622- Patch #1313939: PyUnicode_DecodeCharmap() accepts a unicode string as the
623 mapping argument now. This string is used as a mapping table. Byte values
624 greater than the length of the string and 0xFFFE are treated as undefined
625 mappings.
626
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000627
628Tests
629-----
630
Martin v. Löwis4d394df2005-01-23 09:19:22 +0000631- In test_os, st_?time is now truncated before comparing it with ST_?TIME.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000632
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000633
634Documentation
635-------------
636
Georg Brandl32252422005-09-14 20:42:00 +0000637- Bug #1274828: Document os.path.splitunc().
638
Georg Brandl79c122f2005-08-24 07:31:33 +0000639- Bug #1190204: Clarify which directories are searched by site.py.
640
Georg Brandl6f2bbd32005-08-24 07:26:55 +0000641- Bug #1193849: Clarify os.path.expanduser() documentation.
642
Georg Brandlf13c4ba2005-08-02 10:28:08 +0000643- Bug #1243192: re.UNICODE and re.LOCALE affect \d, \D, \s and \S.
644
Georg Brandl150db732005-07-18 08:53:17 +0000645- Bug #755617: Document the effects of os.chown() on Windows.
646
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000647- Patch #1180012: The documentation for modulefinder is now in the library reference.
648
649- Patch #1213031: Document that os.chown() accepts argument values of -1.
650
651- Bug #1190563: Document os.waitpid() return value with WNOHANG flag.
652
653- Bug #1175022: Correct the example code for property().
654
Georg Brandl40c71652005-06-25 21:08:46 +0000655- Document the IterableUserDict class in the UserDict module.
656 Closes bug #1166582.
657
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000658- Remove all latent references for "Macintosh" that referred to semantics for
659 Mac OS 9 and change to reflect the state for OS X.
660 Closes patch #1095802. Thanks Jack Jansen.
661
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000662Mac
663---
664
665
Hye-Shik Chang4e422812005-07-17 02:36:59 +0000666New platforms
667-------------
668
669- FreeBSD 7 support is added.
670
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000671
672Tools/Demos
673-----------
674
Georg Brandl56897312005-08-24 18:32:30 +0000675- Added two new files to Tools/scripts: pysource.py, which recursively
676 finds Python source files, and findnocoding.py, which finds Python
677 source files that need an encoding declaration.
678 Patch #784089, credits to Oleg Broytmann.
679
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000680- Bug #1072853: pindent.py used an uninitialized variable.
681
Martin v. Löwisab9ec162005-04-09 10:53:34 +0000682- Patch #1177597: Correct Complex.__init__.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000683
684
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000685What's New in Python 2.4 final?
686===============================
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000687
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000688*Release date: 30-NOV-2004*
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000689
690Core and builtins
691-----------------
692
693- Bug 875692: Improve signal handling, especially when using threads, by
694 forcing an early re-execution of PyEval_EvalFrame() "periodic" code when
695 things_to_do is not cleared by Py_MakePendingCalls().
696
697
Anthony Baxter4277ed82004-11-30 11:53:10 +0000698What's New in Python 2.4 (release candidate 1)
699==============================================
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000700
Anthony Baxter5cc727a2004-11-18 12:32:27 +0000701*Release date: 18-NOV-2004*
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000702
703Core and builtins
704-----------------
705
Tim Petersfb1ffb02004-11-08 04:30:21 +0000706- Bug 1061968: Fixes in 2.4a3 to address thread bug 1010677 reintroduced
707 the years-old thread shutdown race bug 225673. Numeric history lesson
708 aside, all bugs in all three reports are fixed now.
709
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000710
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000711Library
712-------
713
714- Bug 1052242: If exceptions are raised by an atexit handler function an
715 attempt is made to execute the remaining handlers. The last exception
716 raised is re-raised.
717
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000718- ``doctest``'s new support for adding ``pdb.set_trace()`` calls to
719 doctests was broken in a dramatic but shallow way. Fixed.
720
Tim Petersbbc0d442004-11-13 16:18:32 +0000721- Bug 1065388: ``calendar``'s ``day_name``, ``day_abbr``, ``month_name``,
722 and ``month_abbr`` attributes emulate sequences of locale-correct
723 spellings of month and day names. Because the locale can change at
724 any time, the correct spelling is recomputed whenever one of these is
725 indexed. In the worst case, the index may be a slice object, so these
726 recomputed every day or month name each time they were indexed. This is
727 much slower than necessary in the usual case, when the index is just an
728 integer. In that case, only the single spelling needed is recomputed
729 now; and, when the index is a slice object, only the spellings needed
730 by the slice are recomputed now.
731
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000732- Patch 1061679: Added ``__all__`` to pickletools.py.
Tim Peters90cf2122004-11-06 23:45:48 +0000733
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000734Build
735-----
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000736
Brett Cannon7d28e962004-11-07 01:19:00 +0000737- Bug 1034277 / Patch 1035255: Remove compilation of core against CoreServices
738 and CoreFoundation on OS X. Involved removing PyMac_GetAppletScriptFile()
739 which has no known users. Thanks Bob Ippolito.
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000740
741C API
742-----
743
Raymond Hettinger39e92ea2004-11-18 09:41:45 +0000744- The PyRange_New() function is deprecated.
745
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000746
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000747What's New in Python 2.4 beta 2?
748================================
749
Anthony Baxter9f41f3a2004-11-03 06:21:37 +0000750*Release date: 03-NOV-2004*
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000751
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000752License
753-------
754
755The Python Software Foundation changed the license under which Python
756is released, to remove Python version numbers. There were no other
757changes to the license. So, for example, wherever the license for
758Python 2.3 said "Python 2.3", the new license says "Python". The
759intent is to make it possible to refer to the PSF license in a more
760durable way. For example, some people say they're confused by that
761the Open Source Initiative's entry for the Python Software Foundation
762License::
763
764 http://www.opensource.org/licenses/PythonSoftFoundation.php
765
766says "Python 2.1.1" all over it, wondering whether it applies only
767to Python 2.1.1.
768
769The official name of the new license is the Python Software Foundation
770License Version 2.
771
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000772Core and builtins
773-----------------
774
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +0000775- Bug #1055820 Cyclic garbage collection was not protecting against that
776 calling a live weakref to a piece of cyclic trash could resurrect an
777 insane mutation of the trash if any Python code ran during gc (via
778 running a dead object's __del__ method, running another callback on a
779 weakref to a dead object, or via any Python code run in any other thread
780 that managed to obtain the GIL while a __del__ or callback was running
781 in the thread doing gc). The most likely symptom was "impossible"
Andrew M. Kuchlingb2a739d2005-11-22 15:14:44 +0000782 ``AttributeError`` exceptions, appearing seemingly at random, on weakly
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +0000783 referenced objects. The cure was to clear all weakrefs to unreachable
784 objects before allowing any callbacks to run.
785
Raymond Hettinger561fbf12004-10-26 01:52:37 +0000786- Bug #1054139 _PyString_Resize() now invalidates its cached hash value.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000787
788Extension Modules
789-----------------
790
Raymond Hettinger9047c8f2004-10-24 00:10:06 +0000791- Bug #1048870: the compiler now generates distinct code objects for
792 functions with identical bodies. This was producing confusing
793 traceback messages which pointed to the function where the code
794 object was first defined rather than the function being executed.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000795
796Library
797-------
798
Barry Warsaw8c72eae2004-11-01 03:52:43 +0000799- Patch #1056967 changes the semantics of Template.safe_substitute() so that
800 no ValueError is raised on an 'invalid' match group. Now the delimiter is
801 returned.
802
Raymond Hettinger2ef7e6c2004-10-24 00:32:24 +0000803- Bug #1052503 pdb.runcall() was not passing along keyword arguments.
804
Raymond Hettingerc64aab82004-10-20 08:21:57 +0000805- Bug #902037: XML.sax.saxutils.prepare_input_source() now combines relative
806 paths with a base path before checking os.path.isfile().
807
Raymond Hettingere54e7262004-10-20 07:17:16 +0000808- The whichdb module can now be run from the command line.
809
Brett Cannon8abcc5d2004-10-18 01:37:57 +0000810- Bug #1045381: time.strptime() can now infer the date using %U or %W (week of
811 the year) when the day of the week and year are also specified.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000812
Andrew M. Kuchling0d19bae2004-10-19 19:54:41 +0000813- Bug #1048816: fix bug in Ctrl-K at start of line in curses.textpad.Textbox
814
Andrew M. Kuchling66e80ba2004-10-20 11:56:15 +0000815- Bug #1017553: fix bug in tarfile.filemode()
816
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000817- Patch #737473: fix bug that old source code is shown in tracebacks even if
Hye-Shik Chang182ac852004-10-26 09:16:42 +0000818 the source code is updated and reloaded.
819
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000820Build
821-----
822
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000823- Patch #1044395: --enable-shared is allowed in FreeBSD also.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000824
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000825What's New in Python 2.4 beta 1?
826================================
827
Anthony Baxter6a587c12004-10-15 08:07:21 +0000828*Release date: 15-OCT-2004*
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000829
830Core and builtins
831-----------------
832
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000833- Patch #975056: Restartable signals were not correctly disabled on
Anthony Baxtere4f8a482004-10-13 14:55:56 +0000834 BSD systems. Consistently use PyOS_setsig() instead of signal().
835
Tim Peters263091e2004-10-10 01:58:44 +0000836- The internal portable implementation of thread-local storage (TLS), used
837 by the ``PyGILState_Ensure()``/``PyGILState_Release()`` API, was not
838 thread-correct. This could lead to a variety of problems, up to and
839 including segfaults. See bug 1041645 for an example.
840
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000841- Added a command line option, -m module, which searches sys.path for the
842 module and then runs it. (Contributed by Nick Coghlan.)
843
Raymond Hettinger2c31a052004-09-22 18:44:21 +0000844- The bytecode optimizer now folds tuples of constants into a single
845 constant.
846
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000847- SF bug #513866: Float/long comparison anomaly. Prior to 2.4b1, when
848 an integer was compared to a float, the integer was coerced to a float.
849 That could yield spurious overflow errors (if the integer was very
850 large), and to anomalies such as
851 ``long(1e200)+1 == 1e200 == long(1e200)-1``. Coercion to float is no
852 longer performed, and cases like ``long(1e200)-1 < 1e200``,
853 ``long(1e200)+1 > 1e200`` and ``(1 << 20000) > 1e200`` are computed
854 correctly now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000855
856Extension modules
857-----------------
858
Tim Peterscf8997f2004-10-01 02:13:16 +0000859- ``collections.deque`` objects didn't play quite right with garbage
860 collection, which could lead to a segfault in a release build, or
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000861 an assert failure in a debug build. Also, added overflow checks,
862 better detection of mutation during iteration, and shielded deque
863 comparisons from unusual subclass overrides of the __iter__() method.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000864
865Library
866-------
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000867
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000868- Patch 1046644: distutils build_ext grew two new options - --swig for
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000869 specifying the swig executable to use, and --swig-opts to specify
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000870 options to pass to swig. --swig-opts="-c++" is the new way to spell
871 --swig-cpp.
872
Anthony Baxter22dcf662004-10-13 15:54:17 +0000873- Patch 983206: distutils now obeys environment variable LDSHARED, if
874 it is set.
875
Andrew M. Kuchling518d3932004-10-12 15:32:10 +0000876- Added Peter Astrand's subprocess.py module. See PEP 324 for details.
Fredrik Lundh5b3687d2004-10-12 15:26:28 +0000877
Brett Cannon4f35c712004-10-06 02:11:37 +0000878- time.strptime() now properly escapes timezones and all other locale-specific
879 strings for regex-specific symbols. Was breaking under Japanese Windows when
880 the timezone was specified as "Tokyo (standard time)".
881 Closes bug #1039270.
882
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000883- Updates for the email package:
Brett Cannon06a30b02004-10-22 06:22:54 +0000884
Barry Warsaw418de1f2004-10-11 14:32:47 +0000885 + email.Utils.formatdate() grew a 'usegmt' argument for HTTP support.
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000886 + All deprecated APIs that in email 2.x issued warnings have been removed:
887 _encoder argument to the MIMEText constructor, Message.add_payload(),
888 Utils.dump_address_pair(), Utils.decode(), Utils.encode()
889 + New deprecations: Generator.__call__(), Message.get_type(),
890 Message.get_main_type(), Message.get_subtype(), the 'strict' argument to
891 the Parser constructor. These will be removed in email 3.1.
892 + Support for Python earlier than 2.3 has been removed (see PEP 291).
893 + All defect classes have been renamed to end in 'Defect'.
894 + Some FeedParser fixes; also a MultipartInvariantViolationDefect will be
895 added to messages that claim to be multipart but really aren't.
896 + Updates to documentation.
897
Raymond Hettinger596ba4d2004-09-24 03:41:05 +0000898- re's findall() and finditer() functions now take an optional flags argument
899 just like the compile(), search(), and match() functions. Also, documented
900 the previously existing start and stop parameters for the findall() and
901 finditer() methods of regular expression objects.
902
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000903- rfc822 Messages now support iterating over the headers.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000904
Martin v. Löwisf3c56112004-09-18 09:08:52 +0000905- The (undocumented) tarfile.Tarfile.membernames has been removed;
906 applications should use the getmember function.
907
Martin v. Löwis39a31782004-09-18 09:03:49 +0000908- httplib now offers symbolic constants for the HTTP status codes.
909
Tim Peters528ca532004-09-16 01:30:50 +0000910- SF bug #1028306: Trying to compare a ``datetime.date`` to a
911 ``datetime.datetime`` mistakenly compared only the year, month and day.
912 Now it acts like a mixed-type comparison: ``False`` for ``==``,
913 ``True`` for ``!=``, and raises ``TypeError`` for other comparison
914 operators. Because datetime is a subclass of date, comparing only the
915 base class (date) members can still be done, if that's desired, by
916 forcing using of the approprate date method; e.g.,
917 ``a_date.__eq__(a_datetime)`` is true if and only if the year, month
918 and day members of ``a_date`` and ``a_datetime`` are equal.
919
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000920- bdist_rpm now supports command line options --force-arch,
921 {pre,post}-install, {pre,post}-uninstall, and
Martin v. Löwis23c48a12004-09-10 06:32:54 +0000922 {prep,build,install,clean,verify}-script.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000923
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000924- SF patch #998993: The UTF-8 and the UTF-16 stateful decoders now support
925 decoding incomplete input (when the input stream is temporarily exhausted).
926 ``codecs.StreamReader`` now implements buffering, which enables proper
927 readline support for the UTF-16 decoders. ``codecs.StreamReader.read()``
928 has a new argument ``chars`` which specifies the number of characters to
929 return. ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` and
930 ``codecs.StreamReader.readlines()`` have a new argument ``keepends``.
931 Trailing "\n"s will be stripped from the lines if ``keepends`` is false.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000932
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000933- The documentation for doctest is greatly expanded, and now covers all
934 the new public features (of which there are many).
935
Walter Dörwald5011d0c2004-09-13 08:53:15 +0000936- ``doctest.master`` was put back in, and ``doctest.testmod()`` once again
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000937 updates it. This isn't good, because every ``testmod()`` call
938 contributes to bloating the "hidden" state of ``doctest.master``, but
939 some old code apparently relies on it. For now, all we can do is
940 encourage people to stitch doctests together via doctest's unittest
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000941 integration features instead.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000942
Skip Montanaro82d0eec2004-09-14 17:58:31 +0000943- httplib now handles ipv6 address/port pairs.
944
David Goodger68a1abd2004-10-03 15:40:25 +0000945- SF bug #1017864: ConfigParser now correctly handles default keys,
946 processing them with ``ConfigParser.optionxform`` when supplied,
947 consistent with the handling of config file entries and runtime-set
948 options.
949
David Goodger1cbf2062004-10-03 15:55:09 +0000950- SF bug #997050: Document, test, & check for non-string values in
951 ConfigParser. Moved the new string-only restriction added in
952 rev. 1.65 to the SafeConfigParser class, leaving existing
953 ConfigParser & RawConfigParser behavior alone, and documented the
954 conditions under which non-string values work.
955
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000956Build
957-----
958
Brett Cannonbfef8692004-09-28 04:08:11 +0000959- Building on darwin now includes /opt/local/include and /opt/local/lib for
960 building extension modules. This is so as to include software installed as
961 a DarwinPorts port <http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/>
962
Tim Peters862f0592004-09-23 19:11:32 +0000963- pyport.h now defines a Py_IS_NAN macro. It works as-is when the
964 platform C computes true for ``x != x`` if and only if X is a NaN.
965 Other platforms can override the default definition with a platform-
966 specific spelling in that platform's pyconfig.h. You can also override
967 pyport.h's default Py_IS_INFINITY definition now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000968
969C API
970-----
971
Tim Peters7f468f22004-10-11 02:40:51 +0000972- SF patch 1044089: New function ``PyEval_ThreadsInitialized()`` returns
973 non-zero if PyEval_InitThreads() has been called.
974
975- The undocumented and unused extern int ``_PyThread_Started`` was removed.
976
Tim Peters84705582004-10-10 02:47:33 +0000977- The C API calls ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
978 are two of the very few advertised as being safe to call without holding
979 the GIL. However, this wasn't true in a debug build, as bug 1041645
980 demonstrated. In a debug build, Python redirects the ``PyMem`` family
981 of calls to Python's small-object allocator, to get the benefit of
982 its extra debugging capabilities. But Python's small-object allocator
983 isn't threadsafe, relying on the GIL to avoid the expense of doing its
984 own locking. ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
985 call the platform ``malloc()`` directly now, regardless of build type.
986
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000987- PyLong_AsUnsignedLong[Mask] now support int objects as well.
988
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000989- SF patch #998993: ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF8Stateful`` and
990 ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF16Stateful`` have been added, which implement stateful
991 decoding.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000992
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000993Tests
994-----
995
996- test__locale ported to unittest
997
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000998Mac
999---
1000
Just van Rossumdd3c8372004-10-03 16:27:09 +00001001- ``plistlib`` now supports non-dict root objects. There is also a new
1002 interface for reading and writing plist files: ``readPlist(pathOrFile)``
1003 and ``writePlist(rootObject, pathOrFile)``
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001004
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001005Tools/Demos
1006-----------
1007
Tim Peters130e37f2004-10-03 19:03:19 +00001008- The text file comparison scripts ``ndiff.py`` and ``diff.py`` now
1009 read the input files in universal-newline mode. This spares them
1010 from consuming a great deal of time to deduce the useless result that,
1011 e.g., a file with Windows line ends and a file with Linux line ends
1012 have no lines in common.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001013
1014
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001015What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
1016=================================
1017
Anthony Baxtere13943a2004-09-02 16:37:15 +00001018*Release date: 02-SEP-2004*
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001019
1020Core and builtins
1021-----------------
1022
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001023- SF patch #1007189: ``from ... import ...`` statements now allow the name
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001024 list to be surrounded by parentheses.
1025
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +00001026- Some speedups for long arithmetic, thanks to Trevor Perrin. Gradeschool
1027 multiplication was sped a little by optimizing the C code. Gradeschool
1028 squaring was sped by about a factor of 2, by exploiting that about half
1029 the digit products are duplicates in a square. Because exponentiation
1030 uses squaring often, this also speeds long power. For example, the time
1031 to compute 17**1000000 dropped from about 14 seconds to 9 on my box due
1032 to this much. The cutoff for Karatsuba multiplication was raised,
1033 since gradeschool multiplication got quicker, and the cutoff was
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +00001034 aggressively small regardless. The exponentiation algorithm was switched
1035 from right-to-left to left-to-right, which is more efficient for small
1036 bases. In addition, if the exponent is large, the algorithm now does
1037 5 bits (instead of 1 bit) at a time. That cut the time to compute
1038 17**1000000 on my box in half again, down to about 4.5 seconds.
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +00001039
Tim Petersc8854432004-08-25 02:14:08 +00001040- OverflowWarning is no longer generated. PEP 237 scheduled this to
1041 occur in Python 2.3, but since OverflowWarning was disabled by default,
1042 nobody realized it was still being generated. On the chance that user
1043 code is still using them, the Python builtin OverflowWarning, and
1044 corresponding C API PyExc_OverflowWarning, will exist until Python 2.5.
1045
Martin v. Löwis336e85f2004-08-19 11:31:58 +00001046- Py_InitializeEx has been added.
1047
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +00001048- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
1049 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
1050
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +00001051- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
1052 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
1053 modified the list.
1054
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +00001055- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
1056 functions is now writable.
1057
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +00001058- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
1059 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
1060 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
1061 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
1062
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +00001063- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
1064 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
1065 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
1066 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
1067 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +00001068
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +00001069- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
1070 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
1071
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001072Extension modules
1073-----------------
1074
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +00001075- difflib now supports HTML side-by-side diff.
1076
Martin v. Löwisdc3883f2004-08-29 15:46:35 +00001077- os.urandom has been added for systems that support sources of random
1078 data.
1079
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +00001080- Patch 1012740: truncate() on a writeable cStringIO now resets the
1081 position to the end of the stream. This is consistent with the original
1082 StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was
1083 supposed to have been truncated away.
1084
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +00001085- Added socket.socketpair().
1086
Dave Cole3203efb2004-08-26 00:37:31 +00001087- Added CurrentByteIndex, CurrentColumnNumber, CurrentLineNumber
1088 members to xml.parsers.expat.XMLParser object.
1089
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001090- The mpz, rotor, and xreadlines modules, all deprecated in earlier
Andrew M. Kuchling00873432004-08-31 13:50:43 +00001091 versions of Python, have now been removed.
1092
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001093Library
1094-------
1095
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +00001096- Patch #934356: if a module defines __all__, believe that rather than using
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001097 heuristics for filtering out imported names.
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +00001098
Johannes Gijsbersae882f72004-08-30 10:19:56 +00001099- Patch #941486: added os.path.lexists(), which returns True for broken
1100 symlinks, unlike os.path.exists().
1101
Raymond Hettinger356a4592004-08-30 06:14:31 +00001102- the random module now uses os.urandom() for seeding if it is available.
1103 Added a new generator based on os.urandom().
1104
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +00001105- difflib and diff.py can now generate HTML.
1106
Martin v. Löwiscae9e672004-08-25 13:04:53 +00001107- bdist_rpm now includes version and release in the BuildRoot, and
1108 replaces - by ``_`` in version and release.
Martin v. Löwiscf525242004-08-25 13:00:34 +00001109
Martin v. Löwis9f5c0c42004-08-25 11:37:43 +00001110- distutils build/build_scripts now has an -e option to specify the
1111 path to the Python interpreter for installed scripts.
1112
Barry Warsaw8bee7612004-08-25 02:22:30 +00001113- PEP 292 classes Template and SafeTemplate are added to the string module.
1114
Martin v. Löwis75b9da42004-08-18 13:57:44 +00001115- tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
1116
Martin v. Löwisdeacce22004-08-18 12:46:26 +00001117- HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
1118
Johannes Gijsbersc473c992004-08-18 12:40:31 +00001119- Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
1120 Percivall.
1121
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +00001122- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
1123 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
1124
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +00001125- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
1126 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
1127 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +00001128 than creating a new one.
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +00001129
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001130- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
1131 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
1132 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
1133 and exponent.
1134
1135- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
1136
1137- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
Georg Brandl08c02db2005-07-22 18:39:19 +00001138 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatibility and atexit
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001139 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
1140
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001141- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
1142 to the readline module.
1143
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +00001144- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001145 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
1146 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +00001147
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +00001148- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
1149 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
1150 contains symlinks.
1151
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +00001152- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
1153 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
1154
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +00001155- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
1156 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
1157 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1158
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +00001159- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
1160 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
1161 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
1162 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
1163 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
1164 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
1165 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
1166 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
1167 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
1168 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
1169 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
1170 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
1171 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
1172
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +00001173- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
1174
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001175Tools/Demos
1176-----------
1177
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001178- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
1179 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
1180
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +00001181- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
1182
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001183Build
1184-----
1185
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +00001186- Backward incompatibility: longintrepr.h now triggers a compile-time
1187 error if SHIFT (the number of bits in a Python long "digit") isn't
1188 divisible by 5. This new requirement allows simple code for the new
1189 5-bits-at-a-time long_pow() implementation. If necessary, the
1190 restriction could be removed (by complicating long_pow(), or by
1191 falling back to the 1-bit-at-a-time algorithm), but there are no
1192 plans to do so.
1193
Brett Cannoncc8a4f62004-08-26 01:44:07 +00001194- bug #991962: When building with --disable-toolbox-glue on Darwin no
1195 attempt to build Mac-specific modules occurs.
1196
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +00001197- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
1198 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
1199
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001200- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
1201 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
1202
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +00001203- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
1204 GNU/k*BSD systems.
1205
Hye-Shik Chang3ba5bfc2004-08-19 17:52:37 +00001206- bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings
1207 found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64.
1208
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001209C API
1210-----
1211
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001212..
1213
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001214Documentation
1215-------------
1216
Neal Norwitz5268c392004-08-21 15:13:52 +00001217- patch #1005936, bug #1009373: fix index entries which contain
1218 an underscore when viewed with Acrobat.
1219
1220- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if
1221 it contains symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment
1222 since 1992, but is now in the library reference as well.
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +00001223
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001224New platforms
1225-------------
1226
Hye-Shik Changf64700a2004-08-18 15:13:41 +00001227- FreeBSD 6 is now supported.
1228
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001229Tests
1230-----
1231
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001232..
1233
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001234Windows
1235-------
1236
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +00001237- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
1238 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
1239 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
1240 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
1241 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
1242 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
1243 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
1244 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
1245 the problem.
1246
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001247Mac
1248---
1249
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001250..
1251
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001252
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001253What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
1254=================================
1255
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +00001256*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001257
1258Core and builtins
1259-----------------
1260
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +00001261- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
1262 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
1263 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
1264 sensitive code.
1265
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001266- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001267 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so::
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001268
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001269 @staticmethod
1270 def foo(bar):
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001271
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +00001272 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001273
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001274- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
1275 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
1276 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
1277 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
1278 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
1279 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
1280 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
1281 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
1282 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
1283 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
1284 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
1285
1286 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
1287 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
1288 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
1289 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
1290 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
1291 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
1292 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
1293
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +00001294- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
1295 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
1296
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +00001297- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001298 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +00001299
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001300- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001301 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001302 which was missing for no apparent reason.
1303
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001304- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001305 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
1306 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
1307
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001308- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
1309 types that support garbage collection.
1310
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +00001311- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
1312
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +00001313- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
1314 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
1315 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
1316 Jython.
1317
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001318- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
1319
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +00001320- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
1321 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
1322
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +00001323- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
1324 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
1325 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +00001326
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +00001327- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
1328 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
1329 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
1330
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001331Extension modules
1332-----------------
1333
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +00001334- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
1335
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001336Library
1337-------
1338
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +00001339- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
1340 TIS-620
1341
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +00001342- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
1343 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
1344 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
1345 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
1346 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
1347 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
1348 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
1349 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
1350 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
1351 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
1352
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +00001353- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
1354
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +00001355- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
1356 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
1357 same as when the argument is omitted).
1358 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
1359
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +00001360- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
1361
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +00001362- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
1363 schemes are offered.
1364
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +00001365- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
1366
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +00001367- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
1368 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
1369 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
1370
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +00001371- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
1372
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +00001373- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
1374 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
1375
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +00001376- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
1377 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
1378 when dummy_threading is being used.
1379
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +00001380- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
1381 from a tarfile.
1382
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001383- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001384 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001385
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +00001386- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
1387 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
1388 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
1389 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
1390
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +00001391- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
1392 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
1393
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +00001394- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
1395 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
1396 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
1397 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
1398 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
1399 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
1400 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
1401 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
1402 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
1403 by some other method in progress).
1404
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001405- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
1406 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
1407 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +00001408
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +00001409- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
1410
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +00001411- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
1412 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
1413 AM Kuchling.
1414
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +00001415- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
1416 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
1417 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
1418
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +00001419- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
1420 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
1421 instead of unsigned.
1422
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001423- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +00001424 no longer part of the public API.
1425
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +00001426- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
1427 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
1428 string methods of the same name).
1429
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001430- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +00001431 SF patch 945642.
1432
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001433- doctest unittest integration improvements:
1434
1435 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
1436
1437 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
1438 DocTestSuites.
1439
1440- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
1441 that provide thread-local data.
1442
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001443- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
1444 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
1445
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001446- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
1447
1448- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
1449 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
1450 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
1451
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001452- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
1453
1454 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
1455 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
1456 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001457
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001458 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
1459 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
1460 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
1461 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
1462
1463 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
1464 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
1465
1466 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
1467 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
1468 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
1469 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
1470
1471 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
1472 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
1473 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
1474 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
1475 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
1476
1477 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
1478 wrapping help output.
1479
1480 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
1481 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
1482 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001483
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001484C API
1485-----
1486
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001487- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
1488 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
1489 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
1490 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
1491 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
1492 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
1493 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
1494 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
1495 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
1496 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
1497 its visible semantics have not changed.
1498
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001499- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
1500 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
1501
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001502Documentation
1503-------------
1504
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001505- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001506
1507 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +00001508 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001509
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +00001510 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001511
1512 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
1513
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001514- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001515
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001516Tests
1517-----
1518
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001519- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +00001520 platforms that use the Makefile.
1521
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001522- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
1523 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
1524 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
1525
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001526
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001527What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
1528=================================
1529
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +00001530*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001531
1532Core and builtins
1533-----------------
1534
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +00001535- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
1536 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
1537 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
1538 objects now (one object instead of three).
1539
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +00001540- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
1541 Windows DLLs.
1542
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +00001543- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
1544 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +00001545
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +00001546- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
1547 a new .pyc magic.
1548
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +00001549- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
1550 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
1551 be there.
1552
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +00001553- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
1554 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
1555 the LC_NUMERIC category.
1556
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +00001557- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
1558 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
1559 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
1560
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +00001561- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
1562
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +00001563- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
1564 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
1565 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +00001566
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +00001567- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
1568 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
1569
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +00001570- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
1571
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001572- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001573 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001574
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +00001575- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
1576
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +00001577- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
1578
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +00001579- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
1580 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
1581
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +00001582- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
1583 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
1584 Fixes bug #858016 .
1585
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +00001586- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
1587 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
1588 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
1589
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +00001590- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
1591 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
1592 improves their performance (about 35%).
1593
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +00001594- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
1595 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
1596 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
1597
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +00001598- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
1599 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
1600 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
1601 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
1602
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001603- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
1604 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
Walter Dörwald09515af2005-03-18 10:28:24 +00001605 list comprehensions, and the list constructor (when the input iterable
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001606 length is not known).
1607
1608- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
1609 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +00001610 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
1611 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001612 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
1613
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +00001614- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
1615 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
1616
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +00001617- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
1618 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
1619 keyword arguments.
1620
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +00001621- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
1622 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
1623 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
1624
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +00001625- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
1626 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
1627 cases.
1628
1629- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
1630 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
1631 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
1632 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
1633 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
1634 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
1635 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
1636 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
1637 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
1638 a release build.
1639
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +00001640- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
1641 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
1642
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001643- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001644 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001645
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +00001646- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
1647 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
1648 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
1649 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
1650 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
1651 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
1652 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
1653 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
1654 destroyed.
1655
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +00001656- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
1657 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
1658 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
1659 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
1660 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
1661 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
1662 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
1663 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
1664
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +00001665- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
1666 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
1667 character other than a space.
1668
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +00001669- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
1670 by the function object or by the method object, the function
1671 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
1672 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
1673 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
1674 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
1675 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
1676 attributes with the same name.
1677
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001678- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
1679 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
1680 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
1681 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
1682 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
1683 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
1684 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
1685 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
1686 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
1687 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
1688 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
1689 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
1690 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
1691 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +00001692
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +00001693- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
1694 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
1695 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
1696 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
1697 This has been repaired.
1698
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001699- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
1700
1701- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
1702
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +00001703- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
1704 over a sequence.
1705
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001706- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001707 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001708
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +00001709- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
1710
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +00001711- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
1712 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
1713 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
1714 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
1715 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
1716 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
1717 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
1718 records with equal keys is unchanged).
1719
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +00001720- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
1721 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
1722 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
1723
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +00001724- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
1725 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
1726 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
1727 freelist.
1728
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +00001729- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
1730 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
1731
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +00001732- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
1733 number.
1734
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +00001735- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
1736 a TypeError exception.
1737
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +00001738- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
1739 820195.
1740
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +00001741- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
1742 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
1743 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
1744
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001745- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001746 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
1747 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +00001748
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +00001749- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
1750 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
1751 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
1752
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001753- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
1754 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001755 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001756
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001757- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +00001758 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
1759 the first call.
1760
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001761
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001762Extension modules
1763-----------------
1764
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +00001765- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
1766 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
1767
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001768- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
1769 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
1770 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
1771 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
1772 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
1773 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
1774 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +00001775
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +00001776- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
1777
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +00001778- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
1779
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +00001780- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
1781 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
1782
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +00001783- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
1784 fewer false positives.
1785
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +00001786- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
1787 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
1788
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001789- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +00001790 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
1791
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +00001792- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001793 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +00001794 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
Raymond Hettinger6ab78cd2004-08-29 07:50:43 +00001795 Also, array.array() and array.extend() now accept any iterable argument
1796 for repeated appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +00001797
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +00001798- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
1799 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
1800 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
1801 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
1802
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +00001803- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
1804 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
1805 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
1806 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
1807 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
1808 #897625.
1809
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +00001810- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
1811 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
1812
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +00001813- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
1814 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
1815 and pops on either side of the deque.
1816
1817- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
1818 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
1819
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +00001820- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
1821 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
1822 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
1823 other functions that expect a function argument.
1824
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +00001825- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
1826
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001827- os.getsid was added.
1828
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +00001829- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
1830 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
1831 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
1832
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +00001833- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
1834
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +00001835- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
1836
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +00001837- readline.clear_history was added.
1838
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +00001839- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
1840
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +00001841- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
1842
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +00001843- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
1844
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +00001845- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
1846
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +00001847- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
1848
1849- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
1850
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +00001851- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
1852
1853- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
1854
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001855- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
1856 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
1857 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
1858
1859- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
1860 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
1861 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
1862 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
1863 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
1864 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
1865 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
1866
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +00001867- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
1868 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
1869 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
1870 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001871
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001872- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001873 iterators from a single iterable.
1874
1875- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
1876 of raising a TypeError exception.
1877
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +00001878- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
1879 as parameter.
1880
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001881Library
1882-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001883
Georg Brandlf0de6a12005-08-22 18:02:59 +00001884- Bug #1266283: The new function "lexists" is now in os.path.__all__.
1885
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +00001886- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
1887 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
1888 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001889
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +00001890- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
1891 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
1892 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +00001893
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +00001894- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +00001895
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +00001896- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
1897 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +00001898
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +00001899- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
1900 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1901
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001902- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
1903
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001904- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001905 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001906
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001907- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001908 that generate a -debuginfo.rpm
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001909
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +00001910- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
1911
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +00001912- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
1913 on cygwin and mingw32.
1914
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +00001915- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
1916
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +00001917- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
1918 module.
1919
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +00001920- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
1921 installation scheme for all platforms.
1922
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001923- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +00001924 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001925
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001926- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
1927 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
1928 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
1929
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +00001930- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
1931 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
1932 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
1933
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +00001934- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
1935
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +00001936- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
1937
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +00001938- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
1939 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
1940
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +00001941- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
1942 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
1943 type pattern with the same value exists.
1944
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +00001945- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
1946 when run from the command prompt).
1947
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001948- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
1949 not taken into consideration when caching value.
1950
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +00001951- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
1952 default sort).
1953
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +00001954- Added global runctx function to profile module
1955
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +00001956- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
1957
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +00001958- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
1959
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +00001960- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
1961
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001962- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +00001963 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
1964 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
1965 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
1966 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
1967 accordingly.
1968
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +00001969- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
1970 decoding standards.
1971
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +00001972- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
1973 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
1974 called for all requests.
1975
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +00001976- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
1977 they are passed to the compiler.
1978
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +00001979- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
1980 indent, width and depth.
1981
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +00001982- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
1983 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
1984
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +00001985- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
1986 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
1987
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +00001988- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
1989
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +00001990- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
1991
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001992- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
1993
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +00001994- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
1995 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
1996
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +00001997- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +00001998 for better performance.
1999
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00002000- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +00002001
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +00002002- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
2003 a string).
2004
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +00002005- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
2006
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +00002007- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
2008
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +00002009- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
2010
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +00002011- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
2012
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +00002013- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
2014 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
2015 list of fieldnames.
2016
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +00002017- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
2018 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
2019
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +00002020- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
2021
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +00002022- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
2023 empty lists.
2024
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +00002025- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
2026 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
2027 and shelves.
2028
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +00002029- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
2030 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
2031
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00002032- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +00002033 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
2034 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00002035
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +00002036- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
2037 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +00002038 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +00002039
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00002040- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +00002041 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
2042 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
2043
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00002044- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
2045 and removed in Py2.4.
2046
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +00002047- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
2048
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +00002049- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
2050
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002051Tools/Demos
2052-----------
2053
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +00002054- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
2055 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
2056
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +00002057- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
2058
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +00002059- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
2060 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
2061 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
2062 destination in situations where both files are given.
2063
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +00002064- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
2065 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
2066 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
2067 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
2068
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +00002069- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
2070
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +00002071- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
2072 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
2073 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
2074 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
2075 now.
2076
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002077- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
2078 in effect
2079
2080- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
2081 C-c C-h
2082
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +00002083- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
2084 -d option was given.
2085
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002086Build
2087-----
2088
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +00002089- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
2090 build under OS X.
2091
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +00002092- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
2093 --enable-profiling.
2094
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +00002095- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
2096 is configured --with-tsc.
2097
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +00002098- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
2099 on AMD64.
2100
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +00002101- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
2102 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
2103
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00002104- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
2105 removed.
2106
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00002107- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
2108 supported (see PEP 11).
2109
2110- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
2111
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00002112- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
2113
2114- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
2115 (see PEP 11).
2116
2117- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
2118 sizeof(char) must be 1.
2119
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002120C API
2121-----
2122
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00002123- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
2124 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
2125 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
2126
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00002127- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
2128 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
2129 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
2130 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
2131
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00002132- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
2133 generator objects.
2134
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00002135- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
2136 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00002137 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
2138 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00002139
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00002140- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
2141 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
2142
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00002143- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
2144 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
2145 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
2146 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
2147 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
2148
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00002149- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
2150 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
2151 about 10% faster.
2152
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00002153- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
2154 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
2155
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00002156- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
2157 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
2158 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
2159 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
2160
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002161Windows
2162-------
2163
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00002164- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
2165 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
2166 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
2167 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
2168
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00002169- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
2170 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
2171 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
2172
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002173
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002174What's New in Python 2.3 final?
2175===============================
2176
2177*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
2178
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002179IDLE
2180----
2181
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00002182- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
2183 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
2184 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
2185 context-menu actions.
2186
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002187- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
2188 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
2189 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
2190 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
2191 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
2192 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
2193 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
2194 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
2195 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
2196
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002197
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002198What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
2199=============================================
2200
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00002201*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002202
2203Core and builtins
2204-----------------
2205
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00002206- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002207 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00002208 comment at the end are still unsupported.
2209
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002210Extension modules
2211-----------------
2212
2213- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
2214 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
2215 than once. This has been fixed.
2216
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00002217- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
2218 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
2219 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
2220 call.
2221
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002222- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
2223
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002224Library
2225-------
2226
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002227- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
2228 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
2229
2230- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
2231 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
2232 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
2233 restored.
2234
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00002235IDLE
2236----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002237
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00002238- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002239
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002240Build
2241-----
2242
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002243- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
2244 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
2245
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002246C API
2247-----
2248
2249Windows
2250-------
2251
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00002252- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
2253 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
2254
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002255- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
2256
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002257Mac
2258---
2259
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002260- Various fixes to pimp.
2261
2262- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
2263
2264- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
2265 more problems than it solves.
2266
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002267
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002268What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
2269=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002270
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00002271*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
2272
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002273Core and builtins
2274-----------------
2275
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00002276- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
2277 by sys.setcheckinterval().
2278
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002279- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
2280 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002281 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002282
2283- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
2284 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
2285 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002286 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002287
2288- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
2289 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002290
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002291- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
2292 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
2293 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
2294
2295- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002296 770247.
2297
2298- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002299
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002300Extension modules
2301-----------------
2302
2303- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
2304 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
2305
2306- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
2307
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002308- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
2309
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00002310- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
2311 contained within the _strptime module.
2312
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002313- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
2314 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
2315
2316- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002317 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
2318
2319- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
2320 the find_class attribute, if present.
2321
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002322- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002323
2324 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
2325 (SF bug 763298).
2326
2327 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00002328 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
2329 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
2330 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002331
2332 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
2333
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002334Library
2335-------
2336
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002337- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
2338
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00002339- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
2340 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
2341 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
2342 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
2343 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
2344 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
2345 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
2346 or Tester().
2347
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002348- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
2349 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
2350 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
2351 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
2352 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
2353 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
2354 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
2355 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
2356 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00002357
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002358 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00002359
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00002360- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
2361 weren't before was an oversight.
2362
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002363- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
2364 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
2365
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00002366- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
2367 when there are no lines.
2368
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00002369- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
2370 which could occur with Tk 8.4
2371
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002372- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
2373 to child processes.
2374
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002375- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
2376
2377- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
2378
2379- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
2380 xmlrpclib.
2381
2382- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
2383 responses.
2384
2385- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
2386 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
2387
2388- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
2389 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
2390 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
2391
2392- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
2393 used as patterns.
2394
2395- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
2396 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
2397 than Tk 8.3.
2398
2399- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
2400
2401- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002402
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002403Tools/Demos
2404-----------
2405
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002406- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
2407
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00002408- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
2409
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002410- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002411
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002412Build
2413-----
2414
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002415- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
2416
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002417- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
2418
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002419- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
2420 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002421
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002422- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
2423 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
2424 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002425
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002426C API
2427-----
2428
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002429- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
2430 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
2431
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002432Windows
2433-------
2434
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002435- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
2436 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
2437 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
2438 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
2439 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
2440 Python exception ::
2441
2442 thread.error: can't start new thread
2443
2444 is raised now.
2445
2446- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
2447 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
2448 instead of from DLL teardown.
2449
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002450Mac
2451---
2452
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002453- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00002454 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002455 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
2456 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
2457 the executable in the bundle.
2458
2459- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002460
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00002461- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
2462
2463- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
2464 on Panther.
2465
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002466What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
2467================================
2468
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002469*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002470
2471Core and builtins
2472-----------------
2473
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00002474- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
2475 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
2476 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
2477 with the -i option.
2478
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00002479- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
2480 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
2481
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002482- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
2483 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
2484
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00002485- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
2486 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
2487 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
2488 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
2489 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
2490 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
2491 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
2492 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
2493 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
2494 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
2495 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
2496 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
2497 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00002498
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002499- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
2500 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
2501 embedded in a lambda expression.
2502
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00002503- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
2504 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
2505 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
2506 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
2507 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
2508
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002509- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
2510 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
2511 matches the restriction on classic classes.
2512
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00002513- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
2514 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
2515
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00002516- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
2517 It's writable again.
2518
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002519- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
2520 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
2521 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002522 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002523
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002524- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
2525 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
2526 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
2527
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002528Extension modules
2529-----------------
2530
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00002531- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
2532 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
2533
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002534- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
2535 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
2536 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
2537 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
2538
2539- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
2540 collection.
2541
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00002542- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
2543 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
2544 unique within a single program run.
2545
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00002546- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
2547 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
2548
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00002549- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
2550 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
2551
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00002552- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
2553 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00002554
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00002555- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
2556
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00002557- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
2558 Fixes SF bug #730685.
2559
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00002560- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
2561 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
2562 for many BSD-derived systems.
2563
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002564
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002565Library
2566-------
2567
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00002568- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
2569 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
2570 primary ones:
2571
2572 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
2573 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
2574 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
2575
2576 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
2577 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
2578 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
2579 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
2580 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
2581 framework features (which doctest lacks).
2582
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00002583- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
2584 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
2585 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
2586 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
2587 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
2588 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
2589 argument.
2590
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002591- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
2592 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
2593 in the archive.
2594
2595- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
2596 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
2597
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00002598- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
2599 569574).
2600
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002601- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
2602 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
2603 no more.
2604
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002605- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
2606 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
2607 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
2608 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
2609 code coverage.
2610
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002611- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
2612 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
2613 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002614 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
2615 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002616
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002617- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
2618 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
2619 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00002620 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002621
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00002622- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
2623
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00002624- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
2625 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
2626 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
2627 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
2628
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00002629- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
2630 handling.
2631
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00002632- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
2633 __doc__ of data descriptors.
2634
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00002635- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
2636 in socket.py.
2637
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00002638- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
2639
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00002640- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
2641 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
2642 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
2643 opener with proxy support.
2644
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002645- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
2646
2647- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
2648
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002649Tools/Demos
2650-----------
2651
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00002652- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
2653
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002654- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
2655
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002656- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
2657 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00002658
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00002659- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
2660 files.
2661
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002662Build
2663-----
2664
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002665- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00002666 different root directory.
2667
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002668C API
2669-----
2670
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00002671- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
2672 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
2673 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
2674 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
2675 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
2676 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
2677 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
2678 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
2679 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
2680 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
2681
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002682- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
2683 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
2684 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
2685 from Python.
2686
2687
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002688New platforms
2689-------------
2690
2691None this time.
2692
2693Tests
2694-----
2695
2696- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
2697 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
2698
2699Windows
2700-------
2701
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00002702- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
2703
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00002704- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
2705 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
2706 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
2707 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
2708 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
2709 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
2710 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
2711 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
2712 that's what it's for.
2713
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002714Mac
2715---
2716
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00002717- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
2718 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
2719 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
2720 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00002721- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
2722 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
2723- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002724
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002725SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
2726------------------------------------
2727
2728430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
2729598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
2730622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
2731661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
2732683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
2733697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
2734713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
2735724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
2736727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
2737729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
2738730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
2739731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
2740732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
2741733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
2742735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
2743740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
2744744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
2745745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
2746747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
2747749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
2748751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
2749753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
2750755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
2751757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
2752760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
2753
2754
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002755What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
2756================================
2757
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00002758*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002759
2760Core and builtins
2761-----------------
2762
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00002763- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
2764 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
2765
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00002766- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
2767 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
2768 and cannot be strings).
2769
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00002770- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
2771 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
2772 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
2773 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
2774
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00002775- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
2776 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
2777 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
2778 Python itself.
2779
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00002780- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
2781 the referenced object, if it has one.
2782
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00002783- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
2784 the thread started at
2785 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
2786
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00002787- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
2788 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
2789 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
2790 placed on a list index.
2791
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00002792- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
2793 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
2794 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
2795 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
2796
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002797- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
2798 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
2799 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
2800 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
2801 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
2802 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
2803 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
2804
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00002805- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
2806 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
2807 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
2808 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
2809 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
2810
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00002811- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
2812 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00002813
2814- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
2815 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
2816 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
2817 #693195.)
2818
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00002819- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
2820 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002821
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002822- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00002823 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002824 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
2825 interpreter executions, would fail.
2826
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002827- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00002828 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00002829 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002830
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002831Extension modules
2832-----------------
2833
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00002834- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
2835 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
2836 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
2837 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
2838
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00002839- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
2840 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
2841
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00002842- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
2843 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
2844 and Greg Chapman.)
2845
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002846- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
2847 recursively.
2848
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00002849- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00002850 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
2851 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
2852 leaks.
2853
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00002854- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
2855
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00002856- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
2857 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
2858 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
2859 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
2860 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
2861 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
2862 #705836.
2863
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002864- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00002865 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
2866
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00002867- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
2868 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
2869 See SF bug #692416.
2870
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00002871- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
2872 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
2873
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00002874- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
2875 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
2876 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002877
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002878- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00002879 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
2880 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
2881
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00002882- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
2883 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
2884 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
2885 timeouts to work properly.
2886
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002887Library
2888-------
2889
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002890- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
2891 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
2892 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
2893 future release.
2894
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00002895- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
2896 for querying platform dependent features.
2897
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00002898- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00002899
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00002900- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
2901 pickle protocol versions.
2902
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00002903- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
2904 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
2905 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
2906
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00002907- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
2908
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00002909- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
2910 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
2911 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
2912 modules.
2913
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00002914- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
2915 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
2916 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
2917
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002918- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
2919 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
2920
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00002921- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
2922 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
2923 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
2924
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002925- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00002926 MS Office extensions.
2927
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00002928- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
2929 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
2930
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00002931- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
2932 execution speed of expressions and statements.
2933
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002934- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
2935 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
2936 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
2937 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
2938 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
2939 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
2940
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002941- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
2942 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
2943 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002944
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00002945- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
2946 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
2947 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
2948
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00002949- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
2950
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00002951- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
2952 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
2953 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
2954
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002955Tools/Demos
2956-----------
2957
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00002958- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
2959 See the module docstring for details.
2960
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002961Build
2962-----
2963
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00002964- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
2965 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002966
2967C API
2968-----
2969
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002970- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
2971
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00002972- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
2973 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
2974 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
2975
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002976- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
2977 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002978
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002979 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
2980 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
2981 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00002982
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00002983- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00002984 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
2985
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00002986- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
2987 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
2988 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002989
2990New platforms
2991-------------
2992
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002993None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002994
2995Tests
2996-----
2997
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00002998- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
2999 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003000
3001Windows
3002-------
3003
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00003004- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
3005 function.
3006
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00003007- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
3008 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003009
3010Mac
3011---
3012
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00003013- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
3014 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00003015
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00003016- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
3017 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003018
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00003019- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
3020 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
3021 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00003022
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00003023- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00003024 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
3025 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00003026
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00003027- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
3028 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003029
3030
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003031What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
3032=================================
3033
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00003034*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003035
3036Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00003037-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003038
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00003039- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
3040 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
3041 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
3042
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00003043- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
3044 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
3045 (SF patch #664376.)
3046
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00003047- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
3048 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
3049 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
3050 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
3051 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
3052 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00003053 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00003054
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00003055- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
3056 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
3057 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
3058 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003059 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00003060
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00003061- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
3062 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
3063 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
3064 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
3065 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
3066 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
3067 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
3068 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
3069 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
3070 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
3071 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
3072
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00003073- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
3074 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
3075 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
3076 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
3077 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
3078 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
3079
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00003080- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
3081 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
3082
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00003083- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
3084 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
3085 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
3086 case.)
3087
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00003088- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
3089 passed as unicode strings.
3090
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00003091- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
3092 See SF bug #683467.
3093
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00003094- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
3095 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
3096
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00003097- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
3098
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00003099- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
3100
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00003101- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
3102 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
3103 arguments.
3104
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00003105- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
3106 See SF bug #667147.
3107
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00003108- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003109 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00003110 See SF bug #676155.
3111
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00003112- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00003113 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00003114 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
3115 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
3116 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
3117 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
3118 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
3119 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00003120
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003121Extension modules
3122-----------------
3123
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00003124- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
3125 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
3126 tp_as_number pointer.
3127
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00003128- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
3129 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
3130 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
3131 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
3132 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
3133
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003134- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
3135
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00003136- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
3137
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00003138- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00003139 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00003140 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
3141 patch #678531.)
3142
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00003143- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
3144 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
3145
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00003146- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
3147 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
3148
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00003149- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
3150
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00003151- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
3152 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
3153 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
3154
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003155- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
3156
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00003157- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
3158 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
3159
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003160- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003161
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003162- datetime changes:
3163
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00003164 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
3165
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00003166 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
3167 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
3168 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
3169 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
3170 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
3171 now.
3172
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003173 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003174 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
3175 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003176
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003177 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003178 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003179 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
3180 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
3181 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
3182 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003183
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00003184 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
3185 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
3186 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003187 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
3188
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00003189 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
3190 by a later example coded by Guido.
3191
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003192 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003193 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
3194 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
3195 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003196 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
3197 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
3198
3199 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
3200 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
3201 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
3202 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
3203 tzinfo subclass instance.
3204
3205 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
3206 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
3207 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
3208 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
3209 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
3210 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
3211 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
3212 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003213
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003214 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
3215 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
3216 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
3217 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
3218 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003219 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
3220
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003221 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003222
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003223 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
3224 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
3225 as a naive datetime object.
3226
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00003227 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
3228 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
3229 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
3230
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00003231 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
3232 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
3233 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
3234 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
3235 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
3236 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
3237 comparison.
3238
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003239 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
3240 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
3241 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
3242 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003243 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003244
3245 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003246
3247 and ::
3248
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003249 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
3250
3251 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
3252 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
3253 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
3254 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
3255
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00003256 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
3257 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
3258 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
3259 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
3260 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
3261
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003262 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
3263 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00003264 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
3265 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003266
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003267Library
3268-------
3269
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003270- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
3271 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
3272
3273- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
3274 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
3275 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
3276 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
3277 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
3278 See PEP 307 for details.
3279
3280- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
3281 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
3282
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00003283- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
3284 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00003285 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003286 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
3287 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00003288 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00003289
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00003290- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
3291 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
3292
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003293- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
3294 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
3295 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
3296
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00003297- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
3298
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00003299- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
3300 exception.
3301
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00003302- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
3303 class.
3304
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00003305- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
3306 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
3307 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
3308
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00003309- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
3310 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
3311
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003312- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00003313 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
3314 See SF bug #659228.
3315
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00003316- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
3317 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
3318 See SF patch #651082.
3319
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00003320- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003321
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00003322- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
3323 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
3324
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003325- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003326 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003327
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00003328- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
3329 DOS paths from other platforms.
3330
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003331Tools/Demos
3332-----------
3333
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003334- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
3335 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
3336 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
3337 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
3338 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
3339 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
3340 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
3341 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
3342 example:
3343
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00003344 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
3345 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003346
3347 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
3348
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003349
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003350Build
3351-----
3352
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003353- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
3354 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
3355 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003356 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
3357
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003358 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
3359
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00003360- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
3361 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
3362 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
3363 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
3364 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
3365 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
3366 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
3367 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
3368 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
3369
3370- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
3371 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
3372 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
3373 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
3374
3375- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
3376 from the Tools/scripts directory.
3377
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003378C API
3379-----
3380
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003381- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
3382 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00003383
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00003384- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
3385 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
3386 tp_as_number pointer.
3387
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00003388- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
3389 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
3390 (SF #681367)
3391
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00003392- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
3393 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
3394 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
3395 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00003396
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003397Tests
3398-----
3399
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00003400- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003401 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
3402 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
3403 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
3404 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
3405 pydoc.)
3406
3407- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
3408
3409- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003410
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003411Windows
3412-------
3413
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00003414- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
3415 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
3416 time).
3417
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00003418- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
3419 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
3420
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00003421- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
3422 release without strong cryptography.
3423
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003424- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003425 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003426
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003427- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
3428 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
3429
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003430Mac
3431---
3432
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003433- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
3434 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003435
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00003436- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
3437 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
3438 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003439
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003440- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
3441 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003442
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003443- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
3444 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
3445 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
3446 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003447
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003448- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00003449 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
3450 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
3451 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003452
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003453
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003454What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003455=================================
3456
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00003457*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003458
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003459Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003460--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003461
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00003462- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
3463
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003464- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
3465 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003466 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003467 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003468 a different meaning than before.
3469
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003470- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003471 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003472 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003473
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003474- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003475 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003476 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003477
3478- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
3479 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
3480 and deallocation.
3481
3482- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
3483 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
3484
3485- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
3486 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
3487 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
3488 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
3489 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
3490
3491- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
3492 now detected by the garbage collector.
3493
3494- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
3495 [SF bug 519621]
3496
3497- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
3498 identifier.
3499
3500- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
3501 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
3502 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
3503 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
3504 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
3505 [SF bug 563060]
3506
3507- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
3508 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
3509 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
3510 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
3511 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
3512
3513- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
3514 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
3515 not called. [SF bug #537450]
3516
3517- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
3518
3519- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
3520 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
3521 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
3522 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
3523 state of the slots would be lost.)
3524
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003525Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003526-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003527
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003528- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003529 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
3530 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
3531 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
3532 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003533 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
3534 Jython 2.1.
3535
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003536- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003537 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003538 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
3539 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
3540 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
3541 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
3542 these, see PEP 302.
3543
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003544- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
3545 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
3546 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
3547
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00003548- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
3549 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
3550 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
3551
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00003552- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
3553 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
3554 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
3555
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003556- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
3557 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
3558 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
3559 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
3560 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
3561 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
3562 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
3563 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
3564 releases or implementations.
3565
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003566- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003567 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
3568 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003569
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00003570- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
3571 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
3572
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003573- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
3574 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
3575 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
3576
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00003577- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
3578 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
3579
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003580- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
3581 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003582 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
3583 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003584
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00003585- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
3586 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
3587 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
3588 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
3589 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
3590
3591 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
3592 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
3593 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
3594 pattern.
3595
3596 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
3597 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
3598 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
3599 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
3600
3601 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
3602 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
3603 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
3604 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
3605 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
3606 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
3607
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00003608- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
3609 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
3610 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
3611 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
3612 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
3613 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
3614 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
3615 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00003616
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00003617- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
3618 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
3619 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
3620 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
3621 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003622 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
3623 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
3624 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
3625 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
3626 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
3627 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
3628 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003629
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003630- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
3631 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
3632
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00003633- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
3634 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
3635 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
3636 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
3637 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
3638 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
3639 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
3640 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
3641 to Zack Weinberg!
3642
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00003643- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
3644 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
3645 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
3646 type. This has been fixed now.
3647
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00003648- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
3649 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
3650 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
3651
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003652- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
3653 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
3654 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
3655 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
3656 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
3657 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
3658 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
3659 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00003660 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003661
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00003662- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
3663 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
3664 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00003665
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003666- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
3667 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
3668 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
3669 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
3670 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
3671 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
3672 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
3673 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003674 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003675 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
3676 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
3677
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00003678- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
3679 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
3680 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
3681 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
3682 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
3683 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
3684 this.)
3685
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003686- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
3687 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003688 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003689 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003690 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
3691 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00003692 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
3693 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003694
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003695- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
3696 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
3697 currently running.
3698
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00003699- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
3700 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
3701 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
3702 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
3703
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00003704- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
3705 as directory names.
3706
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00003707- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
3708 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
3709
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00003710- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
3711 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
3712
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003713- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00003714 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
3715 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003716
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00003717- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
3718 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
3719 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
3720 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
3721 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
3722
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003723- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
3724 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
3725 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
3726 removed.
3727
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00003728- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
3729 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
3730 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
3731
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00003732- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
3733 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
3734 to __debug__.
3735
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00003736- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
3737 string to the left with zeros. For example,
3738 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
3739
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00003740- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
3741 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
3742 deprecated now.
3743
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00003744- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
3745 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
3746 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00003747
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00003748- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
3749 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
3750 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
3751 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
3752 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00003753
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00003754- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
3755 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
3756
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003757- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
3758 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
3759 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003760 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003761 is backward compatible.
3762
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00003763- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
3764 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
3765 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
3766 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
3767 could access a pointer to freed memory.
3768
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00003769- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
3770 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
3771 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
3772 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
3773 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
3774 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003775
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00003776- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
3777 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
3778
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003779- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
3780 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
3781
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003782- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
3783 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
3784 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
3785 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
3786 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
3787
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00003788- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
3789 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
3790 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
3791
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003792- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00003793 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
3794
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00003795- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
3796 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
3797 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00003798
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00003799- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
3800 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
3801
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00003802- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
3803 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
3804 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
3805
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00003806- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
3807
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003808Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003809-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003810
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00003811- Added three operators to the operator module:
3812 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
3813 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
3814 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
3815
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00003816- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
3817
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003818- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
3819 archives.
3820
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003821- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
3822 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
3823 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
3824
3825 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
3826
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003827- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
3828 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
3829 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00003830 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003831
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00003832- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
3833 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
3834 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
3835 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003836 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
3837 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
3838 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
3839 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00003840
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00003841- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
3842 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00003843
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00003844- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
3845
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00003846- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
3847 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
3848
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00003849- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
3850 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
3851 supported.
3852
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00003853- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
3854
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00003855- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
3856 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00003857
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00003858- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
3859 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
3860
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003861- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
3862
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003863- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
3864 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
3865
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00003866- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
3867 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
3868 functions but callable type objects.
3869
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003870- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003871 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003872 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003873
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00003874- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
3875 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00003876
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00003877- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
3878 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00003879
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00003880- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
3881 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
3882 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
3883 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
3884
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00003885- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
3886 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00003887
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00003888- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
3889 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
3890 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
3891 and __imul__.
3892
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00003893- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00003894 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
3895 is called.
3896
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00003897- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
3898 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
3899 interpreter was compiled.
3900
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003901- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
3902 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
3903 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003904 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003905 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
3906 1, not 2.
3907
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00003908- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
3909 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
3910 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
3911 limit.
3912
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00003913- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
3914 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
3915 bug #623464.
3916
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00003917- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
3918 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
3919 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
3920 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
3921
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003922Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003923-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003924
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00003925- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
3926
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00003927- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
3928 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
3929 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
3930 with Python 2.3a2.
3931
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00003932- os.path exposes getctime.
3933
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003934- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003935 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003936 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003937 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003938 unit tests of floating point results.
3939
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00003940- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
3941 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
3942 has been increased.
3943
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003944- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
3945 executed.
3946
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00003947- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
3948 postinstallation script.
3949
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00003950- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
3951 test the current module.
3952
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003953- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00003954 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
3955 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
3956 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
3957 this behavior needs to be controlled.
3958
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003959- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003960 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003961 Ward's Optik package.
3962
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003963- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
3964 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
3965 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
3966 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
3967
3968- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
3969 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003970 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003971
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00003972- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
3973 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
3974 shelf are binary pickles.
3975
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00003976- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
3977 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
3978
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00003979- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
3980 modules are iterators now.
3981
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00003982- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
3983 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
3984 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
3985 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
3986 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
3987 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003988
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00003989- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
3990 with their entity value.
3991
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00003992- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
3993
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003994- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
3995 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00003996
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003997- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
3998 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003999 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00004000
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00004001- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
4002 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
4003 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
4004 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
4005 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
4006 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
4007 main():
4008
4009 import locale
4010 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
4011
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00004012- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
4013 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
4014
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00004015- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
4016 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
4017 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
4018 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
4019 to the new standard.
4020
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00004021- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
4022 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
4023 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
4024 an extension to the database.
4025
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00004026- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
4027 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
4028 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
4029 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00004030 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00004031
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00004032- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00004033 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00004034
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00004035- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
4036 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
4037 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
4038 bounded integers.
4039
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00004040- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
4041 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
4042 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
4043 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
4044 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
4045 in existence.
4046
4047 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
4048 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
4049 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
4050 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
4051 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
4052 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
4053
4054 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
4055 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
4056 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
4057 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
4058
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00004059- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
4060 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
4061 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
4062
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00004063- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
4064
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00004065- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
4066 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
4067 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
4068 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
4069
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00004070- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
4071 argument.
4072
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00004073- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
4074 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
4075 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
4076 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
4077 [SF patch 560794].
4078
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00004079- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
4080 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
4081 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00004082 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
4083 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
4084 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00004085
4086- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
4087 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00004088
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00004089- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
4090 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
4091 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
4092 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00004093
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00004094- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
4095 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
4096 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
4097 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
4098 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
4099
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00004100- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00004101
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00004102- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
4103
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00004104- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
4105 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
4106 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
4107 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
4108 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
4109 identical to None.
4110
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00004111- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
4112 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
4113 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
4114 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
4115 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
4116 results now.
4117
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00004118- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
4119 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
4120
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00004121- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
4122 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
4123 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
4124 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
4125 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
4126 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
4127 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
4128 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
4129
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00004130- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
4131
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00004132- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
4133 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
4134
4135- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
4136 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
4137 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
4138 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
4139 and other systems.
4140
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00004141- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
4142 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
4143 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
4144 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 +00004145 work well with these.
4146
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00004147- compileall now supports quiet operation.
4148
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004149- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00004150 connections.
4151
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00004152- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
4153 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
4154 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
4155
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00004156- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
4157 sets
4158
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00004159- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
4160 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
4161 name.
4162
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00004163- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
4164 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
4165 passed in.
4166
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004167- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00004168 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00004169 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
4170 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00004171
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00004172- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
4173
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00004174- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
4175
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00004176- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
4177 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
4178 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
4179
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00004180- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
4181 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
4182 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
4183 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00004184 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00004185
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004186- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00004187 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004188 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00004189
4190- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
4191 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
4192 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
4193
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004194- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00004195 the value of its expression argument.
4196
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00004197- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
4198 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
4199 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
4200
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00004201- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
4202 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
4203 skipstone browser was included.
4204
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00004205- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
4206 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
4207
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004208Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004209-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004210
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00004211- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
4212 names in addition to accepting file names.
4213
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00004214- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
4215 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
4216 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
4217 still used and useful.)
4218
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00004219- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
4220 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
4221 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
4222 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00004223
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00004224- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
4225 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
4226 the generated binary.
4227
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004228Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004229-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004230
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00004231- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
4232
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00004233- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
4234 except in the hands of experts.
4235
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00004236- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00004237 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
4238 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
4239 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00004240
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00004241- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
4242 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
4243 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
4244 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
4245 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
4246 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
4247 builds.
4248
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00004249- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
4250 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
4251 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
4252 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
4253 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
4254 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
4255 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
4256 new type.
4257
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00004258- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00004259
4260 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
4261 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
4262 positive infinities.
4263
4264 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
4265 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
4266 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
4267 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
4268 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
4269 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
4270 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
4271
4272 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
4273
4274 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
4275
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00004276- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
4277 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
4278 size of the executable.
4279
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00004280- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
4281 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
4282 configure script. On other platforms, remove
4283 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00004284
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00004285- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
4286
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00004287- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
4288 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
4289 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00004290
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00004291- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
4292 well as Unix.
4293
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00004294- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
4295 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
4296 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
4297 modules in the README file for details.
4298
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004299C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004300-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004301
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004302- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
4303 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004304 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00004305 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004306 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004307
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004308- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
4309 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
4310 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
4311 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
4312 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
4313 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004314 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004315 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
4316 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
4317 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
4318 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
4319 aligned.)
4320
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00004321- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
4322 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
4323 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
4324
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00004325- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
4326 level.
4327
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00004328- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
4329 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
4330 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
4331 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
4332 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
4333
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00004334- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
4335 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
4336 code.
4337
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00004338- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
4339 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
4340 adjusting for negative indices.
4341
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00004342- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
4343 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
4344 object.
4345
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00004346- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
4347 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
4348 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
4349
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004350- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
4351 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00004352
4353- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
4354
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00004355- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
4356 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
4357 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
4358 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
4359
4360- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
4361
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00004362- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00004363
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004364- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00004365 without going through the buffer API.
4366
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004367- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00004368
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00004369- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
4370 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
4371 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
4372 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
4373
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004374- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
4375 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
4376
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004377- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00004378 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
4379
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004380New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004381-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004382
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00004383- OpenVMS is now supported.
4384
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00004385- AtheOS is now supported.
4386
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00004387- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
4388
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00004389- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
4390
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004391Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004392-----
4393
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00004394- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
4395 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
4396 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004397
4398Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004399-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004400
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004401- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
4402 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
4403 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
4404 bugs.
4405 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004406 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00004407 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
4408 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004409 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00004410
4411- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00004412 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004413
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00004414- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
4415 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
4416
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004417- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
4418 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004419 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004420 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
4421
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00004422- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
4423 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
4424 use files" uninstall option).
4425
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00004426- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
4427
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004428- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
4429 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
4430
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004431- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
4432 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
4433 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
4434
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004435- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
4436 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
4437 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
4438 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
4439 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004440 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
4441 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
4442 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004443
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004444- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004445 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004446 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
4447 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
4448 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
4449 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
4450 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
4451 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
4452 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
4453 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
4454 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
4455 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
4456 work around.
4457
4458- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
4459 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
4460 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
4461 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
4462 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
4463 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
4464 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
4465 specified with O_CREAT too).
4466
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004467Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004468----
4469
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004470- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004471
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00004472- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
4473 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
4474 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
4475
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004476- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
4477 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
4478 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
4479
4480- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
4481 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
4482 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
4483 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
4484 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
4485 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
4486 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
4487 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00004488
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00004489- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
4490 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
4491 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004492
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004493- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
4494 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
4495 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
4496 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
4497 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004498
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004499- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
4500 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
4501 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004502
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004503- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
4504 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004505
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004506- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
4507 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
4508 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
4509 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
4510 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004511
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004512- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
4513 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
4514 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
4515
4516- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
4517 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
4518 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004519
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004520- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
4521 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
4522 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
4523 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004524 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004525
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004526- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
4527 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004528
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004529- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
4530 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00004531
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004532- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00004533 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004534 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
4535 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004536
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00004537
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004538What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004539===============================
4540
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004541*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
4542
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004543Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004544--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004545
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004546- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
4547 with a custom metaclass.
4548
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004549Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004550-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004551
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004552- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
4553 are proxies.
4554
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004555Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004556-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004557
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004558- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
4559 very short strings.
4560
4561- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
4562 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
4563 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
4564 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
4565 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
4566
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004567Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004568-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004569
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004570- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
4571 close or delete time).
4572
4573- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
4574 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
4575
4576- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
4577
4578- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004579 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004580
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004581Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004582-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004583
4584Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004585-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004586
4587C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004588-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004589
4590New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004591-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004592
4593Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004594-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004595
4596Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004597-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004598
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004599- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
4600
4601- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
4602 instances are deleted at process exit time.
4603
4604- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
4605 deleted at process exit time.
4606
4607- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
4608 in backslash.
4609
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004610Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004611----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004612
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004613- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
4614 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
4615 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
4616
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004617
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00004618What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004619===========================
4620
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004621*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
4622
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004623Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004624--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004625
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004626- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
4627 been extensively updated. See
4628
4629 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
4630
4631 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
4632
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00004633- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
4634 deleted!
4635
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00004636- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
4637 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
4638 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
4639 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
4640 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
4641
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004642- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
4643
4644 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
4645 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
4646
4647 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
4648 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
4649 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
4650 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
4651 supported anyway.
4652
4653 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
4654 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
4655
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00004656- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
4657 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
4658 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
4659 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
4660 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004661
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00004662- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
4663 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
4664 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
4665
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004666Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004667-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004668
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004669- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
4670 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
4671 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
4672 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
4673 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
4674 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00004675 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
4676 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
4677 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
4678 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004679
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00004680- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
4681 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
4682 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
4683
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004684Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004685-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004686
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004687- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
4688
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004689Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004690-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004691
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00004692- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
4693 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
4694 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
4695 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
4696 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
4697 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
4698
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00004699- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
4700
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00004701- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
4702
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00004703- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
4704
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004705- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
4706 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
4707 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
4708
4709- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
4710
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004711Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004712-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004713
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004714- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
4715 off a search on Google.
4716
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004717Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004718-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004719
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004720- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
4721 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
4722 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
4723 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
4724 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
4725 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
4726 other platforms should do likewise.
4727
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00004728- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
4729 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
4730 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
4731
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004732C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004733-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004734
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004735- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
4736 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
4737 producing key-value pairs.
4738
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004739- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004740 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004741 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
4742 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
4743 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
4744 previously went unchallenged.
4745
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004746New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004747-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004748
4749Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004750-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004751
4752Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004753-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004754
4755Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004756----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004757
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00004758- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
4759 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004760
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004761- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
4762 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
4763 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
4764 home.
4765
4766
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004767What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004768===========================
4769
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004770*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
4771
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004772Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004773--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004774
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004775- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
4776 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004777
4778 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004779 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004780
4781 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
4782 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004783 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004784 This needs to be documented.
4785
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00004786- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
4787 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
4788
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00004789- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
4790 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
4791 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
4792
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00004793- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
4794 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
4795
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004796- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
4797 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
4798 class forbids it).
4799
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00004800- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
4801 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
4802 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
4803
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004804- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
4805
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004806Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004807-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004808
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004809- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
4810 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004811 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004812
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004813- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
4814 (like 1 + '').
4815
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004816Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004817-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004818
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004819- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
4820 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
4821 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
4822 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004823 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004824 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
4825
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00004826- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
4827 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
4828 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
4829 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
4830
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004831- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
4832 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004833 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
4834 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
4835 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004836
4837- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
4838 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004839
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00004840- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
4841 bytes on its input.
4842
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004843Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004844-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004845
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004846- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00004847 convenience function.
4848
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004849- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
4850 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
4851 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004852 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
4853 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
4854 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
4855 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
4856 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
4857 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004858
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00004859- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
4860 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
4861 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
4862 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
4863
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00004864- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
4865 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
4866 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
4867
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004868- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
4869 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
4870 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
4871 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
4872
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004873- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
4874 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004875 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004876 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
4877 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
4878 new -l and -e options.
4879
4880- statcache is now deprecated.
4881
4882- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
4883 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004884 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004885 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
4886 time properly taken into account.
4887
4888- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
4889 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
4890 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
4891 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
4892
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004893Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004894-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004895
4896Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004897-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004898
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004899- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
4900 is built with libdb3 if available.
4901
4902- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
4903
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004904C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004905-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004906
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00004907- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
4908 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
4909 PySequence_Size().
4910
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004911- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
4912
4913- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
4914 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
4915 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
4916
4917- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
4918 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
4919
4920- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
4921 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
4922
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004923New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004924-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004925
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004926- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
4927 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
4928
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00004929- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
4930 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
4931
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004932- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
4933
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004934Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004935-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004936
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004937- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
4938 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
4939
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004940Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004941-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004942
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004943Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004944----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004945
4946- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
4947 removed completely in the next release.
4948
4949- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
4950 OSX.
4951
4952- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
4953 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
4954
4955- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
4956
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004957
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004958What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004959===========================
4960
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004961*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
4962
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004963Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004964--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004965
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004966- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004967 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004968 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004969 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
4970 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004971 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
4972 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004973 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
4974 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00004975
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00004976- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
4977 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
4978
4979- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
4980 class methods, static methods, and properties.
4981
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004982Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004983-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004984
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00004985- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
4986 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
4987 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
4988 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
4989 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
4990 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
4991 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
4992 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
4993
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004994- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
4995 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
4996 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
4997 example).
4998
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004999- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00005000 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005001 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005002 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00005003
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00005004- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
5005 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
5006 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00005007 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00005008
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005009- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
5010 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
5011 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
5012 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
5013 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
5014 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
5015
5016 isinstance(x, (A, B))
5017
5018 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
5019
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005020Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005021-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005022
5023- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
5024
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00005025- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
5026
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00005027- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
5028 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00005029
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00005030- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
5031 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
5032 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
5033 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
5034 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
5035 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00005036 attributes.
5037
5038- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
5039 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
5040 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00005041
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005042- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
5043 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
5044 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005045
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00005046- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
5047 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
5048 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005049 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
5050 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
5051
5052- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
5053 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00005054
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005055Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005056-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00005057
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00005058- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
5059 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
5060
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00005061- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
5062 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
5063 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
5064 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
5065
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00005066- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
5067 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
5068 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
5069 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
5070
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00005071 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
5072 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
5073 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
5074 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
5075 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
5076 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
5077 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
5078 without losing information).
5079
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00005080- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00005081 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
5082 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
5083 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
5084 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
5085 module).
5086
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00005087 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00005088 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
5089 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
5090 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
5091 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00005092
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00005093- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00005094 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
5095 encoding.
5096
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00005097- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
5098 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
5099
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005100- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005101 to allow saving the message body to a file.
5102
5103- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
5104 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
5105 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
5106 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
5107
5108- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
5109
5110- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
5111 ON, and OFF.
5112
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00005113- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
5114 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
5115
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00005116Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005117-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00005118
5119- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
5120 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
5121 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005122
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005123- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
5124 been added: -X and -E.
5125
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005126Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005127-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005128
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005129- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
5130 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
5131
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005132C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005133-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005134
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00005135- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
5136 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
5137 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
5138 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
5139 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
5140
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00005141- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
5142 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
5143 as long) arguments.
5144
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00005145- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
5146 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
5147 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
5148 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
5149 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
5150 report any bugs or strange behavior).
5151
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00005152- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
5153 input.
5154
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005155New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005156-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005157
5158Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005159-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005160
5161Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005162-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005163
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00005164- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
5165 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
5166 is created for .py and .pyw files.
5167
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005168- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
5169 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
5170 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005171 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005172
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005173 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
5174 # (SIGINT) behavior.
5175 import signal
5176 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005177
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005178 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005179 while 1:
5180 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005181 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005182 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
5183 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
5184 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
5185 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005186
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005187
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005188What's New in Python 2.2a4?
5189===========================
5190
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005191*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
5192
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005193Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005194--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005195
5196- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
5197 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
5198 documentation for all operations on list objects.
5199
5200- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
5201 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
5202 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
5203 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
5204 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
5205 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
5206 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005207
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00005208- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005209 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00005210 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
5211 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
5212 associate a docstring with a property.
5213
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005214- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
5215 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
5216 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
5217 other built-in object types.
5218
5219- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
5220 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
5221 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
5222 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
5223 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
5224
5225- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
5226 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
5227
5228- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
5229 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005230 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005231 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
5232 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
5233 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
5234 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
5235 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
5236
5237- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
5238 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
5239 class.
5240
5241- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
5242 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
5243 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
5244 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
5245
5246- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
5247 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
5248 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
5249 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
5250
5251- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
5252 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
5253
5254- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
5255 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
5256 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
5257 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
5258 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005259 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005260 with the same value as s.
5261
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00005262- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
5263
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005264Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005265----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005266
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00005267- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
5268
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00005269- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
5270 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
5271 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
5272 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
5273 objects.
5274
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005275- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
5276 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00005277 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
5278 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
5279
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005280- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
5281 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
5282 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
5283
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005284Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005285-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005286
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00005287- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
5288 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
5289 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
5290 by the instances.
5291
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00005292- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
5293 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
5294 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
5295
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005296- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
5297 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
5298 before the entire comparison is complete.
5299
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00005300- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
5301 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
5302 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
5303
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00005304- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
5305 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
5306 getwriter().
5307
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005308- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
5309 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
5310
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00005311- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005312 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
5313 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
5314
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00005315- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
5316 iterable object.
5317
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005318- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
5319 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005320
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005321- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
5322 authentication.
5323
5324- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
5325 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005326
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005327- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00005328 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
5329 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
5330 a sample driver.)
5331
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005332Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005333-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005334
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005335- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
5336 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
5337 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
5338 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
5339 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
5340 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
5341 kernel has large file support.
5342
5343- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
5344 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
5345 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
5346 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
5347 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
5348
5349- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
5350 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
5351 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
5352
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005353C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005354-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005355
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005356- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
5357 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
5358
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005359New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005360-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005361
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005362- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
5363 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
5364
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005365Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005366-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005367
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005368- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
5369 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
5370 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
5371 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
5372 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
5373
5374- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
5375 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
5376 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
5377 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
5378
5379- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
5380 especially in regard to reporting errors.
5381
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005382Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005383-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005384
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005385- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005386 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
5387 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005388
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005389
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005390What's New in Python 2.2a3?
5391===========================
5392
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005393*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
5394
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005395Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005396----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005397
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005398- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
5399 big to represent as a C double.
5400
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00005401- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
5402 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
5403 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
5404 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
5405 restriction).
5406
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00005407- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
5408 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
5409 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
5410 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
5411 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
5412
5413 >>> dir([])
5414 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
5415 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
5416 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
5417 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
5418 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
5419 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
5420 'reverse', 'sort']
5421
5422 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
5423
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005424- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005425 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
5426 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
5427 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
5428 OverflowError exception.
5429
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00005430- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005431 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005432 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
5433 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
5434 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
5435 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
5436 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00005437 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005438 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
5439 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
5440
5441 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
5442 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
5443 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
5444 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005445
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005446- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005447 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
5448 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
5449 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
5450 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
5451 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
5452 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
5453 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
5454 once it is created.
5455
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00005456- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
5457 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
5458 (key, value) pairs.
5459
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005460- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005461 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
5462 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
5463
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00005464- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
5465 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
5466 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
5467 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
5468 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005469
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005470- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005471 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
5472 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
5473
5474 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
5475
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005476- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00005477 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
5478
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005479Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005480-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005481
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005482- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00005483 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
5484 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005485
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00005486- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
5487 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
5488 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
5489 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
5490 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
5491 in this area anymore).
5492
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00005493- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
5494 threading.Timer.
5495
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00005496- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
5497 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
5498
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005499- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005500 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
5501
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005502- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00005503 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
5504 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
5505 converted to Python longs.
5506
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005507- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005508 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
5509
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00005510- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
5511 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
5512 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
5513
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005514Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005515-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005516
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005517- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
5518 division operators as per PEP 238.
5519
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005520Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005521-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005522
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005523- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
5524 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
5525 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
5526 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
5527
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005528C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005529-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005530
5531- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005532
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005533- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
5534 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005535 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005536
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005537 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
5538 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005539 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005540 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005541
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005542- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005543 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
5544 module:
5545
5546 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005547
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005548 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
5549 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005550
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005551 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
5552 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005553
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005554 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
5555
5556 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
5557
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005558- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005559 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
5560 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
5561 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005562
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005563New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005564-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005565
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00005566- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
5567 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
5568 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
5569 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
5570 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005571
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005572Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005573-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005574
5575Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005576-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005577
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005578- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
5579 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
5580 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
5581 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00005582 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
5583 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
5584 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
5585 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
5586 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005587
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005588- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00005589 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
5590
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005591
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005592What's New in Python 2.2a2?
5593===========================
5594
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005595*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
5596
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005597Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005598-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005599
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00005600- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
5601 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
5602
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005603- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
5604 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
5605 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005606
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00005607- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
5608 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
5609 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
5610 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005611
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005612- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
5613
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005614- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005615
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005616Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005617-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005618
5619- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00005620 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005621 the module docstring for details.
5622
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005623Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005624-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005625
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005626- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005627 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
5628 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
5629 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005630
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005631- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
5632 Nick Mathewson.
5633
5634Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005635----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005636
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005637- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
5638 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
5639 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
5640 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
5641 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
5642 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
5643 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
5644 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
5645
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00005646- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
5647 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
5648 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
5649 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
5650
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00005651- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
5652 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
5653 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
5654 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
5655 come a long way).
5656
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005657- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
5658 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
5659 write filters for these warnings).
5660
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00005661- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
5662 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
5663 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
5664 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
5665 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
5666
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00005667- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
5668 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
5669 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
5670 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
5671 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
5672 older distribution.
5673
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005674Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005675-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005676
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005677- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
5678 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005679 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005680
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005681- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
5682 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
5683 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
5684
5685- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
5686
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005687- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
5688
5689- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
5690
5691- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
5692
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005693- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005694
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00005695- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
5696
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005697New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005698-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005699
5700C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005701-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005702
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005703- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
5704 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
5705 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
5706 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
5707 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
5708 against buffer overruns.
5709
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005710- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005711 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
5712 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005713 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
5714 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
5715 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
5716
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005717- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
5718 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
5719 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
5720 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
5721 deprecated.
5722
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005723Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005724-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005725
5726- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
5727 relevant is found.
5728
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005729
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005730What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005731===========================
5732
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005733*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
5734
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005735Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005736----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005737
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005738- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
5739 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
5740 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
5741 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
5742 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
5743 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
5744 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
5745 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005746 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005747 repaired.
5748
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005749- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00005750 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005751 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
5752 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
5753 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
5754 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
5755 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
5756 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
5757 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
5758 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
5759
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00005760- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
5761 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
5762 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
5763 leading BMO character).
5764
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005765- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
5766 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
5767 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
5768
5769 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
5770 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
5771 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005772
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005773 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
5774 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
5775 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
5776 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
5777 for various simple to use conversions.
5778
5779 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
5780 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
5781
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005782 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5783 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
5784 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
5785 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
5786 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5787 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
5788 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5789 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
5790 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5791 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
5792 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5793 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
5794 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5795 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
5796 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005797
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005798- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
5799 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
5800 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005801 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005802 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005803
5804 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005805 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
5806 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
5807 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
5808 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
5809 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005810 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
5811 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005812
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005813 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
5814 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
5815 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005816 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005817
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00005818- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
5819 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
5820 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
5821 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
5822 floating arithmetic,
5823
5824 x = 9007199254740992.0
5825 print long(x)
5826
5827 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
5828 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
5829 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
5830 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
5831 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
5832 functions are of good quality).
5833
5834 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
5835 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
5836 algorithms to break.
5837
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00005838- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
5839 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
5840 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
5841 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
5842 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
5843 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
5844 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
5845 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
5846 order.
5847
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005848- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
5849 operation along the most common code paths.
5850
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005851- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
5852 the same as dict.has_key(x).
5853
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00005854- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
5855 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
5856 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
5857 {}.update(UserDict())
5858
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005859- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
5860 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
5861 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
5862 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
5863 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
5864 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
5865 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
5866 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
5867
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005868- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005869 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005870
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005871 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00005872 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
5873 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00005874 join() method of strings
5875 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005876 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
5877 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005878 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00005879 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005880
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00005881- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
5882 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
5883
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005884- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
5885 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
5886
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00005887- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
5888 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
5889 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
5890 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
5891
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005892- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
5893 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005894 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005895 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
5896 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00005897
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00005898- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
5899
5900
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005901Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005902-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005903
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005904- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005905 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005906 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
5907 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
5908
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00005909- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
5910 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
5911
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00005912- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
5913 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
5914 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
5915 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
5916
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00005917- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
5918 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
5919 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
5920
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00005921- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
5922
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00005923- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
5924
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00005925- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
5926 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
5927 that are still imported into string.py).
5928
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005929- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
5930
5931- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
5932 Now it does.
5933
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005934- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
5935
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005936- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
5937 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
5938 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
5939 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
5940 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005941 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
5942 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005943
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00005944- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
5945 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
5946 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
5947 'help(object)'.
5948
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005949Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005950-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005951
5952- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005953 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005954 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
5955 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
5956
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005957- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005958 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
5959 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005960
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005961C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005962-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005963
5964- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
5965 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005966
5967----
5968
5969**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**