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Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +00007What's New in Python 2.5 alpha 1?
8=================================
9
Anthony Baxter12b6f6c2005-03-29 13:36:16 +000010*Release date: XX-XXX-2006*
11
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000012Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Raymond Hettinger9f1a6792005-07-31 01:16:36 +000015- The implementation of set() and frozenset() was revised to use its
16 own internal data structure. Memory consumption is reduced by 1/3
17 and there are modest speed-ups as well. The API is unchanged.
18
Tim Petersde7990b2005-07-17 23:45:23 +000019- SF bug #1238681: freed pointer is used in longobject.c:long_pow().
20
Michael W. Hudson0edc7a02005-07-12 10:21:19 +000021- SF bug #1229429: PyObject_CallMethod failed to decrement some
22 reference counts in some error exit cases.
23
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +000024- SF bug #1185883: Python's small-object memory allocator took over
25 a block managed by the platform C library whenever a realloc specified
26 a small new size. However, there's no portable way to know then how
27 much of the address space following the pointer is valid, so no
28 portable way to copy data from the C-managed block into Python's
29 small-object space without risking a memory fault. Python's small-object
30 realloc now leaves such blocks under the control of the platform C
31 realloc.
32
Michael W. Hudsonb8963812005-07-05 15:21:58 +000033- SF bug #1232517: An overflow error was not detected properly when
34 attempting to convert a large float to an int in os.utime().
35
Raymond Hettinger3296e692005-06-29 23:29:56 +000036- SF bug #1224347: hex longs now print with lowercase letters just
37 like their int counterparts.
38
Michael W. Hudson188d4362005-06-20 16:52:57 +000039- SF bug #1163563: the original fix for bug #1010677 ("thread Module
40 Breaks PyGILState_Ensure()") broke badly in the case of multiple
41 interpreter states; back out that fix and do a better job (see
42 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2005-June/054258.html
43 for a longer write-up of the problem).
44
Michael W. Hudsondf888462005-06-03 14:41:55 +000045- SF patch #1180995: marshal now uses a binary format by default when
46 serializing floats.
47
Michael W. Hudsonda85a902005-06-01 11:34:22 +000048- SF patch #1181301: on platforms that appear to use IEEE 754 floats,
49 the routines that promise to produce IEEE 754 binary representations
50 of floats now simply copy bytes around.
51
Skip Montanarobbf12ba2005-05-20 03:07:06 +000052- bug #967182: disallow opening files with 'wU' or 'aU' as specified by PEP
53 278.
54
Brett Cannonc3647ac2005-04-26 03:45:26 +000055- patch #1109424: int, long, float, complex, and unicode now check for the
56 proper magic slot for type conversions when subclassed. Previously the
57 magic slot was ignored during conversion. Semantics now match the way
58 subclasses of str always behaved. int/long/float, conversion of an instance
59 to the base class has been moved the prroper nb_* magic slot and out of
60 PyNumber_*().
61 Thanks Walter Dörwald.
62
Barry Warsawc8d907c2005-04-19 23:43:40 +000063- Descriptors defined in C with a PyGetSetDef structure, where the setter is
64 NULL, now raise an AttributeError when attempting to set or delete the
65 attribute. Previously a TypeError was raised, but this was inconsistent
66 with the equivalent pure-Python implementation.
67
Michael W. Hudson774479c2005-04-18 08:46:17 +000068- It is now safe to call PyGILState_Release() before
69 PyEval_InitThreads() (note that if there is reason to believe there
70 are multiple threads around you still must call PyEval_InitThreads()
71 before using the Python API; this fix is for extension modules that
72 have no way of knowing if Python is multi-threaded yet).
73
Michael W. Hudsone3afc592005-04-07 10:11:19 +000074- Typing Ctrl-C whilst raw_input() was waiting in a build with threads
75 disabled caused a crash.
76
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +000077- Bug #1165306: instancemethod_new allowed the creation of a method
78 with im_class == im_self == NULL, which caused a crash when called.
79
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +000080- Move exception finalisation later in the shutdown process - this
Anthony Baxter12b6f6c2005-03-29 13:36:16 +000081 fixes the crash seen in bug #1165761
82
Raymond Hettinger96229b12005-03-11 06:49:40 +000083- Added two new builtins, any() and all().
84
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +000085- Defining a class with empty parentheses is now allowed
Brett Cannonf4189912005-04-09 02:30:16 +000086 (e.g., ``class C(): pass`` is no longer a syntax error).
87 Patch #1176012 added support to the 'parser' module and 'compiler' package
88 (thanks to logistix for that added support).
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +000089
Martin v. Löwis96d743e2005-03-03 23:00:26 +000090- Patch #1115086: Support PY_LONGLONG in structmember.
91
Raymond Hettingerb67cc802005-03-03 16:45:19 +000092- Bug #1155938: new style classes did not check that __init__() was
93 returning None.
94
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +000095- Patch #802188: Report characters after line continuation character
Martin v. Löwis4bf108d2005-03-03 11:45:45 +000096 ('\') with a specific error message.
97
Martin v. Löwisff232d72005-03-03 09:24:38 +000098- Bug #723201: Raise a TypeError for passing bad objects to 'L' format.
99
Michael W. Hudson8e1afab2005-02-17 14:55:21 +0000100- Bug #1124295: the __name__ attribute of file objects was
101 inadvertently made inaccessible in restricted mode.
102
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000103- Bug #1074011: closing sys.std{out,err} now causes a flush() and
Martin v. Löwis8e3ca8a2005-01-23 09:41:49 +0000104 an ferror() call.
105
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000106- min() and max() now support key= arguments with the same meaning as in
107 list.sort().
108
Raymond Hettingerc34f8672005-01-02 06:17:33 +0000109- The peephole optimizer now performs simple constant folding in expressions:
110 (2+3) --> (5).
111
Raymond Hettingera422c342005-01-11 03:03:27 +0000112- set and frozenset objects can now be marshalled. SF #1098985.
113
Michael W. Hudsonfaa76482005-01-31 17:09:25 +0000114- Bug #1077106: Poor argument checking could cause memory corruption
115 in calls to os.read().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000116
Jeremy Hyltonab630502005-02-04 18:44:06 +0000117- The parser did not complain about future statements in illegal
118 positions. It once again reports a syntax error if a future
119 statement occurs after anything other than a doc string.
120
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000121Extension Modules
122-----------------
123
Michael W. Hudson8137bea2005-07-27 20:24:40 +0000124- Patch #1231069: The fcntl.ioctl function now uses the 'I' code for
125 the request code argument, which results in more C-like behaviour
126 for large or negative values.
127
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000128- Bug #1234979: For the argument of thread.Lock.acquire, the Windows
Georg Brandlaf410b52005-07-08 22:26:13 +0000129 implemented treated all integer values except 1 as false.
130
Georg Brandl6b95f1d2005-06-03 19:47:00 +0000131- Bug #1194181: bz2.BZ2File didn't handle mode 'U' correctly.
132
Hye-Shik Chang5f937a72005-06-02 13:09:30 +0000133- Patch #1212117: os.stat().st_flags is now accessible as a attribute
134 if available on the platform.
135
Skip Montanaro5ff14922005-05-16 02:42:22 +0000136- Patch #1103951: Expose O_SHLOCK and O_EXLOCK in the posix module if
137 available on the platform.
138
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +0000139- Bug #1166660: The readline module could segfault if hook functions
140 were set in a different thread than that which called readline.
141
Raymond Hettinger4aec61e2005-03-18 21:20:23 +0000142- collections.deque objects now support a remove() method.
143
Raymond Hettinger984f9bb2005-03-09 16:38:48 +0000144- operator.itemgetter() and operator.attrgetter() now support retrieving
145 multiple fields. This provides direct support for sorting on multiple
146 keys (primary, secondary, etc).
147
Martin v. Löwisb60ae992005-03-08 09:10:29 +0000148- os.access now supports Unicode path names on non-Win32 systems.
149
Martin v. Löwisfd78a6f2005-03-04 14:37:01 +0000150- Patches #925152, #1118602: Avoid reading after the end of the buffer
151 in pyexpat.GetInputContext.
152
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000153- Patches #749830, #1144555: allow UNIX mmap size to default to current
Martin v. Löwis7fe60c02005-03-03 11:22:44 +0000154 file size.
155
Raymond Hettinger9c323f82005-02-28 19:39:44 +0000156- Added functional.partial(). See PEP309.
157
Martin v. Löwis9533e342005-02-27 20:33:25 +0000158- Patch #1093585: raise a ValueError for negative history items in readline.
159 {remove_history,replace_history}
160
Fred Drake9c131f22005-01-23 15:16:08 +0000161- The spwd module has been added, allowing access to the shadow password
162 database.
Martin v. Löwisc3001752005-01-23 09:27:24 +0000163
Martin v. Löwisfe33d0b2005-01-16 08:57:39 +0000164- stat_float_times is now True.
165
Raymond Hettingerb0900e62004-12-16 16:23:40 +0000166- array.array objects are now picklable.
167
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000168- the cPickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
169 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
170
Raymond Hettingerb2594052004-12-05 09:25:51 +0000171- itertools.islice() now accepts None for the start and step arguments.
172 This allows islice() to work more readily with slices:
173 islice(s.start, s.stop, s.step)
174
Skip Montanaro0af3ade2005-01-13 04:12:31 +0000175- datetime.datetime() now has a strptime class method which can be used to
176 create datetime object using a string and format.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000177
178Library
179-------
180
Guido van Rossum755149f2005-07-27 00:00:44 +0000181- Fix a problem in Tkinter introduced by SF patch #869468: delete bogus
182 __hasattr__ and __delattr__ methods on class Tk that were breaking
183 Tkdnd.
184
Georg Brandl5dbda752005-07-17 20:27:41 +0000185- Bug #1015140: disambiguated the term "article id" in nntplib docs and
186 docstrings to either "article number" or "message id".
187
Georg Brandla4a8b822005-07-15 09:13:21 +0000188- Bug #1238170: threading.Thread.__init__ no longer has "kwargs={}" as a
189 parameter, but uses the usual "kwargs=None".
190
Raymond Hettinger8bfa8932005-07-15 06:53:35 +0000191- textwrap now processes text chucks at O(n) speed instead of O(n**2).
192 Patch #1209527 (Contributed by Connelly).
193
Georg Brandl5c5fe2f2005-07-14 06:40:47 +0000194- urllib2 has now an attribute 'httpresponses' mapping from HTTP status code
195 to W3C name (404 -> 'Not Found'). RFE #1216944.
196
Georg Brandl9e43acf2005-07-04 17:16:07 +0000197- Bug #1177468: Don't cache the /dev/urandom file descriptor for os.urandom,
198 as this can cause problems with apps closing all file descriptors.
199
Georg Brandl5284b532005-06-26 22:54:58 +0000200- Bug #839151: Fix an attempt to access sys.argv in the warnings module
201 though this can be missing in embedded interpreters
202
Georg Brandl2f210b62005-06-26 22:09:06 +0000203- Bug #1155638: Fix a bug which affected HTTP 0.9 responses in httplib.
204
Georg Brandlfbff1bc2005-06-26 21:36:25 +0000205- Bug #1100201: Cross-site scripting was possible on BaseHTTPServer via
206 error messages.
207
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000208- Bug #1108948: Cookie.py produced invalid JavaScript code.
209
Raymond Hettingerda99d1c2005-06-21 07:43:58 +0000210- The tokenize module now detects and reports indentation errors.
211 Bug #1224621.
212
Raymond Hettinger68c04532005-06-10 11:05:19 +0000213- The tokenize module has a new untokenize() function to support a full
214 roundtrip from lexed tokens back to Python sourcecode. In addition,
215 the generate_tokens() function now accepts a callable argument that
216 terminates by raising StopIteration.
217
Georg Brandl9166e1a2005-06-04 09:20:03 +0000218- Bug #1196315: fix weakref.WeakValueDictionary constructor.
219
Georg Brandl268e61c2005-06-03 14:28:50 +0000220- Bug #1213894: os.path.realpath didn't resolve symlinks that were the first
221 component of the path.
222
Skip Montanaro174dd222005-05-14 20:54:16 +0000223- Patch #1120353: The xmlrpclib module provides better, more transparent,
224 support for datetime.{datetime,date,time} objects. With use_datetime set
225 to True, applications shouldn't have to fiddle with the DateTime wrapper
226 class at all.
227
Martin v. Löwis55f1bb82005-03-21 20:56:35 +0000228- distutils.commands.upload was added to support uploading distribution
229 files to PyPI.
230
Walter Dörwalda6e8a4a2005-03-31 13:57:38 +0000231- distutils.commands.register now encodes the data as UTF-8 before posting
232 them to PyPI.
233
Raymond Hettinger267b8682005-03-27 10:47:39 +0000234- decimal operator and comparison methods now return NotImplemented
235 instead of raising a TypeError when interacting with other types. This
236 allows other classes to implement __radd__ style methods and have them
237 work as expected.
238
Raymond Hettingerbea3f6f2005-03-15 04:59:17 +0000239- Bug #1163325: Decimal infinities failed to hash. Attempting to
240 hash a NaN raised an InvalidOperation instead of a TypeError.
241
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000242- Patch #918101: Add tarfile open mode r|* for auto-detection of the
Martin v. Löwis78be7df2005-03-05 12:47:42 +0000243 stream compression; add, for symmetry reasons, r:* as a synonym of r.
244
Martin v. Löwis00a73e72005-03-04 19:40:34 +0000245- Patch #1043890: Add extractall method to tarfile.
246
Martin v. Löwisc72dd382005-03-04 13:50:17 +0000247- Patch #1075887: Don't require MSVC in distutils if there is nothing
248 to build.
249
Martin v. Löwis637431b2005-03-03 23:12:42 +0000250- Patch #1103407: Properly deal with tarfile iterators when untarring
251 symbolic links on Windows.
252
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000253- Patch #645894: Use getrusage for computing the time consumption in
Martin v. Löwisa4dac402005-03-03 11:39:45 +0000254 profile.py if available.
255
Martin v. Löwisdf37c8c2005-03-03 11:08:03 +0000256- Patch #1046831: Use get_python_version where appropriate in sysconfig.py.
257
Martin v. Löwisc5574e82005-03-03 10:57:37 +0000258- Patch #1117454: Remove code to special-case cookies without values
259 in LWPCookieJar.
260
Martin v. Löwis4ea3ead2005-03-03 10:48:12 +0000261- Patch #1117339: Add cookielib special name tests.
262
Martin v. Löwise869eb12005-03-03 09:46:07 +0000263- Patch #1112812: Make bsddb/__init__.py more friendly for modulefinder.
264
Martin v. Löwisf2a8d632005-03-03 08:35:22 +0000265- Patch #1110248: SYNC_FLUSH the zlib buffer for GZipFile.flush.
266
Martin v. Löwisdf241532005-03-03 08:17:42 +0000267- Patch #1107973: Allow to iterate over the lines of a tarfile.ExFileObject.
268
Martin v. Löwis8ed338a2005-03-03 08:12:27 +0000269- Patch #1104111: Alter setup.py --help and --help-commands.
270
Martin v. Löwis4afe1542005-03-01 08:09:28 +0000271- Patch #1121234: Properly cleanup _exit and tkerror commands.
272
Martin v. Löwisc2a0ac22005-02-24 20:22:10 +0000273- Patch #1049151: xdrlib now unpacks booleans as True or False.
274
Raymond Hettingerbab41432005-02-05 01:31:19 +0000275- Fixed bug in a NameError bug in cookielib. Patch #1116583.
276
Guido van Rossumd0641422005-02-03 15:01:24 +0000277- Applied a security fix to SimpleXMLRPCserver (PSF-2005-001). This
278 disables recursive traversal through instance attributes, which can
279 be exploited in various ways.
280
Martin v. Löwis1d11de62005-01-29 13:29:23 +0000281- Bug #1110478: Revert os.environ.update to do putenv again.
282
Thomas Hellerd6c6e222005-01-20 19:20:16 +0000283- Bug #1103844: fix distutils.install.dump_dirs() with negated options.
284
Martin v. Löwis22b457e2005-01-16 08:40:58 +0000285- os.{SEEK_SET, SEEK_CUR, SEEK_END} have been added for convenience.
286
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000287- Enhancements to the csv module:
288
289 + Dialects are now validated by the underlying C code, better
Georg Brandl7eb4b7d2005-07-22 21:49:32 +0000290 reflecting its capabilities, and improving its compliance with
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000291 PEP 305.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000292 + Dialect parameter parsing has been re-implemented to improve error
293 reporting.
294 + quotechar=None and quoting=QUOTE_NONE now work the way PEP 305
295 dictates.
296 + the parser now removes the escapechar prefix from escaped characters.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000297 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the writer now tests for numeric
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000298 types, rather than any object than can be represented as a numeric.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000299 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the reader now casts unquoted fields
300 to floats.
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000301 + reader now allows \r characters to be quoted (previously it only allowed
302 \n to be quoted).
Andrew McNamarac89f2842005-01-12 07:44:42 +0000303 + writer doublequote handling improved.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000304 + Dialect classes passed to the module are no longer instantiated by
305 the module before being parsed (the former validation scheme required
306 this, but the mechanism was unreliable).
307 + The dialect registry now contains instances of the internal
308 C-coded dialect type, rather than references to python objects.
309 + the internal c-coded dialect type is now immutable.
310 + register_dialect now accepts the same keyword dialect specifications
311 as the reader and writer, allowing the user to register dialects
312 without first creating a dialect class.
313 + a configurable limit to the size of parsed fields has been added -
314 previously, an unmatched quote character could result in the entire
315 file being read into the field buffer before an error was reported.
Andrew McNamara31d88962005-01-12 03:45:10 +0000316 + A new module method csv.field_size_limit() has been added that sets
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000317 the parser field size limit (returning the former limit). The initial
318 limit is 128kB.
Andrew McNamara7f2053e2005-01-12 11:17:16 +0000319 + A line_num attribute has been added to the reader object, which tracks
320 the number of lines read from the source iterator. This is not
321 the same as the number of records returned, as records can span
322 multiple lines.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000323 + reader and writer objects were not being registered with the cyclic-GC.
324 This has been fixed.
325
Brett Cannone6539c42005-01-08 02:43:53 +0000326- _DummyThread objects in the threading module now delete self.__block that is
327 inherited from _Thread since it uses up a lock allocated by 'thread'. The
328 lock primitives tend to be limited in number and thus should not be wasted on
329 a _DummyThread object. Fixes bug #1089632.
330
Raymond Hettinger97db05d2005-01-07 08:15:41 +0000331- The imghdr module now detects Exif files.
332
Raymond Hettinger6065d322004-12-20 23:51:53 +0000333- StringIO.truncate() now correctly adjusts the size attribute.
334 (Bug #951915).
335
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000336- locale.py now uses an updated locale alias table (built using
337 Tools/i18n/makelocalealias.py, a tool to parse the X11 locale
338 alias file); the encoding lookup was enhanced to use Python's
339 encoding alias table
340
Raymond Hettinger3557f422004-12-07 12:02:02 +0000341- moved deprecated modules to Lib/lib-old: whrandom, tzparse, statcache.
342
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000343- the pickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
344 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
345
Brett Cannon84667c02004-12-07 03:25:18 +0000346- optparse now optionally imports gettext. This allows its use in setup.py.
347
Raymond Hettinger3489cad2004-12-05 05:20:42 +0000348- the pickle module no longer uses the deprecated bin parameter.
349
Raymond Hettinger1bc82f82004-12-05 03:58:17 +0000350- the shelve module no longer uses the deprecated binary parameter.
351
Raymond Hettinger6c92d762004-12-05 03:28:00 +0000352- the pstats module no longer uses the deprecated ignore() method.
353
Raymond Hettingerf3fa9462004-12-05 01:58:09 +0000354- the filecmp module no longer uses the deprecated use_statcache argument.
355
Raymond Hettinger664347b2004-12-04 21:21:53 +0000356- unittest.TestCase.run() and unittest.TestSuite.run() can now be successfully
357 extended or overridden by subclasses. Formerly, the subclassed method would
358 be ignored by the rest of the module. (Bug #1078905).
359
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000360- heapq.nsmallest() and heapq.nlargest() now support key= arguments with
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000361 the same meaning as in list.sort().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000362
Walter Dörwald36733692004-12-22 12:50:50 +0000363- Bug #1076985: ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` now calls ``read()`` only
364 once when a size argument is given. This prevents a buffer overflow in the
365 tokenizer with very long source lines.
366
Andrew M. Kuchling3b585b32004-12-28 20:10:48 +0000367- Bug #1083110: ``zlib.decompress.flush()`` would segfault if called immediately
368 after creating the object, without any intervening ``.decompress()`` calls.
369
Skip Montanaro05885812005-01-16 20:48:27 +0000370- The reconvert.quote function can now emit triple-quoted strings. The
371 reconvert module now has some simple documentation.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000372
Walter Dörwaldaf3b39a2005-02-18 13:22:43 +0000373- ``UserString.MutableString`` now supports negative indices in
374 ``__setitem__`` and ``__delitem__``
375
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000376- Bug #1149508: ``textwrap`` now handles hyphenated numbers (eg. "2004-03-05")
377 correctly.
378
Walter Dörwaldbc8e6422005-04-21 21:32:03 +0000379- Partial fixes for SF bugs #1163244 and #1175396: If a chunk read by
380 ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` has a trailing "\r", read one more
381 character even if the user has passed a size parameter to get a proper
382 line ending. Remove the special handling of a "\r\n" that has been split
383 between two lines.
384
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000385
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000386Build
387-----
388
Trent Mick8321b422005-07-26 02:29:21 +0000389- Upgrade Windows build to zlib 1.2.3 which eliminates a potential security
390 vulnerability in zlib 1.2.1 and 1.2.2.
391
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000392- EXTRA_CFLAGS has been introduced as an environment variable to hold compiler
393 flags that change binary compatibility. Changes were also made to
394 distutils.sysconfig to also use the environment variable when used during
Martin v. Löwisd7c795e2005-04-25 07:14:03 +0000395 compilation of the interpreter and of C extensions through distutils.
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000396
Bob Ippolitoed233462005-03-29 13:47:59 +0000397- SF patch 1171735: Darwin 8's headers are anal about POSIX compliance,
398 and linking has changed (prebinding is now deprecated, and libcc_dynamic
399 no longer exists). This configure patch makes things right.
400
Martin v. Löwise2713be2005-03-08 15:03:08 +0000401- Bug #1158607: Build with --disable-unicode again.
402
Brett Cannon46d96232005-02-16 00:07:19 +0000403- spwdmodule.c is built only if either HAVE_GETSPNAM or HAVE_HAVE_GETSPENT is
404 defined. Discovered as a result of not being able to build on OS X.
405
Brett Cannon516592f2004-12-07 00:42:59 +0000406- setup.py now uses the directories specified in LDFLAGS using the -L option
407 and in CPPFLAGS using the -I option for adding library and include
408 directories, respectively, for compiling extension modules against. This has
409 led to the core being compiled using the values in CPPFLAGS. It also removes
410 the need for the special-casing of both DarwinPorts and Fink for darwin since
411 the proper directories can be specified in LDFLAGS (``-L/sw/lib`` for Fink,
412 ``-L/opt/local/lib`` for DarwinPorts) and CPPFLAGS (``-I/sw/include`` for
413 Fink, ``-I/opt/local/include`` for DarwinPorts).
414
Brett Cannon43802422005-02-10 20:48:03 +0000415- Test in configure.in that checks for tzset no longer dependent on tm->tm_zone
416 to exist in the struct (not required by either ISO C nor the UNIX 2 spec).
417 Tests for sanity in tzname when HAVE_TZNAME defined were also defined.
418 Closes bug #1096244. Thanks Gregory Bond.
419
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000420
421C API
422-----
423
Raymond Hettinger66517482004-12-03 11:45:13 +0000424- Removed PyRange_New().
425
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000426
427Tests
428-----
429
Martin v. Löwis4d394df2005-01-23 09:19:22 +0000430- In test_os, st_?time is now truncated before comparing it with ST_?TIME.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000431
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000432
433Documentation
434-------------
435
Georg Brandlf13c4ba2005-08-02 10:28:08 +0000436- Bug #1243192: re.UNICODE and re.LOCALE affect \d, \D, \s and \S.
437
Georg Brandl150db732005-07-18 08:53:17 +0000438- Bug #755617: Document the effects of os.chown() on Windows.
439
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000440- Patch #1180012: The documentation for modulefinder is now in the library reference.
441
442- Patch #1213031: Document that os.chown() accepts argument values of -1.
443
444- Bug #1190563: Document os.waitpid() return value with WNOHANG flag.
445
446- Bug #1175022: Correct the example code for property().
447
Georg Brandl40c71652005-06-25 21:08:46 +0000448- Document the IterableUserDict class in the UserDict module.
449 Closes bug #1166582.
450
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000451- Remove all latent references for "Macintosh" that referred to semantics for
452 Mac OS 9 and change to reflect the state for OS X.
453 Closes patch #1095802. Thanks Jack Jansen.
454
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000455Mac
456---
457
458
Hye-Shik Chang4e422812005-07-17 02:36:59 +0000459New platforms
460-------------
461
462- FreeBSD 7 support is added.
463
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000464
465Tools/Demos
466-----------
467
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000468- Bug #1072853: pindent.py used an uninitialized variable.
469
Martin v. Löwisab9ec162005-04-09 10:53:34 +0000470- Patch #1177597: Correct Complex.__init__.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000471
472
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000473What's New in Python 2.4 final?
474===============================
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000475
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000476*Release date: 30-NOV-2004*
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000477
478Core and builtins
479-----------------
480
481- Bug 875692: Improve signal handling, especially when using threads, by
482 forcing an early re-execution of PyEval_EvalFrame() "periodic" code when
483 things_to_do is not cleared by Py_MakePendingCalls().
484
485
Anthony Baxter4277ed82004-11-30 11:53:10 +0000486What's New in Python 2.4 (release candidate 1)
487==============================================
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000488
Anthony Baxter5cc727a2004-11-18 12:32:27 +0000489*Release date: 18-NOV-2004*
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000490
491Core and builtins
492-----------------
493
Tim Petersfb1ffb02004-11-08 04:30:21 +0000494- Bug 1061968: Fixes in 2.4a3 to address thread bug 1010677 reintroduced
495 the years-old thread shutdown race bug 225673. Numeric history lesson
496 aside, all bugs in all three reports are fixed now.
497
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000498
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000499Library
500-------
501
502- Bug 1052242: If exceptions are raised by an atexit handler function an
503 attempt is made to execute the remaining handlers. The last exception
504 raised is re-raised.
505
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000506- ``doctest``'s new support for adding ``pdb.set_trace()`` calls to
507 doctests was broken in a dramatic but shallow way. Fixed.
508
Tim Petersbbc0d442004-11-13 16:18:32 +0000509- Bug 1065388: ``calendar``'s ``day_name``, ``day_abbr``, ``month_name``,
510 and ``month_abbr`` attributes emulate sequences of locale-correct
511 spellings of month and day names. Because the locale can change at
512 any time, the correct spelling is recomputed whenever one of these is
513 indexed. In the worst case, the index may be a slice object, so these
514 recomputed every day or month name each time they were indexed. This is
515 much slower than necessary in the usual case, when the index is just an
516 integer. In that case, only the single spelling needed is recomputed
517 now; and, when the index is a slice object, only the spellings needed
518 by the slice are recomputed now.
519
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000520- Patch 1061679: Added ``__all__`` to pickletools.py.
Tim Peters90cf2122004-11-06 23:45:48 +0000521
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000522Build
523-----
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000524
Brett Cannon7d28e962004-11-07 01:19:00 +0000525- Bug 1034277 / Patch 1035255: Remove compilation of core against CoreServices
526 and CoreFoundation on OS X. Involved removing PyMac_GetAppletScriptFile()
527 which has no known users. Thanks Bob Ippolito.
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000528
529C API
530-----
531
Raymond Hettinger39e92ea2004-11-18 09:41:45 +0000532- The PyRange_New() function is deprecated.
533
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000534
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000535What's New in Python 2.4 beta 2?
536================================
537
Anthony Baxter9f41f3a2004-11-03 06:21:37 +0000538*Release date: 03-NOV-2004*
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000539
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000540License
541-------
542
543The Python Software Foundation changed the license under which Python
544is released, to remove Python version numbers. There were no other
545changes to the license. So, for example, wherever the license for
546Python 2.3 said "Python 2.3", the new license says "Python". The
547intent is to make it possible to refer to the PSF license in a more
548durable way. For example, some people say they're confused by that
549the Open Source Initiative's entry for the Python Software Foundation
550License::
551
552 http://www.opensource.org/licenses/PythonSoftFoundation.php
553
554says "Python 2.1.1" all over it, wondering whether it applies only
555to Python 2.1.1.
556
557The official name of the new license is the Python Software Foundation
558License Version 2.
559
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000560Core and builtins
561-----------------
562
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +0000563- Bug #1055820 Cyclic garbage collection was not protecting against that
564 calling a live weakref to a piece of cyclic trash could resurrect an
565 insane mutation of the trash if any Python code ran during gc (via
566 running a dead object's __del__ method, running another callback on a
567 weakref to a dead object, or via any Python code run in any other thread
568 that managed to obtain the GIL while a __del__ or callback was running
569 in the thread doing gc). The most likely symptom was "impossible"
570 ``AttributeEror`` exceptions, appearing seemingly at random, on weakly
571 referenced objects. The cure was to clear all weakrefs to unreachable
572 objects before allowing any callbacks to run.
573
Raymond Hettinger561fbf12004-10-26 01:52:37 +0000574- Bug #1054139 _PyString_Resize() now invalidates its cached hash value.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000575
576Extension Modules
577-----------------
578
Raymond Hettinger9047c8f2004-10-24 00:10:06 +0000579- Bug #1048870: the compiler now generates distinct code objects for
580 functions with identical bodies. This was producing confusing
581 traceback messages which pointed to the function where the code
582 object was first defined rather than the function being executed.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000583
584Library
585-------
586
Barry Warsaw8c72eae2004-11-01 03:52:43 +0000587- Patch #1056967 changes the semantics of Template.safe_substitute() so that
588 no ValueError is raised on an 'invalid' match group. Now the delimiter is
589 returned.
590
Raymond Hettinger2ef7e6c2004-10-24 00:32:24 +0000591- Bug #1052503 pdb.runcall() was not passing along keyword arguments.
592
Raymond Hettingerc64aab82004-10-20 08:21:57 +0000593- Bug #902037: XML.sax.saxutils.prepare_input_source() now combines relative
594 paths with a base path before checking os.path.isfile().
595
Raymond Hettingere54e7262004-10-20 07:17:16 +0000596- The whichdb module can now be run from the command line.
597
Brett Cannon8abcc5d2004-10-18 01:37:57 +0000598- Bug #1045381: time.strptime() can now infer the date using %U or %W (week of
599 the year) when the day of the week and year are also specified.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000600
Andrew M. Kuchling0d19bae2004-10-19 19:54:41 +0000601- Bug #1048816: fix bug in Ctrl-K at start of line in curses.textpad.Textbox
602
Andrew M. Kuchling66e80ba2004-10-20 11:56:15 +0000603- Bug #1017553: fix bug in tarfile.filemode()
604
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000605- Patch #737473: fix bug that old source code is shown in tracebacks even if
Hye-Shik Chang182ac852004-10-26 09:16:42 +0000606 the source code is updated and reloaded.
607
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000608Build
609-----
610
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000611- Patch #1044395: --enable-shared is allowed in FreeBSD also.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000612
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000613What's New in Python 2.4 beta 1?
614================================
615
Anthony Baxter6a587c12004-10-15 08:07:21 +0000616*Release date: 15-OCT-2004*
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000617
618Core and builtins
619-----------------
620
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000621- Patch #975056: Restartable signals were not correctly disabled on
Anthony Baxtere4f8a482004-10-13 14:55:56 +0000622 BSD systems. Consistently use PyOS_setsig() instead of signal().
623
Tim Peters263091e2004-10-10 01:58:44 +0000624- The internal portable implementation of thread-local storage (TLS), used
625 by the ``PyGILState_Ensure()``/``PyGILState_Release()`` API, was not
626 thread-correct. This could lead to a variety of problems, up to and
627 including segfaults. See bug 1041645 for an example.
628
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000629- Added a command line option, -m module, which searches sys.path for the
630 module and then runs it. (Contributed by Nick Coghlan.)
631
Raymond Hettinger2c31a052004-09-22 18:44:21 +0000632- The bytecode optimizer now folds tuples of constants into a single
633 constant.
634
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000635- SF bug #513866: Float/long comparison anomaly. Prior to 2.4b1, when
636 an integer was compared to a float, the integer was coerced to a float.
637 That could yield spurious overflow errors (if the integer was very
638 large), and to anomalies such as
639 ``long(1e200)+1 == 1e200 == long(1e200)-1``. Coercion to float is no
640 longer performed, and cases like ``long(1e200)-1 < 1e200``,
641 ``long(1e200)+1 > 1e200`` and ``(1 << 20000) > 1e200`` are computed
642 correctly now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000643
644Extension modules
645-----------------
646
Tim Peterscf8997f2004-10-01 02:13:16 +0000647- ``collections.deque`` objects didn't play quite right with garbage
648 collection, which could lead to a segfault in a release build, or
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000649 an assert failure in a debug build. Also, added overflow checks,
650 better detection of mutation during iteration, and shielded deque
651 comparisons from unusual subclass overrides of the __iter__() method.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000652
653Library
654-------
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000655
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000656- Patch 1046644: distutils build_ext grew two new options - --swig for
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000657 specifying the swig executable to use, and --swig-opts to specify
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000658 options to pass to swig. --swig-opts="-c++" is the new way to spell
659 --swig-cpp.
660
Anthony Baxter22dcf662004-10-13 15:54:17 +0000661- Patch 983206: distutils now obeys environment variable LDSHARED, if
662 it is set.
663
Andrew M. Kuchling518d3932004-10-12 15:32:10 +0000664- Added Peter Astrand's subprocess.py module. See PEP 324 for details.
Fredrik Lundh5b3687d2004-10-12 15:26:28 +0000665
Brett Cannon4f35c712004-10-06 02:11:37 +0000666- time.strptime() now properly escapes timezones and all other locale-specific
667 strings for regex-specific symbols. Was breaking under Japanese Windows when
668 the timezone was specified as "Tokyo (standard time)".
669 Closes bug #1039270.
670
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000671- Updates for the email package:
Brett Cannon06a30b02004-10-22 06:22:54 +0000672
Barry Warsaw418de1f2004-10-11 14:32:47 +0000673 + email.Utils.formatdate() grew a 'usegmt' argument for HTTP support.
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000674 + All deprecated APIs that in email 2.x issued warnings have been removed:
675 _encoder argument to the MIMEText constructor, Message.add_payload(),
676 Utils.dump_address_pair(), Utils.decode(), Utils.encode()
677 + New deprecations: Generator.__call__(), Message.get_type(),
678 Message.get_main_type(), Message.get_subtype(), the 'strict' argument to
679 the Parser constructor. These will be removed in email 3.1.
680 + Support for Python earlier than 2.3 has been removed (see PEP 291).
681 + All defect classes have been renamed to end in 'Defect'.
682 + Some FeedParser fixes; also a MultipartInvariantViolationDefect will be
683 added to messages that claim to be multipart but really aren't.
684 + Updates to documentation.
685
Raymond Hettinger596ba4d2004-09-24 03:41:05 +0000686- re's findall() and finditer() functions now take an optional flags argument
687 just like the compile(), search(), and match() functions. Also, documented
688 the previously existing start and stop parameters for the findall() and
689 finditer() methods of regular expression objects.
690
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000691- rfc822 Messages now support iterating over the headers.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000692
Martin v. Löwisf3c56112004-09-18 09:08:52 +0000693- The (undocumented) tarfile.Tarfile.membernames has been removed;
694 applications should use the getmember function.
695
Martin v. Löwis39a31782004-09-18 09:03:49 +0000696- httplib now offers symbolic constants for the HTTP status codes.
697
Tim Peters528ca532004-09-16 01:30:50 +0000698- SF bug #1028306: Trying to compare a ``datetime.date`` to a
699 ``datetime.datetime`` mistakenly compared only the year, month and day.
700 Now it acts like a mixed-type comparison: ``False`` for ``==``,
701 ``True`` for ``!=``, and raises ``TypeError`` for other comparison
702 operators. Because datetime is a subclass of date, comparing only the
703 base class (date) members can still be done, if that's desired, by
704 forcing using of the approprate date method; e.g.,
705 ``a_date.__eq__(a_datetime)`` is true if and only if the year, month
706 and day members of ``a_date`` and ``a_datetime`` are equal.
707
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000708- bdist_rpm now supports command line options --force-arch,
709 {pre,post}-install, {pre,post}-uninstall, and
Martin v. Löwis23c48a12004-09-10 06:32:54 +0000710 {prep,build,install,clean,verify}-script.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000711
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000712- SF patch #998993: The UTF-8 and the UTF-16 stateful decoders now support
713 decoding incomplete input (when the input stream is temporarily exhausted).
714 ``codecs.StreamReader`` now implements buffering, which enables proper
715 readline support for the UTF-16 decoders. ``codecs.StreamReader.read()``
716 has a new argument ``chars`` which specifies the number of characters to
717 return. ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` and
718 ``codecs.StreamReader.readlines()`` have a new argument ``keepends``.
719 Trailing "\n"s will be stripped from the lines if ``keepends`` is false.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000720
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000721- The documentation for doctest is greatly expanded, and now covers all
722 the new public features (of which there are many).
723
Walter Dörwald5011d0c2004-09-13 08:53:15 +0000724- ``doctest.master`` was put back in, and ``doctest.testmod()`` once again
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000725 updates it. This isn't good, because every ``testmod()`` call
726 contributes to bloating the "hidden" state of ``doctest.master``, but
727 some old code apparently relies on it. For now, all we can do is
728 encourage people to stitch doctests together via doctest's unittest
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000729 integration features instead.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000730
Skip Montanaro82d0eec2004-09-14 17:58:31 +0000731- httplib now handles ipv6 address/port pairs.
732
David Goodger68a1abd2004-10-03 15:40:25 +0000733- SF bug #1017864: ConfigParser now correctly handles default keys,
734 processing them with ``ConfigParser.optionxform`` when supplied,
735 consistent with the handling of config file entries and runtime-set
736 options.
737
David Goodger1cbf2062004-10-03 15:55:09 +0000738- SF bug #997050: Document, test, & check for non-string values in
739 ConfigParser. Moved the new string-only restriction added in
740 rev. 1.65 to the SafeConfigParser class, leaving existing
741 ConfigParser & RawConfigParser behavior alone, and documented the
742 conditions under which non-string values work.
743
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000744Build
745-----
746
Brett Cannonbfef8692004-09-28 04:08:11 +0000747- Building on darwin now includes /opt/local/include and /opt/local/lib for
748 building extension modules. This is so as to include software installed as
749 a DarwinPorts port <http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/>
750
Tim Peters862f0592004-09-23 19:11:32 +0000751- pyport.h now defines a Py_IS_NAN macro. It works as-is when the
752 platform C computes true for ``x != x`` if and only if X is a NaN.
753 Other platforms can override the default definition with a platform-
754 specific spelling in that platform's pyconfig.h. You can also override
755 pyport.h's default Py_IS_INFINITY definition now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000756
757C API
758-----
759
Tim Peters7f468f22004-10-11 02:40:51 +0000760- SF patch 1044089: New function ``PyEval_ThreadsInitialized()`` returns
761 non-zero if PyEval_InitThreads() has been called.
762
763- The undocumented and unused extern int ``_PyThread_Started`` was removed.
764
Tim Peters84705582004-10-10 02:47:33 +0000765- The C API calls ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
766 are two of the very few advertised as being safe to call without holding
767 the GIL. However, this wasn't true in a debug build, as bug 1041645
768 demonstrated. In a debug build, Python redirects the ``PyMem`` family
769 of calls to Python's small-object allocator, to get the benefit of
770 its extra debugging capabilities. But Python's small-object allocator
771 isn't threadsafe, relying on the GIL to avoid the expense of doing its
772 own locking. ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
773 call the platform ``malloc()`` directly now, regardless of build type.
774
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000775- PyLong_AsUnsignedLong[Mask] now support int objects as well.
776
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000777- SF patch #998993: ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF8Stateful`` and
778 ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF16Stateful`` have been added, which implement stateful
779 decoding.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000780
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000781Tests
782-----
783
784- test__locale ported to unittest
785
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000786Mac
787---
788
Just van Rossumdd3c8372004-10-03 16:27:09 +0000789- ``plistlib`` now supports non-dict root objects. There is also a new
790 interface for reading and writing plist files: ``readPlist(pathOrFile)``
791 and ``writePlist(rootObject, pathOrFile)``
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000792
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000793Tools/Demos
794-----------
795
Tim Peters130e37f2004-10-03 19:03:19 +0000796- The text file comparison scripts ``ndiff.py`` and ``diff.py`` now
797 read the input files in universal-newline mode. This spares them
798 from consuming a great deal of time to deduce the useless result that,
799 e.g., a file with Windows line ends and a file with Linux line ends
800 have no lines in common.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000801
802
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000803What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
804=================================
805
Anthony Baxtere13943a2004-09-02 16:37:15 +0000806*Release date: 02-SEP-2004*
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000807
808Core and builtins
809-----------------
810
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000811- SF patch #1007189: ``from ... import ...`` statements now allow the name
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +0000812 list to be surrounded by parentheses.
813
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000814- Some speedups for long arithmetic, thanks to Trevor Perrin. Gradeschool
815 multiplication was sped a little by optimizing the C code. Gradeschool
816 squaring was sped by about a factor of 2, by exploiting that about half
817 the digit products are duplicates in a square. Because exponentiation
818 uses squaring often, this also speeds long power. For example, the time
819 to compute 17**1000000 dropped from about 14 seconds to 9 on my box due
820 to this much. The cutoff for Karatsuba multiplication was raised,
821 since gradeschool multiplication got quicker, and the cutoff was
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000822 aggressively small regardless. The exponentiation algorithm was switched
823 from right-to-left to left-to-right, which is more efficient for small
824 bases. In addition, if the exponent is large, the algorithm now does
825 5 bits (instead of 1 bit) at a time. That cut the time to compute
826 17**1000000 on my box in half again, down to about 4.5 seconds.
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000827
Tim Petersc8854432004-08-25 02:14:08 +0000828- OverflowWarning is no longer generated. PEP 237 scheduled this to
829 occur in Python 2.3, but since OverflowWarning was disabled by default,
830 nobody realized it was still being generated. On the chance that user
831 code is still using them, the Python builtin OverflowWarning, and
832 corresponding C API PyExc_OverflowWarning, will exist until Python 2.5.
833
Martin v. Löwis336e85f2004-08-19 11:31:58 +0000834- Py_InitializeEx has been added.
835
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +0000836- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
837 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
838
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +0000839- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
840 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
841 modified the list.
842
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +0000843- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
844 functions is now writable.
845
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +0000846- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
847 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
848 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
849 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
850
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000851- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
852 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
853 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
854 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
855 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +0000856
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +0000857- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
858 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
859
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000860Extension modules
861-----------------
862
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000863- difflib now supports HTML side-by-side diff.
864
Martin v. Löwisdc3883f2004-08-29 15:46:35 +0000865- os.urandom has been added for systems that support sources of random
866 data.
867
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000868- Patch 1012740: truncate() on a writeable cStringIO now resets the
869 position to the end of the stream. This is consistent with the original
870 StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was
871 supposed to have been truncated away.
872
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +0000873- Added socket.socketpair().
874
Dave Cole3203efb2004-08-26 00:37:31 +0000875- Added CurrentByteIndex, CurrentColumnNumber, CurrentLineNumber
876 members to xml.parsers.expat.XMLParser object.
877
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000878- The mpz, rotor, and xreadlines modules, all deprecated in earlier
Andrew M. Kuchling00873432004-08-31 13:50:43 +0000879 versions of Python, have now been removed.
880
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000881Library
882-------
883
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000884- Patch #934356: if a module defines __all__, believe that rather than using
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000885 heuristics for filtering out imported names.
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000886
Johannes Gijsbersae882f72004-08-30 10:19:56 +0000887- Patch #941486: added os.path.lexists(), which returns True for broken
888 symlinks, unlike os.path.exists().
889
Raymond Hettinger356a4592004-08-30 06:14:31 +0000890- the random module now uses os.urandom() for seeding if it is available.
891 Added a new generator based on os.urandom().
892
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000893- difflib and diff.py can now generate HTML.
894
Martin v. Löwiscae9e672004-08-25 13:04:53 +0000895- bdist_rpm now includes version and release in the BuildRoot, and
896 replaces - by ``_`` in version and release.
Martin v. Löwiscf525242004-08-25 13:00:34 +0000897
Martin v. Löwis9f5c0c42004-08-25 11:37:43 +0000898- distutils build/build_scripts now has an -e option to specify the
899 path to the Python interpreter for installed scripts.
900
Barry Warsaw8bee7612004-08-25 02:22:30 +0000901- PEP 292 classes Template and SafeTemplate are added to the string module.
902
Martin v. Löwis75b9da42004-08-18 13:57:44 +0000903- tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
904
Martin v. Löwisdeacce22004-08-18 12:46:26 +0000905- HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
906
Johannes Gijsbersc473c992004-08-18 12:40:31 +0000907- Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
908 Percivall.
909
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +0000910- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
911 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
912
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000913- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
914 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
915 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000916 than creating a new one.
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000917
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000918- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
919 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
920 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
921 and exponent.
922
923- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
924
925- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
Georg Brandl08c02db2005-07-22 18:39:19 +0000926 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatibility and atexit
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000927 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
928
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000929- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
930 to the readline module.
931
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000932- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000933 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
934 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000935
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +0000936- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
937 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
938 contains symlinks.
939
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +0000940- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
941 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
942
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +0000943- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
944 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
945 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
946
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000947- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
948 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
949 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
950 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
951 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
952 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
953 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
954 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
955 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
956 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
957 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
958 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
959 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
960
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +0000961- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
962
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000963Tools/Demos
964-----------
965
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000966- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
967 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
968
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +0000969- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
970
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000971Build
972-----
973
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000974- Backward incompatibility: longintrepr.h now triggers a compile-time
975 error if SHIFT (the number of bits in a Python long "digit") isn't
976 divisible by 5. This new requirement allows simple code for the new
977 5-bits-at-a-time long_pow() implementation. If necessary, the
978 restriction could be removed (by complicating long_pow(), or by
979 falling back to the 1-bit-at-a-time algorithm), but there are no
980 plans to do so.
981
Brett Cannoncc8a4f62004-08-26 01:44:07 +0000982- bug #991962: When building with --disable-toolbox-glue on Darwin no
983 attempt to build Mac-specific modules occurs.
984
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +0000985- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
986 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
987
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000988- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
989 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
990
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +0000991- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
992 GNU/k*BSD systems.
993
Hye-Shik Chang3ba5bfc2004-08-19 17:52:37 +0000994- bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings
995 found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64.
996
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000997C API
998-----
999
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001000..
1001
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001002Documentation
1003-------------
1004
Neal Norwitz5268c392004-08-21 15:13:52 +00001005- patch #1005936, bug #1009373: fix index entries which contain
1006 an underscore when viewed with Acrobat.
1007
1008- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if
1009 it contains symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment
1010 since 1992, but is now in the library reference as well.
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +00001011
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001012New platforms
1013-------------
1014
Hye-Shik Changf64700a2004-08-18 15:13:41 +00001015- FreeBSD 6 is now supported.
1016
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001017Tests
1018-----
1019
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001020..
1021
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001022Windows
1023-------
1024
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +00001025- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
1026 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
1027 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
1028 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
1029 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
1030 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
1031 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
1032 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
1033 the problem.
1034
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001035Mac
1036---
1037
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001038..
1039
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001040
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001041What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
1042=================================
1043
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +00001044*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001045
1046Core and builtins
1047-----------------
1048
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +00001049- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
1050 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
1051 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
1052 sensitive code.
1053
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001054- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001055 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so::
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001056
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001057 @staticmethod
1058 def foo(bar):
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001059
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +00001060 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001061
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001062- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
1063 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
1064 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
1065 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
1066 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
1067 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
1068 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
1069 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
1070 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
1071 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
1072 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
1073
1074 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
1075 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
1076 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
1077 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
1078 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
1079 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
1080 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
1081
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +00001082- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
1083 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
1084
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +00001085- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001086 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +00001087
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001088- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001089 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001090 which was missing for no apparent reason.
1091
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001092- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001093 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
1094 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
1095
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001096- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
1097 types that support garbage collection.
1098
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +00001099- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
1100
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +00001101- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
1102 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
1103 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
1104 Jython.
1105
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001106- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
1107
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +00001108- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
1109 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
1110
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +00001111- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
1112 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
1113 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +00001114
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +00001115- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
1116 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
1117 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
1118
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001119Extension modules
1120-----------------
1121
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +00001122- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
1123
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001124Library
1125-------
1126
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +00001127- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
1128 TIS-620
1129
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +00001130- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
1131 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
1132 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
1133 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
1134 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
1135 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
1136 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
1137 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
1138 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
1139 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
1140
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +00001141- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
1142
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +00001143- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
1144 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
1145 same as when the argument is omitted).
1146 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
1147
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +00001148- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
1149
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +00001150- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
1151 schemes are offered.
1152
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +00001153- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
1154
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +00001155- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
1156 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
1157 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
1158
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +00001159- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
1160
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +00001161- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
1162 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
1163
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +00001164- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
1165 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
1166 when dummy_threading is being used.
1167
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +00001168- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
1169 from a tarfile.
1170
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001171- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001172 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001173
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +00001174- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
1175 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
1176 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
1177 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
1178
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +00001179- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
1180 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
1181
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +00001182- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
1183 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
1184 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
1185 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
1186 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
1187 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
1188 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
1189 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
1190 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
1191 by some other method in progress).
1192
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001193- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
1194 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
1195 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +00001196
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +00001197- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
1198
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +00001199- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
1200 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
1201 AM Kuchling.
1202
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +00001203- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
1204 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
1205 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
1206
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +00001207- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
1208 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
1209 instead of unsigned.
1210
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001211- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +00001212 no longer part of the public API.
1213
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +00001214- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
1215 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
1216 string methods of the same name).
1217
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001218- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +00001219 SF patch 945642.
1220
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001221- doctest unittest integration improvements:
1222
1223 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
1224
1225 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
1226 DocTestSuites.
1227
1228- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
1229 that provide thread-local data.
1230
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001231- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
1232 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
1233
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001234- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
1235
1236- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
1237 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
1238 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
1239
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001240- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
1241
1242 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
1243 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
1244 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001245
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001246 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
1247 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
1248 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
1249 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
1250
1251 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
1252 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
1253
1254 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
1255 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
1256 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
1257 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
1258
1259 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
1260 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
1261 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
1262 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
1263 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
1264
1265 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
1266 wrapping help output.
1267
1268 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
1269 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
1270 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001271
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001272C API
1273-----
1274
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001275- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
1276 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
1277 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
1278 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
1279 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
1280 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
1281 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
1282 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
1283 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
1284 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
1285 its visible semantics have not changed.
1286
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001287- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
1288 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
1289
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001290Documentation
1291-------------
1292
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001293- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001294
1295 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +00001296 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001297
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +00001298 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001299
1300 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
1301
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001302- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001303
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001304Tests
1305-----
1306
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001307- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +00001308 platforms that use the Makefile.
1309
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001310- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
1311 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
1312 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
1313
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001314
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001315What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
1316=================================
1317
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +00001318*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001319
1320Core and builtins
1321-----------------
1322
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +00001323- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
1324 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
1325 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
1326 objects now (one object instead of three).
1327
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +00001328- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
1329 Windows DLLs.
1330
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +00001331- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
1332 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +00001333
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +00001334- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
1335 a new .pyc magic.
1336
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +00001337- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
1338 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
1339 be there.
1340
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +00001341- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
1342 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
1343 the LC_NUMERIC category.
1344
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +00001345- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
1346 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
1347 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
1348
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +00001349- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
1350
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +00001351- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
1352 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
1353 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +00001354
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +00001355- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
1356 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
1357
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +00001358- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
1359
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001360- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001361 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001362
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +00001363- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
1364
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +00001365- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
1366
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +00001367- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
1368 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
1369
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +00001370- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
1371 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
1372 Fixes bug #858016 .
1373
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +00001374- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
1375 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
1376 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
1377
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +00001378- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
1379 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
1380 improves their performance (about 35%).
1381
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +00001382- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
1383 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
1384 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
1385
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +00001386- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
1387 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
1388 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
1389 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
1390
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001391- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
1392 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
Walter Dörwald09515af2005-03-18 10:28:24 +00001393 list comprehensions, and the list constructor (when the input iterable
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001394 length is not known).
1395
1396- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
1397 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +00001398 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
1399 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001400 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
1401
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +00001402- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
1403 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
1404
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +00001405- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
1406 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
1407 keyword arguments.
1408
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +00001409- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
1410 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
1411 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
1412
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +00001413- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
1414 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
1415 cases.
1416
1417- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
1418 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
1419 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
1420 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
1421 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
1422 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
1423 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
1424 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
1425 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
1426 a release build.
1427
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +00001428- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
1429 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
1430
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001431- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001432 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001433
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +00001434- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
1435 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
1436 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
1437 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
1438 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
1439 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
1440 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
1441 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
1442 destroyed.
1443
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +00001444- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
1445 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
1446 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
1447 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
1448 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
1449 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
1450 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
1451 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
1452
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +00001453- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
1454 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
1455 character other than a space.
1456
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +00001457- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
1458 by the function object or by the method object, the function
1459 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
1460 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
1461 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
1462 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
1463 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
1464 attributes with the same name.
1465
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001466- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
1467 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
1468 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
1469 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
1470 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
1471 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
1472 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
1473 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
1474 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
1475 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
1476 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
1477 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
1478 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
1479 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +00001480
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +00001481- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
1482 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
1483 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
1484 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
1485 This has been repaired.
1486
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001487- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
1488
1489- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
1490
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +00001491- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
1492 over a sequence.
1493
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001494- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001495 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001496
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +00001497- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
1498
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +00001499- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
1500 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
1501 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
1502 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
1503 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
1504 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
1505 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
1506 records with equal keys is unchanged).
1507
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +00001508- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
1509 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
1510 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
1511
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +00001512- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
1513 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
1514 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
1515 freelist.
1516
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +00001517- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
1518 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
1519
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +00001520- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
1521 number.
1522
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +00001523- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
1524 a TypeError exception.
1525
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +00001526- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
1527 820195.
1528
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +00001529- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
1530 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
1531 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
1532
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001533- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001534 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
1535 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +00001536
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +00001537- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
1538 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
1539 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
1540
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001541- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
1542 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001543 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001544
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001545- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +00001546 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
1547 the first call.
1548
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001549
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001550Extension modules
1551-----------------
1552
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +00001553- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
1554 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
1555
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001556- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
1557 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
1558 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
1559 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
1560 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
1561 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
1562 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +00001563
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +00001564- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
1565
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +00001566- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
1567
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +00001568- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
1569 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
1570
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +00001571- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
1572 fewer false positives.
1573
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +00001574- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
1575 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
1576
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001577- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +00001578 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
1579
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +00001580- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001581 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +00001582 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
Raymond Hettinger6ab78cd2004-08-29 07:50:43 +00001583 Also, array.array() and array.extend() now accept any iterable argument
1584 for repeated appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +00001585
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +00001586- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
1587 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
1588 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
1589 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
1590
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +00001591- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
1592 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
1593 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
1594 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
1595 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
1596 #897625.
1597
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +00001598- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
1599 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
1600
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +00001601- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
1602 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
1603 and pops on either side of the deque.
1604
1605- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
1606 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
1607
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +00001608- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
1609 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
1610 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
1611 other functions that expect a function argument.
1612
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +00001613- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
1614
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001615- os.getsid was added.
1616
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +00001617- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
1618 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
1619 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
1620
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +00001621- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
1622
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +00001623- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
1624
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +00001625- readline.clear_history was added.
1626
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +00001627- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
1628
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +00001629- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
1630
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +00001631- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
1632
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +00001633- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
1634
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +00001635- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
1636
1637- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
1638
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +00001639- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
1640
1641- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
1642
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001643- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
1644 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
1645 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
1646
1647- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
1648 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
1649 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
1650 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
1651 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
1652 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
1653 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
1654
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +00001655- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
1656 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
1657 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
1658 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001659
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001660- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001661 iterators from a single iterable.
1662
1663- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
1664 of raising a TypeError exception.
1665
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +00001666- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
1667 as parameter.
1668
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001669Library
1670-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001671
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +00001672- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
1673 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
1674 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001675
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +00001676- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
1677 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
1678 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +00001679
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +00001680- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +00001681
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +00001682- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
1683 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +00001684
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +00001685- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
1686 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1687
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001688- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
1689
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001690- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001691 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001692
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001693- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001694 that generate a -debuginfo.rpm
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001695
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +00001696- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
1697
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +00001698- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
1699 on cygwin and mingw32.
1700
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +00001701- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
1702
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +00001703- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
1704 module.
1705
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +00001706- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
1707 installation scheme for all platforms.
1708
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001709- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +00001710 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001711
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001712- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
1713 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
1714 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
1715
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +00001716- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
1717 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
1718 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
1719
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +00001720- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
1721
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +00001722- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
1723
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +00001724- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
1725 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
1726
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +00001727- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
1728 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
1729 type pattern with the same value exists.
1730
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +00001731- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
1732 when run from the command prompt).
1733
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001734- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
1735 not taken into consideration when caching value.
1736
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +00001737- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
1738 default sort).
1739
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +00001740- Added global runctx function to profile module
1741
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +00001742- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
1743
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +00001744- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
1745
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +00001746- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
1747
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001748- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +00001749 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
1750 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
1751 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
1752 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
1753 accordingly.
1754
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +00001755- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
1756 decoding standards.
1757
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +00001758- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
1759 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
1760 called for all requests.
1761
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +00001762- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
1763 they are passed to the compiler.
1764
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +00001765- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
1766 indent, width and depth.
1767
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +00001768- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
1769 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
1770
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +00001771- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
1772 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
1773
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +00001774- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
1775
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +00001776- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
1777
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001778- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
1779
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +00001780- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
1781 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
1782
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +00001783- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +00001784 for better performance.
1785
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001786- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +00001787
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +00001788- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
1789 a string).
1790
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +00001791- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
1792
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +00001793- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
1794
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +00001795- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
1796
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +00001797- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
1798
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +00001799- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
1800 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
1801 list of fieldnames.
1802
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +00001803- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
1804 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
1805
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +00001806- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
1807
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +00001808- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
1809 empty lists.
1810
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +00001811- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
1812 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
1813 and shelves.
1814
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +00001815- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
1816 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
1817
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001818- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +00001819 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
1820 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001821
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +00001822- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
1823 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +00001824 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +00001825
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001826- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +00001827 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
1828 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
1829
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001830- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
1831 and removed in Py2.4.
1832
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +00001833- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
1834
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +00001835- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
1836
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001837Tools/Demos
1838-----------
1839
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +00001840- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
1841 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
1842
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +00001843- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
1844
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +00001845- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
1846 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
1847 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
1848 destination in situations where both files are given.
1849
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +00001850- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
1851 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
1852 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
1853 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
1854
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +00001855- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
1856
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +00001857- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
1858 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
1859 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
1860 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
1861 now.
1862
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001863- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
1864 in effect
1865
1866- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
1867 C-c C-h
1868
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +00001869- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
1870 -d option was given.
1871
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001872Build
1873-----
1874
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +00001875- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
1876 build under OS X.
1877
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +00001878- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
1879 --enable-profiling.
1880
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +00001881- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
1882 is configured --with-tsc.
1883
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +00001884- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
1885 on AMD64.
1886
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +00001887- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
1888 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
1889
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00001890- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
1891 removed.
1892
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00001893- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
1894 supported (see PEP 11).
1895
1896- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
1897
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00001898- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
1899
1900- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
1901 (see PEP 11).
1902
1903- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
1904 sizeof(char) must be 1.
1905
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001906C API
1907-----
1908
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00001909- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
1910 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
1911 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
1912
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001913- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
1914 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
1915 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
1916 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
1917
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00001918- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
1919 generator objects.
1920
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001921- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
1922 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00001923 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
1924 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001925
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00001926- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
1927 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
1928
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00001929- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
1930 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
1931 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
1932 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
1933 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
1934
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00001935- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
1936 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
1937 about 10% faster.
1938
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00001939- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
1940 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
1941
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00001942- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
1943 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
1944 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
1945 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
1946
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001947Windows
1948-------
1949
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00001950- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
1951 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
1952 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
1953 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
1954
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00001955- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
1956 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
1957 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
1958
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001959
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001960What's New in Python 2.3 final?
1961===============================
1962
1963*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
1964
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001965IDLE
1966----
1967
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00001968- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
1969 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
1970 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
1971 context-menu actions.
1972
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001973- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
1974 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
1975 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
1976 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
1977 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
1978 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
1979 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
1980 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
1981 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
1982
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001983
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001984What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
1985=============================================
1986
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00001987*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001988
1989Core and builtins
1990-----------------
1991
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001992- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001993 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001994 comment at the end are still unsupported.
1995
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001996Extension modules
1997-----------------
1998
1999- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
2000 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
2001 than once. This has been fixed.
2002
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00002003- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
2004 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
2005 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
2006 call.
2007
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002008- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
2009
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002010Library
2011-------
2012
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002013- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
2014 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
2015
2016- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
2017 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
2018 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
2019 restored.
2020
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00002021IDLE
2022----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002023
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00002024- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002025
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002026Build
2027-----
2028
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002029- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
2030 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
2031
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002032C API
2033-----
2034
2035Windows
2036-------
2037
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00002038- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
2039 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
2040
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002041- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
2042
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002043Mac
2044---
2045
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002046- Various fixes to pimp.
2047
2048- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
2049
2050- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
2051 more problems than it solves.
2052
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002053
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002054What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
2055=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002056
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00002057*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
2058
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002059Core and builtins
2060-----------------
2061
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00002062- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
2063 by sys.setcheckinterval().
2064
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002065- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
2066 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002067 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002068
2069- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
2070 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
2071 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002072 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002073
2074- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
2075 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002076
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002077- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
2078 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
2079 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
2080
2081- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002082 770247.
2083
2084- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002085
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002086Extension modules
2087-----------------
2088
2089- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
2090 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
2091
2092- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
2093
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002094- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
2095
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00002096- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
2097 contained within the _strptime module.
2098
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002099- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
2100 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
2101
2102- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002103 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
2104
2105- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
2106 the find_class attribute, if present.
2107
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002108- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002109
2110 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
2111 (SF bug 763298).
2112
2113 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00002114 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
2115 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
2116 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002117
2118 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
2119
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002120Library
2121-------
2122
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002123- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
2124
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00002125- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
2126 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
2127 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
2128 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
2129 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
2130 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
2131 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
2132 or Tester().
2133
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002134- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
2135 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
2136 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
2137 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
2138 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
2139 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
2140 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
2141 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
2142 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00002143
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002144 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00002145
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00002146- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
2147 weren't before was an oversight.
2148
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002149- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
2150 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
2151
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00002152- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
2153 when there are no lines.
2154
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00002155- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
2156 which could occur with Tk 8.4
2157
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002158- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
2159 to child processes.
2160
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002161- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
2162
2163- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
2164
2165- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
2166 xmlrpclib.
2167
2168- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
2169 responses.
2170
2171- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
2172 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
2173
2174- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
2175 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
2176 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
2177
2178- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
2179 used as patterns.
2180
2181- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
2182 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
2183 than Tk 8.3.
2184
2185- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
2186
2187- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002188
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002189Tools/Demos
2190-----------
2191
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002192- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
2193
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00002194- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
2195
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002196- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002197
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002198Build
2199-----
2200
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002201- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
2202
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002203- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
2204
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002205- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
2206 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002207
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002208- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
2209 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
2210 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002211
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002212C API
2213-----
2214
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002215- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
2216 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
2217
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002218Windows
2219-------
2220
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002221- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
2222 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
2223 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
2224 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
2225 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
2226 Python exception ::
2227
2228 thread.error: can't start new thread
2229
2230 is raised now.
2231
2232- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
2233 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
2234 instead of from DLL teardown.
2235
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002236Mac
2237---
2238
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002239- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00002240 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002241 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
2242 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
2243 the executable in the bundle.
2244
2245- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002246
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00002247- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
2248
2249- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
2250 on Panther.
2251
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002252What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
2253================================
2254
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002255*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002256
2257Core and builtins
2258-----------------
2259
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00002260- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
2261 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
2262 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
2263 with the -i option.
2264
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00002265- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
2266 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
2267
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002268- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
2269 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
2270
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00002271- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
2272 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
2273 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
2274 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
2275 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
2276 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
2277 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
2278 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
2279 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
2280 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
2281 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
2282 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
2283 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00002284
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002285- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
2286 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
2287 embedded in a lambda expression.
2288
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00002289- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
2290 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
2291 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
2292 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
2293 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
2294
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002295- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
2296 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
2297 matches the restriction on classic classes.
2298
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00002299- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
2300 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
2301
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00002302- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
2303 It's writable again.
2304
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002305- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
2306 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
2307 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002308 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002309
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002310- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
2311 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
2312 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
2313
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002314Extension modules
2315-----------------
2316
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00002317- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
2318 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
2319
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002320- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
2321 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
2322 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
2323 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
2324
2325- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
2326 collection.
2327
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00002328- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
2329 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
2330 unique within a single program run.
2331
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00002332- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
2333 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
2334
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00002335- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
2336 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
2337
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00002338- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
2339 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00002340
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00002341- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
2342
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00002343- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
2344 Fixes SF bug #730685.
2345
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00002346- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
2347 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
2348 for many BSD-derived systems.
2349
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002350
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002351Library
2352-------
2353
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00002354- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
2355 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
2356 primary ones:
2357
2358 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
2359 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
2360 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
2361
2362 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
2363 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
2364 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
2365 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
2366 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
2367 framework features (which doctest lacks).
2368
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00002369- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
2370 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
2371 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
2372 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
2373 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
2374 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
2375 argument.
2376
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002377- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
2378 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
2379 in the archive.
2380
2381- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
2382 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
2383
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00002384- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
2385 569574).
2386
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002387- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
2388 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
2389 no more.
2390
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002391- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
2392 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
2393 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
2394 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
2395 code coverage.
2396
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002397- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
2398 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
2399 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002400 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
2401 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002402
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002403- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
2404 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
2405 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00002406 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002407
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00002408- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
2409
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00002410- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
2411 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
2412 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
2413 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
2414
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00002415- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
2416 handling.
2417
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00002418- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
2419 __doc__ of data descriptors.
2420
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00002421- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
2422 in socket.py.
2423
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00002424- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
2425
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00002426- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
2427 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
2428 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
2429 opener with proxy support.
2430
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002431- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
2432
2433- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
2434
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002435Tools/Demos
2436-----------
2437
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00002438- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
2439
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002440- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
2441
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002442- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
2443 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00002444
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00002445- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
2446 files.
2447
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002448Build
2449-----
2450
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002451- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00002452 different root directory.
2453
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002454C API
2455-----
2456
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00002457- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
2458 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
2459 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
2460 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
2461 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
2462 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
2463 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
2464 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
2465 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
2466 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
2467
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002468- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
2469 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
2470 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
2471 from Python.
2472
2473
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002474New platforms
2475-------------
2476
2477None this time.
2478
2479Tests
2480-----
2481
2482- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
2483 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
2484
2485Windows
2486-------
2487
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00002488- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
2489
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00002490- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
2491 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
2492 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
2493 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
2494 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
2495 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
2496 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
2497 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
2498 that's what it's for.
2499
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002500Mac
2501---
2502
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00002503- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
2504 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
2505 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
2506 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00002507- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
2508 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
2509- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002510
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002511SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
2512------------------------------------
2513
2514430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
2515598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
2516622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
2517661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
2518683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
2519697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
2520713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
2521724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
2522727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
2523729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
2524730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
2525731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
2526732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
2527733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
2528735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
2529740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
2530744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
2531745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
2532747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
2533749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
2534751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
2535753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
2536755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
2537757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
2538760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
2539
2540
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002541What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
2542================================
2543
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00002544*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002545
2546Core and builtins
2547-----------------
2548
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00002549- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
2550 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
2551
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00002552- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
2553 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
2554 and cannot be strings).
2555
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00002556- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
2557 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
2558 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
2559 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
2560
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00002561- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
2562 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
2563 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
2564 Python itself.
2565
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00002566- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
2567 the referenced object, if it has one.
2568
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00002569- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
2570 the thread started at
2571 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
2572
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00002573- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
2574 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
2575 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
2576 placed on a list index.
2577
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00002578- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
2579 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
2580 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
2581 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
2582
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002583- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
2584 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
2585 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
2586 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
2587 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
2588 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
2589 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
2590
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00002591- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
2592 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
2593 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
2594 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
2595 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
2596
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00002597- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
2598 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00002599
2600- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
2601 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
2602 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
2603 #693195.)
2604
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00002605- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
2606 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002607
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002608- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00002609 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002610 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
2611 interpreter executions, would fail.
2612
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002613- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00002614 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00002615 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002616
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002617Extension modules
2618-----------------
2619
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00002620- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
2621 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
2622 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
2623 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
2624
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00002625- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
2626 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
2627
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00002628- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
2629 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
2630 and Greg Chapman.)
2631
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002632- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
2633 recursively.
2634
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00002635- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00002636 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
2637 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
2638 leaks.
2639
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00002640- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
2641
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00002642- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
2643 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
2644 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
2645 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
2646 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
2647 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
2648 #705836.
2649
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002650- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00002651 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
2652
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00002653- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
2654 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
2655 See SF bug #692416.
2656
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00002657- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
2658 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
2659
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00002660- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
2661 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
2662 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002663
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002664- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00002665 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
2666 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
2667
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00002668- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
2669 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
2670 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
2671 timeouts to work properly.
2672
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002673Library
2674-------
2675
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002676- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
2677 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
2678 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
2679 future release.
2680
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00002681- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
2682 for querying platform dependent features.
2683
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00002684- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00002685
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00002686- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
2687 pickle protocol versions.
2688
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00002689- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
2690 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
2691 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
2692
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00002693- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
2694
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00002695- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
2696 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
2697 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
2698 modules.
2699
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00002700- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
2701 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
2702 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
2703
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002704- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
2705 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
2706
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00002707- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
2708 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
2709 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
2710
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002711- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00002712 MS Office extensions.
2713
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00002714- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
2715 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
2716
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00002717- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
2718 execution speed of expressions and statements.
2719
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002720- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
2721 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
2722 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
2723 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
2724 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
2725 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
2726
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002727- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
2728 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
2729 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002730
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00002731- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
2732 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
2733 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
2734
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00002735- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
2736
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00002737- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
2738 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
2739 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
2740
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002741Tools/Demos
2742-----------
2743
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00002744- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
2745 See the module docstring for details.
2746
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002747Build
2748-----
2749
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00002750- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
2751 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002752
2753C API
2754-----
2755
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002756- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
2757
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00002758- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
2759 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
2760 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
2761
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002762- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
2763 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002764
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002765 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
2766 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
2767 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00002768
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00002769- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00002770 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
2771
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00002772- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
2773 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
2774 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002775
2776New platforms
2777-------------
2778
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002779None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002780
2781Tests
2782-----
2783
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00002784- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
2785 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002786
2787Windows
2788-------
2789
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00002790- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
2791 function.
2792
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00002793- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
2794 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002795
2796Mac
2797---
2798
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002799- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
2800 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00002801
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00002802- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
2803 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002804
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00002805- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
2806 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
2807 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002808
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002809- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00002810 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
2811 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002812
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002813- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
2814 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002815
2816
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002817What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
2818=================================
2819
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002820*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002821
2822Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002823-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002824
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00002825- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
2826 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
2827 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
2828
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00002829- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
2830 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
2831 (SF patch #664376.)
2832
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002833- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
2834 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
2835 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
2836 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
2837 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
2838 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00002839 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002840
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002841- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
2842 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
2843 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
2844 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002845 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002846
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00002847- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
2848 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
2849 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
2850 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
2851 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
2852 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
2853 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
2854 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
2855 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
2856 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
2857 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
2858
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00002859- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
2860 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
2861 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
2862 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
2863 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
2864 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
2865
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00002866- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
2867 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
2868
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00002869- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
2870 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
2871 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
2872 case.)
2873
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00002874- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
2875 passed as unicode strings.
2876
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00002877- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
2878 See SF bug #683467.
2879
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00002880- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
2881 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
2882
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00002883- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
2884
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00002885- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
2886
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00002887- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
2888 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
2889 arguments.
2890
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00002891- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
2892 See SF bug #667147.
2893
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002894- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002895 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002896 See SF bug #676155.
2897
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002898- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002899 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002900 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
2901 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
2902 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
2903 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
2904 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
2905 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002906
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002907Extension modules
2908-----------------
2909
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002910- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
2911 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2912 tp_as_number pointer.
2913
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002914- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
2915 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
2916 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
2917 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
2918 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
2919
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002920- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
2921
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00002922- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
2923
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002924- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00002925 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002926 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
2927 patch #678531.)
2928
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00002929- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
2930 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
2931
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00002932- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
2933 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
2934
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00002935- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
2936
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00002937- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
2938 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
2939 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
2940
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002941- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
2942
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002943- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
2944 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
2945
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002946- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002947
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002948- datetime changes:
2949
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00002950 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
2951
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00002952 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
2953 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
2954 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
2955 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
2956 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
2957 now.
2958
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002959 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002960 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
2961 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002962
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002963 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002964 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002965 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
2966 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
2967 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
2968 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002969
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002970 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
2971 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
2972 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002973 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
2974
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002975 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
2976 by a later example coded by Guido.
2977
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002978 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002979 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
2980 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
2981 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002982 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
2983 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
2984
2985 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
2986 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
2987 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
2988 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
2989 tzinfo subclass instance.
2990
2991 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
2992 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
2993 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
2994 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
2995 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
2996 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
2997 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
2998 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002999
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003000 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
3001 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
3002 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
3003 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
3004 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003005 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
3006
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003007 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003008
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003009 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
3010 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
3011 as a naive datetime object.
3012
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00003013 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
3014 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
3015 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
3016
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00003017 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
3018 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
3019 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
3020 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
3021 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
3022 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
3023 comparison.
3024
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003025 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
3026 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
3027 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
3028 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003029 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003030
3031 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003032
3033 and ::
3034
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003035 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
3036
3037 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
3038 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
3039 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
3040 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
3041
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00003042 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
3043 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
3044 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
3045 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
3046 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
3047
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003048 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
3049 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00003050 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
3051 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003052
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003053Library
3054-------
3055
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003056- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
3057 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
3058
3059- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
3060 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
3061 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
3062 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
3063 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
3064 See PEP 307 for details.
3065
3066- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
3067 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
3068
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00003069- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
3070 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00003071 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003072 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
3073 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00003074 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00003075
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00003076- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
3077 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
3078
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003079- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
3080 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
3081 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
3082
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00003083- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
3084
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00003085- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
3086 exception.
3087
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00003088- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
3089 class.
3090
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00003091- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
3092 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
3093 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
3094
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00003095- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
3096 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
3097
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003098- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00003099 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
3100 See SF bug #659228.
3101
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00003102- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
3103 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
3104 See SF patch #651082.
3105
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00003106- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003107
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00003108- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
3109 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
3110
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003111- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003112 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003113
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00003114- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
3115 DOS paths from other platforms.
3116
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003117Tools/Demos
3118-----------
3119
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003120- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
3121 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
3122 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
3123 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
3124 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
3125 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
3126 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
3127 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
3128 example:
3129
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00003130 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
3131 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003132
3133 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
3134
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003135
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003136Build
3137-----
3138
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003139- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
3140 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
3141 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003142 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
3143
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003144 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
3145
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00003146- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
3147 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
3148 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
3149 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
3150 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
3151 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
3152 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
3153 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
3154 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
3155
3156- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
3157 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
3158 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
3159 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
3160
3161- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
3162 from the Tools/scripts directory.
3163
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003164C API
3165-----
3166
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003167- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
3168 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00003169
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00003170- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
3171 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
3172 tp_as_number pointer.
3173
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00003174- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
3175 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
3176 (SF #681367)
3177
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00003178- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
3179 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
3180 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
3181 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00003182
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003183Tests
3184-----
3185
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00003186- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003187 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
3188 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
3189 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
3190 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
3191 pydoc.)
3192
3193- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
3194
3195- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003196
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003197Windows
3198-------
3199
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00003200- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
3201 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
3202 time).
3203
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00003204- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
3205 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
3206
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00003207- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
3208 release without strong cryptography.
3209
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003210- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003211 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003212
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003213- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
3214 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
3215
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003216Mac
3217---
3218
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003219- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
3220 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003221
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00003222- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
3223 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
3224 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003225
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003226- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
3227 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003228
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003229- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
3230 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
3231 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
3232 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003233
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003234- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00003235 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
3236 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
3237 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003238
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003239
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003240What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003241=================================
3242
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00003243*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003244
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003245Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003246--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003247
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00003248- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
3249
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003250- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
3251 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003252 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003253 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003254 a different meaning than before.
3255
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003256- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003257 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003258 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003259
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003260- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003261 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003262 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003263
3264- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
3265 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
3266 and deallocation.
3267
3268- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
3269 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
3270
3271- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
3272 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
3273 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
3274 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
3275 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
3276
3277- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
3278 now detected by the garbage collector.
3279
3280- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
3281 [SF bug 519621]
3282
3283- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
3284 identifier.
3285
3286- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
3287 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
3288 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
3289 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
3290 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
3291 [SF bug 563060]
3292
3293- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
3294 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
3295 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
3296 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
3297 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
3298
3299- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
3300 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
3301 not called. [SF bug #537450]
3302
3303- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
3304
3305- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
3306 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
3307 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
3308 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
3309 state of the slots would be lost.)
3310
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003311Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003312-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003313
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003314- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003315 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
3316 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
3317 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
3318 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003319 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
3320 Jython 2.1.
3321
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003322- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003323 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003324 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
3325 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
3326 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
3327 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
3328 these, see PEP 302.
3329
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003330- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
3331 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
3332 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
3333
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00003334- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
3335 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
3336 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
3337
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00003338- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
3339 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
3340 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
3341
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003342- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
3343 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
3344 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
3345 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
3346 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
3347 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
3348 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
3349 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
3350 releases or implementations.
3351
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003352- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003353 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
3354 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003355
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00003356- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
3357 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
3358
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003359- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
3360 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
3361 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
3362
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00003363- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
3364 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
3365
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003366- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
3367 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003368 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
3369 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003370
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00003371- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
3372 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
3373 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
3374 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
3375 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
3376
3377 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
3378 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
3379 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
3380 pattern.
3381
3382 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
3383 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
3384 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
3385 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
3386
3387 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
3388 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
3389 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
3390 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
3391 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
3392 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
3393
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00003394- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
3395 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
3396 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
3397 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
3398 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
3399 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
3400 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
3401 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00003402
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00003403- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
3404 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
3405 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
3406 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
3407 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003408 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
3409 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
3410 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
3411 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
3412 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
3413 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
3414 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003415
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003416- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
3417 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
3418
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00003419- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
3420 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
3421 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
3422 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
3423 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
3424 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
3425 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
3426 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
3427 to Zack Weinberg!
3428
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00003429- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
3430 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
3431 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
3432 type. This has been fixed now.
3433
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00003434- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
3435 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
3436 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
3437
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003438- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
3439 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
3440 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
3441 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
3442 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
3443 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
3444 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
3445 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00003446 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003447
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00003448- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
3449 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
3450 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00003451
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003452- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
3453 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
3454 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
3455 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
3456 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
3457 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
3458 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
3459 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003460 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003461 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
3462 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
3463
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00003464- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
3465 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
3466 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
3467 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
3468 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
3469 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
3470 this.)
3471
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003472- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
3473 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003474 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003475 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003476 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
3477 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00003478 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
3479 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003480
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003481- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
3482 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
3483 currently running.
3484
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00003485- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
3486 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
3487 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
3488 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
3489
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00003490- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
3491 as directory names.
3492
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00003493- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
3494 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
3495
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00003496- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
3497 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
3498
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003499- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00003500 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
3501 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003502
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00003503- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
3504 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
3505 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
3506 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
3507 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
3508
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003509- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
3510 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
3511 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
3512 removed.
3513
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00003514- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
3515 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
3516 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
3517
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00003518- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
3519 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
3520 to __debug__.
3521
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00003522- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
3523 string to the left with zeros. For example,
3524 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
3525
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00003526- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
3527 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
3528 deprecated now.
3529
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00003530- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
3531 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
3532 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00003533
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00003534- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
3535 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
3536 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
3537 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
3538 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00003539
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00003540- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
3541 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
3542
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003543- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
3544 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
3545 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003546 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003547 is backward compatible.
3548
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00003549- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
3550 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
3551 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
3552 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
3553 could access a pointer to freed memory.
3554
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00003555- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
3556 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
3557 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
3558 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
3559 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
3560 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003561
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00003562- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
3563 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
3564
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003565- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
3566 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
3567
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003568- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
3569 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
3570 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
3571 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
3572 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
3573
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00003574- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
3575 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
3576 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
3577
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003578- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00003579 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
3580
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00003581- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
3582 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
3583 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00003584
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00003585- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
3586 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
3587
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00003588- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
3589 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
3590 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
3591
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00003592- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
3593
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003594Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003595-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003596
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00003597- Added three operators to the operator module:
3598 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
3599 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
3600 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
3601
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00003602- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
3603
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003604- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
3605 archives.
3606
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003607- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
3608 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
3609 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
3610
3611 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
3612
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003613- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
3614 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
3615 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00003616 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003617
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00003618- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
3619 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
3620 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
3621 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003622 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
3623 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
3624 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
3625 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00003626
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00003627- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
3628 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00003629
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00003630- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
3631
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00003632- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
3633 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
3634
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00003635- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
3636 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
3637 supported.
3638
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00003639- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
3640
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00003641- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
3642 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00003643
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00003644- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
3645 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
3646
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003647- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
3648
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003649- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
3650 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
3651
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00003652- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
3653 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
3654 functions but callable type objects.
3655
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003656- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003657 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003658 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003659
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00003660- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
3661 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00003662
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00003663- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
3664 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00003665
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00003666- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
3667 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
3668 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
3669 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
3670
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00003671- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
3672 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00003673
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00003674- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
3675 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
3676 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
3677 and __imul__.
3678
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00003679- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00003680 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
3681 is called.
3682
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00003683- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
3684 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
3685 interpreter was compiled.
3686
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003687- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
3688 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
3689 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003690 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003691 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
3692 1, not 2.
3693
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00003694- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
3695 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
3696 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
3697 limit.
3698
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00003699- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
3700 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
3701 bug #623464.
3702
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00003703- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
3704 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
3705 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
3706 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
3707
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003708Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003709-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003710
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00003711- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
3712
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00003713- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
3714 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
3715 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
3716 with Python 2.3a2.
3717
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00003718- os.path exposes getctime.
3719
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003720- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003721 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003722 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003723 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003724 unit tests of floating point results.
3725
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00003726- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
3727 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
3728 has been increased.
3729
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003730- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
3731 executed.
3732
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00003733- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
3734 postinstallation script.
3735
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00003736- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
3737 test the current module.
3738
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003739- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00003740 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
3741 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
3742 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
3743 this behavior needs to be controlled.
3744
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003745- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003746 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003747 Ward's Optik package.
3748
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003749- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
3750 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
3751 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
3752 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
3753
3754- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
3755 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003756 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003757
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00003758- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
3759 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
3760 shelf are binary pickles.
3761
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00003762- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
3763 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
3764
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00003765- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
3766 modules are iterators now.
3767
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00003768- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
3769 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
3770 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
3771 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
3772 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
3773 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003774
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00003775- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
3776 with their entity value.
3777
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00003778- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
3779
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003780- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
3781 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00003782
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003783- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
3784 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003785 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00003786
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00003787- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
3788 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
3789 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
3790 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
3791 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
3792 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
3793 main():
3794
3795 import locale
3796 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
3797
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00003798- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
3799 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
3800
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00003801- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
3802 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
3803 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
3804 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
3805 to the new standard.
3806
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00003807- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
3808 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
3809 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
3810 an extension to the database.
3811
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003812- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
3813 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
3814 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
3815 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00003816 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003817
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003818- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003819 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003820
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003821- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
3822 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
3823 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
3824 bounded integers.
3825
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00003826- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
3827 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
3828 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
3829 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
3830 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
3831 in existence.
3832
3833 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
3834 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
3835 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
3836 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
3837 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
3838 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
3839
3840 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
3841 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
3842 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
3843 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
3844
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00003845- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
3846 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
3847 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
3848
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00003849- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
3850
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003851- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
3852 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
3853 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
3854 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
3855
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00003856- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
3857 argument.
3858
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00003859- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
3860 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
3861 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
3862 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
3863 [SF patch 560794].
3864
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003865- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
3866 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
3867 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003868 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
3869 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
3870 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003871
3872- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
3873 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00003874
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00003875- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
3876 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
3877 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
3878 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00003879
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00003880- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
3881 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
3882 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
3883 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
3884 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
3885
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003886- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00003887
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00003888- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
3889
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00003890- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
3891 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
3892 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
3893 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
3894 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
3895 identical to None.
3896
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00003897- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
3898 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
3899 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
3900 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
3901 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
3902 results now.
3903
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00003904- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
3905 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
3906
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003907- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
3908 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
3909 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
3910 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
3911 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
3912 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
3913 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
3914 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
3915
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00003916- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
3917
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00003918- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
3919 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
3920
3921- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
3922 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
3923 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
3924 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
3925 and other systems.
3926
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003927- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
3928 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
3929 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
3930 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 +00003931 work well with these.
3932
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00003933- compileall now supports quiet operation.
3934
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003935- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00003936 connections.
3937
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00003938- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
3939 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
3940 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
3941
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00003942- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
3943 sets
3944
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00003945- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
3946 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
3947 name.
3948
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00003949- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
3950 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
3951 passed in.
3952
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003953- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00003954 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00003955 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
3956 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00003957
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00003958- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
3959
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00003960- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
3961
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00003962- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
3963 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
3964 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
3965
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003966- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
3967 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
3968 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
3969 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00003970 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003971
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003972- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003973 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003974 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003975
3976- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
3977 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
3978 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
3979
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003980- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00003981 the value of its expression argument.
3982
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003983- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
3984 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
3985 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
3986
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00003987- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
3988 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
3989 skipstone browser was included.
3990
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00003991- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
3992 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
3993
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003994Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003995-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003996
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00003997- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
3998 names in addition to accepting file names.
3999
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00004000- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
4001 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
4002 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
4003 still used and useful.)
4004
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00004005- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
4006 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
4007 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
4008 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00004009
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00004010- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
4011 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
4012 the generated binary.
4013
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004014Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004015-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004016
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00004017- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
4018
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00004019- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
4020 except in the hands of experts.
4021
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00004022- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00004023 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
4024 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
4025 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00004026
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00004027- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
4028 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
4029 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
4030 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
4031 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
4032 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
4033 builds.
4034
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00004035- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
4036 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
4037 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
4038 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
4039 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
4040 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
4041 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
4042 new type.
4043
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00004044- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00004045
4046 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
4047 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
4048 positive infinities.
4049
4050 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
4051 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
4052 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
4053 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
4054 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
4055 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
4056 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
4057
4058 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
4059
4060 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
4061
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00004062- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
4063 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
4064 size of the executable.
4065
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00004066- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
4067 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
4068 configure script. On other platforms, remove
4069 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00004070
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00004071- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
4072
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00004073- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
4074 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
4075 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00004076
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00004077- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
4078 well as Unix.
4079
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00004080- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
4081 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
4082 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
4083 modules in the README file for details.
4084
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004085C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004086-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004087
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004088- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
4089 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004090 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00004091 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004092 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004093
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004094- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
4095 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
4096 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
4097 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
4098 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
4099 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004100 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004101 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
4102 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
4103 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
4104 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
4105 aligned.)
4106
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00004107- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
4108 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
4109 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
4110
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00004111- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
4112 level.
4113
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00004114- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
4115 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
4116 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
4117 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
4118 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
4119
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00004120- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
4121 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
4122 code.
4123
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00004124- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
4125 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
4126 adjusting for negative indices.
4127
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00004128- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
4129 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
4130 object.
4131
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00004132- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
4133 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
4134 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
4135
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004136- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
4137 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00004138
4139- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
4140
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00004141- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
4142 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
4143 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
4144 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
4145
4146- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
4147
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00004148- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00004149
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004150- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00004151 without going through the buffer API.
4152
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004153- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00004154
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00004155- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
4156 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
4157 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
4158 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
4159
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004160- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
4161 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
4162
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004163- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00004164 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
4165
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004166New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004167-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004168
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00004169- OpenVMS is now supported.
4170
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00004171- AtheOS is now supported.
4172
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00004173- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
4174
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00004175- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
4176
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004177Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004178-----
4179
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00004180- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
4181 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
4182 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004183
4184Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004185-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004186
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004187- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
4188 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
4189 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
4190 bugs.
4191 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004192 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00004193 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
4194 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004195 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00004196
4197- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00004198 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004199
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00004200- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
4201 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
4202
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004203- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
4204 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004205 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004206 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
4207
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00004208- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
4209 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
4210 use files" uninstall option).
4211
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00004212- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
4213
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004214- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
4215 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
4216
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004217- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
4218 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
4219 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
4220
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004221- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
4222 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
4223 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
4224 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
4225 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004226 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
4227 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
4228 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004229
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004230- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004231 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004232 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
4233 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
4234 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
4235 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
4236 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
4237 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
4238 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
4239 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
4240 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
4241 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
4242 work around.
4243
4244- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
4245 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
4246 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
4247 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
4248 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
4249 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
4250 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
4251 specified with O_CREAT too).
4252
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004253Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004254----
4255
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004256- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004257
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00004258- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
4259 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
4260 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
4261
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004262- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
4263 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
4264 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
4265
4266- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
4267 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
4268 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
4269 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
4270 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
4271 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
4272 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
4273 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00004274
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00004275- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
4276 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
4277 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004278
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004279- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
4280 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
4281 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
4282 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
4283 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004284
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004285- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
4286 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
4287 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004288
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004289- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
4290 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004291
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004292- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
4293 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
4294 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
4295 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
4296 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004297
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004298- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
4299 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
4300 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
4301
4302- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
4303 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
4304 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004305
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004306- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
4307 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
4308 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
4309 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004310 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004311
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004312- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
4313 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004314
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004315- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
4316 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00004317
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004318- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00004319 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004320 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
4321 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004322
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00004323
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004324What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004325===============================
4326
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004327*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
4328
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004329Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004330--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004331
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004332- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
4333 with a custom metaclass.
4334
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004335Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004336-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004337
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004338- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
4339 are proxies.
4340
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004341Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004342-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004343
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004344- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
4345 very short strings.
4346
4347- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
4348 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
4349 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
4350 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
4351 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
4352
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004353Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004354-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004355
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004356- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
4357 close or delete time).
4358
4359- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
4360 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
4361
4362- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
4363
4364- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004365 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004366
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004367Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004368-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004369
4370Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004371-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004372
4373C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004374-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004375
4376New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004377-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004378
4379Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004380-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004381
4382Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004383-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004384
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004385- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
4386
4387- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
4388 instances are deleted at process exit time.
4389
4390- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
4391 deleted at process exit time.
4392
4393- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
4394 in backslash.
4395
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004396Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004397----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004398
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004399- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
4400 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
4401 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
4402
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004403
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00004404What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004405===========================
4406
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004407*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
4408
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004409Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004410--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004411
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004412- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
4413 been extensively updated. See
4414
4415 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
4416
4417 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
4418
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00004419- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
4420 deleted!
4421
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00004422- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
4423 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
4424 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
4425 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
4426 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
4427
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004428- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
4429
4430 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
4431 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
4432
4433 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
4434 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
4435 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
4436 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
4437 supported anyway.
4438
4439 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
4440 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
4441
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00004442- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
4443 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
4444 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
4445 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
4446 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004447
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00004448- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
4449 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
4450 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
4451
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004452Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004453-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004454
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004455- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
4456 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
4457 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
4458 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
4459 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
4460 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00004461 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
4462 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
4463 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
4464 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004465
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00004466- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
4467 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
4468 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
4469
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004470Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004471-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004472
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004473- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
4474
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004475Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004476-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004477
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00004478- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
4479 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
4480 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
4481 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
4482 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
4483 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
4484
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00004485- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
4486
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00004487- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
4488
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00004489- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
4490
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004491- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
4492 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
4493 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
4494
4495- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
4496
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004497Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004498-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004499
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004500- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
4501 off a search on Google.
4502
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004503Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004504-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004505
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004506- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
4507 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
4508 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
4509 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
4510 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
4511 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
4512 other platforms should do likewise.
4513
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00004514- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
4515 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
4516 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
4517
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004518C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004519-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004520
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004521- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
4522 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
4523 producing key-value pairs.
4524
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004525- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004526 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004527 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
4528 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
4529 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
4530 previously went unchallenged.
4531
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004532New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004533-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004534
4535Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004536-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004537
4538Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004539-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004540
4541Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004542----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004543
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00004544- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
4545 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004546
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004547- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
4548 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
4549 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
4550 home.
4551
4552
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004553What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004554===========================
4555
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004556*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
4557
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004558Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004559--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004560
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004561- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
4562 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004563
4564 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004565 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004566
4567 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
4568 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004569 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004570 This needs to be documented.
4571
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00004572- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
4573 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
4574
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00004575- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
4576 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
4577 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
4578
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00004579- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
4580 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
4581
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004582- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
4583 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
4584 class forbids it).
4585
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00004586- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
4587 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
4588 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
4589
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004590- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
4591
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004592Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004593-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004594
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004595- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
4596 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004597 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004598
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004599- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
4600 (like 1 + '').
4601
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004602Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004603-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004604
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004605- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
4606 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
4607 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
4608 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004609 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004610 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
4611
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00004612- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
4613 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
4614 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
4615 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
4616
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004617- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
4618 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004619 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
4620 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
4621 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004622
4623- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
4624 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004625
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00004626- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
4627 bytes on its input.
4628
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004629Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004630-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004631
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004632- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00004633 convenience function.
4634
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004635- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
4636 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
4637 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004638 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
4639 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
4640 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
4641 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
4642 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
4643 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004644
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00004645- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
4646 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
4647 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
4648 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
4649
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00004650- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
4651 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
4652 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
4653
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004654- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
4655 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
4656 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
4657 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
4658
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004659- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
4660 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004661 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004662 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
4663 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
4664 new -l and -e options.
4665
4666- statcache is now deprecated.
4667
4668- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
4669 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004670 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004671 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
4672 time properly taken into account.
4673
4674- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
4675 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
4676 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
4677 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
4678
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004679Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004680-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004681
4682Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004683-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004684
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004685- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
4686 is built with libdb3 if available.
4687
4688- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
4689
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004690C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004691-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004692
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00004693- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
4694 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
4695 PySequence_Size().
4696
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004697- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
4698
4699- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
4700 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
4701 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
4702
4703- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
4704 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
4705
4706- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
4707 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
4708
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004709New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004710-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004711
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004712- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
4713 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
4714
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00004715- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
4716 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
4717
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004718- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
4719
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004720Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004721-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004722
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004723- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
4724 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
4725
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004726Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004727-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004728
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004729Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004730----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004731
4732- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
4733 removed completely in the next release.
4734
4735- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
4736 OSX.
4737
4738- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
4739 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
4740
4741- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
4742
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004743
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004744What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004745===========================
4746
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004747*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
4748
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004749Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004750--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004751
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004752- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004753 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004754 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004755 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
4756 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004757 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
4758 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004759 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
4760 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00004761
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00004762- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
4763 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
4764
4765- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
4766 class methods, static methods, and properties.
4767
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004768Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004769-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004770
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00004771- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
4772 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
4773 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
4774 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
4775 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
4776 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
4777 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
4778 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
4779
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004780- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
4781 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
4782 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
4783 example).
4784
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004785- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004786 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004787 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004788 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004789
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004790- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
4791 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
4792 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00004793 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004794
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004795- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
4796 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
4797 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
4798 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
4799 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
4800 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
4801
4802 isinstance(x, (A, B))
4803
4804 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
4805
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004806Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004807-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004808
4809- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
4810
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004811- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
4812
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004813- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
4814 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00004815
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004816- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
4817 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
4818 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
4819 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
4820 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
4821 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00004822 attributes.
4823
4824- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
4825 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
4826 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00004827
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004828- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
4829 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
4830 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004831
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004832- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
4833 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
4834 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004835 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
4836 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
4837
4838- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
4839 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004840
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004841Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004842-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004843
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00004844- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
4845 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
4846
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004847- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
4848 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
4849 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
4850 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
4851
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00004852- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
4853 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
4854 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
4855 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
4856
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00004857 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
4858 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
4859 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
4860 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
4861 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
4862 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
4863 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
4864 without losing information).
4865
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004866- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004867 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
4868 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
4869 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
4870 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
4871 module).
4872
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004873 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004874 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
4875 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
4876 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
4877 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004878
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004879- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00004880 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
4881 encoding.
4882
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00004883- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
4884 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
4885
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004886- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004887 to allow saving the message body to a file.
4888
4889- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
4890 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
4891 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
4892 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
4893
4894- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
4895
4896- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
4897 ON, and OFF.
4898
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004899- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
4900 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
4901
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004902Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004903-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004904
4905- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
4906 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
4907 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004908
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004909- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
4910 been added: -X and -E.
4911
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004912Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004913-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004914
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004915- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
4916 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
4917
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004918C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004919-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004920
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00004921- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
4922 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
4923 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
4924 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
4925 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
4926
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00004927- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
4928 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
4929 as long) arguments.
4930
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004931- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
4932 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
4933 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
4934 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
4935 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
4936 report any bugs or strange behavior).
4937
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004938- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
4939 input.
4940
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004941New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004942-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004943
4944Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004945-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004946
4947Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004948-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004949
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00004950- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
4951 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
4952 is created for .py and .pyw files.
4953
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004954- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
4955 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
4956 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004957 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004958
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004959 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
4960 # (SIGINT) behavior.
4961 import signal
4962 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004963
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004964 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004965 while 1:
4966 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004967 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004968 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
4969 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
4970 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
4971 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004972
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004973
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004974What's New in Python 2.2a4?
4975===========================
4976
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004977*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
4978
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004979Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004980--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004981
4982- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
4983 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
4984 documentation for all operations on list objects.
4985
4986- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
4987 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
4988 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
4989 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
4990 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
4991 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
4992 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004993
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004994- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004995 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004996 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
4997 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
4998 associate a docstring with a property.
4999
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005000- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
5001 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
5002 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
5003 other built-in object types.
5004
5005- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
5006 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
5007 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
5008 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
5009 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
5010
5011- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
5012 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
5013
5014- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
5015 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005016 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005017 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
5018 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
5019 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
5020 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
5021 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
5022
5023- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
5024 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
5025 class.
5026
5027- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
5028 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
5029 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
5030 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
5031
5032- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
5033 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
5034 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
5035 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
5036
5037- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
5038 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
5039
5040- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
5041 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
5042 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
5043 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
5044 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005045 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005046 with the same value as s.
5047
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00005048- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
5049
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005050Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005051----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005052
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00005053- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
5054
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00005055- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
5056 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
5057 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
5058 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
5059 objects.
5060
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005061- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
5062 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00005063 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
5064 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
5065
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005066- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
5067 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
5068 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
5069
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005070Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005071-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005072
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00005073- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
5074 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
5075 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
5076 by the instances.
5077
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00005078- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
5079 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
5080 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
5081
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005082- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
5083 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
5084 before the entire comparison is complete.
5085
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00005086- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
5087 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
5088 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
5089
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00005090- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
5091 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
5092 getwriter().
5093
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005094- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
5095 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
5096
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00005097- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005098 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
5099 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
5100
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00005101- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
5102 iterable object.
5103
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005104- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
5105 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005106
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005107- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
5108 authentication.
5109
5110- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
5111 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005112
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005113- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00005114 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
5115 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
5116 a sample driver.)
5117
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005118Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005119-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005120
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005121- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
5122 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
5123 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
5124 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
5125 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
5126 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
5127 kernel has large file support.
5128
5129- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
5130 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
5131 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
5132 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
5133 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
5134
5135- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
5136 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
5137 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
5138
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005139C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005140-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005141
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005142- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
5143 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
5144
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005145New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005146-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005147
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005148- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
5149 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
5150
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005151Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005152-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005153
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005154- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
5155 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
5156 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
5157 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
5158 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
5159
5160- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
5161 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
5162 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
5163 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
5164
5165- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
5166 especially in regard to reporting errors.
5167
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005168Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005169-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005170
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005171- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005172 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
5173 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005174
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005175
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005176What's New in Python 2.2a3?
5177===========================
5178
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005179*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
5180
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005181Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005182----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005183
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005184- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
5185 big to represent as a C double.
5186
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00005187- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
5188 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
5189 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
5190 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
5191 restriction).
5192
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00005193- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
5194 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
5195 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
5196 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
5197 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
5198
5199 >>> dir([])
5200 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
5201 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
5202 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
5203 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
5204 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
5205 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
5206 'reverse', 'sort']
5207
5208 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
5209
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005210- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005211 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
5212 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
5213 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
5214 OverflowError exception.
5215
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00005216- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005217 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005218 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
5219 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
5220 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
5221 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
5222 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00005223 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005224 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
5225 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
5226
5227 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
5228 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
5229 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
5230 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005231
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005232- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005233 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
5234 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
5235 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
5236 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
5237 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
5238 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
5239 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
5240 once it is created.
5241
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00005242- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
5243 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
5244 (key, value) pairs.
5245
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005246- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005247 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
5248 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
5249
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00005250- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
5251 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
5252 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
5253 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
5254 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005255
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005256- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005257 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
5258 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
5259
5260 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
5261
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005262- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00005263 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
5264
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005265Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005266-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005267
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005268- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00005269 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
5270 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005271
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00005272- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
5273 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
5274 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
5275 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
5276 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
5277 in this area anymore).
5278
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00005279- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
5280 threading.Timer.
5281
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00005282- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
5283 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
5284
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005285- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005286 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
5287
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005288- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00005289 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
5290 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
5291 converted to Python longs.
5292
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005293- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005294 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
5295
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00005296- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
5297 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
5298 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
5299
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005300Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005301-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005302
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005303- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
5304 division operators as per PEP 238.
5305
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005306Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005307-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005308
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005309- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
5310 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
5311 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
5312 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
5313
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005314C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005315-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005316
5317- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005318
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005319- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
5320 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005321 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005322
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005323 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
5324 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005325 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005326 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005327
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005328- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005329 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
5330 module:
5331
5332 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005333
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005334 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
5335 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005336
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005337 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
5338 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005339
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005340 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
5341
5342 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
5343
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005344- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005345 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
5346 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
5347 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005348
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005349New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005350-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005351
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00005352- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
5353 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
5354 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
5355 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
5356 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005357
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005358Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005359-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005360
5361Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005362-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005363
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005364- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
5365 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
5366 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
5367 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00005368 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
5369 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
5370 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
5371 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
5372 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005373
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005374- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00005375 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
5376
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005377
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005378What's New in Python 2.2a2?
5379===========================
5380
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005381*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
5382
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005383Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005384-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005385
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00005386- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
5387 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
5388
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005389- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
5390 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
5391 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005392
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00005393- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
5394 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
5395 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
5396 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005397
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005398- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
5399
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005400- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005401
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005402Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005403-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005404
5405- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00005406 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005407 the module docstring for details.
5408
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005409Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005410-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005411
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005412- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005413 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
5414 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
5415 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005416
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005417- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
5418 Nick Mathewson.
5419
5420Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005421----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005422
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005423- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
5424 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
5425 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
5426 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
5427 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
5428 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
5429 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
5430 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
5431
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00005432- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
5433 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
5434 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
5435 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
5436
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00005437- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
5438 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
5439 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
5440 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
5441 come a long way).
5442
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005443- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
5444 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
5445 write filters for these warnings).
5446
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00005447- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
5448 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
5449 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
5450 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
5451 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
5452
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00005453- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
5454 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
5455 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
5456 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
5457 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
5458 older distribution.
5459
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005460Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005461-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005462
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005463- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
5464 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005465 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005466
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005467- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
5468 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
5469 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
5470
5471- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
5472
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005473- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
5474
5475- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
5476
5477- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
5478
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005479- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005480
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00005481- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
5482
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005483New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005484-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005485
5486C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005487-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005488
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005489- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
5490 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
5491 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
5492 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
5493 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
5494 against buffer overruns.
5495
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005496- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005497 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
5498 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005499 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
5500 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
5501 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
5502
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005503- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
5504 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
5505 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
5506 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
5507 deprecated.
5508
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005509Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005510-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005511
5512- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
5513 relevant is found.
5514
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005515
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005516What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005517===========================
5518
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005519*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
5520
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005521Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005522----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005523
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005524- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
5525 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
5526 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
5527 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
5528 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
5529 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
5530 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
5531 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005532 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005533 repaired.
5534
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005535- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00005536 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005537 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
5538 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
5539 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
5540 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
5541 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
5542 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
5543 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
5544 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
5545
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00005546- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
5547 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
5548 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
5549 leading BMO character).
5550
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005551- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
5552 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
5553 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
5554
5555 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
5556 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
5557 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005558
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005559 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
5560 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
5561 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
5562 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
5563 for various simple to use conversions.
5564
5565 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
5566 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
5567
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005568 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5569 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
5570 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
5571 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
5572 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5573 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
5574 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5575 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
5576 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5577 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
5578 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5579 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
5580 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5581 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
5582 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005583
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005584- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
5585 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
5586 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005587 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005588 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005589
5590 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005591 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
5592 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
5593 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
5594 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
5595 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005596 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
5597 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005598
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005599 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
5600 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
5601 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005602 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005603
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00005604- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
5605 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
5606 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
5607 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
5608 floating arithmetic,
5609
5610 x = 9007199254740992.0
5611 print long(x)
5612
5613 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
5614 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
5615 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
5616 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
5617 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
5618 functions are of good quality).
5619
5620 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
5621 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
5622 algorithms to break.
5623
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00005624- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
5625 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
5626 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
5627 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
5628 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
5629 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
5630 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
5631 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
5632 order.
5633
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005634- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
5635 operation along the most common code paths.
5636
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005637- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
5638 the same as dict.has_key(x).
5639
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00005640- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
5641 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
5642 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
5643 {}.update(UserDict())
5644
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005645- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
5646 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
5647 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
5648 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
5649 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
5650 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
5651 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
5652 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
5653
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005654- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005655 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005656
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005657 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00005658 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
5659 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00005660 join() method of strings
5661 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005662 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
5663 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005664 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00005665 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005666
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00005667- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
5668 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
5669
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005670- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
5671 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
5672
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00005673- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
5674 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
5675 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
5676 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
5677
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005678- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
5679 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005680 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005681 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
5682 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00005683
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00005684- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
5685
5686
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005687Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005688-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005689
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005690- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005691 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005692 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
5693 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
5694
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00005695- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
5696 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
5697
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00005698- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
5699 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
5700 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
5701 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
5702
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00005703- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
5704 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
5705 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
5706
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00005707- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
5708
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00005709- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
5710
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00005711- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
5712 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
5713 that are still imported into string.py).
5714
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005715- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
5716
5717- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
5718 Now it does.
5719
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005720- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
5721
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005722- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
5723 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
5724 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
5725 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
5726 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005727 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
5728 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005729
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00005730- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
5731 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
5732 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
5733 'help(object)'.
5734
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005735Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005736-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005737
5738- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005739 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005740 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
5741 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
5742
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005743- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005744 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
5745 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005746
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005747C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005748-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005749
5750- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
5751 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005752
5753----
5754
5755**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**