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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
Skip Montanarof8948ca2005-09-19 03:54:46 +000015- test__locale is skipped on OS X < 10.4 (only partial locale support is
16present).
17
Georg Brandl80bbf3f2005-09-14 19:38:29 +000018- SF bug #893549: parsing keyword arguments was broken with a few format
19 codes.
20
Guido van Rossum8ee3e5a2005-09-14 18:09:42 +000021- Changes donated by Elemental Security to make it work on AIX 5.3
22 with IBM's 64-bit compiler (SF patch #1284289). This also closes SF
23 bug #105470: test_pwd fails on 64bit system (Opteron).
24
Guido van Rossum539c6622005-09-14 17:49:54 +000025- Changes donated by Elemental Security to make it work on HP-UX 11 on
26 Itanium2 with HP's 64-bit compiler (SF patch #1225212).
27
Georg Brandl4550b8d2005-08-26 06:43:52 +000028- Disallow keyword arguments for type constructors that don't use them
Georg Brandl02c42872005-08-26 06:42:30 +000029 (fixes bug #1119418).
30
Martin v. Löwisd35edda2005-08-24 08:39:24 +000031- Forward UnicodeDecodeError into SyntaxError for source encoding errors.
32
Barry Warsawe2eca0b2005-08-15 18:14:19 +000033- SF bug #900092: When tracing (e.g. for hotshot), restore 'return' events for
34 exceptions that cause a function to exit.
35
Raymond Hettinger9f1a6792005-07-31 01:16:36 +000036- The implementation of set() and frozenset() was revised to use its
37 own internal data structure. Memory consumption is reduced by 1/3
38 and there are modest speed-ups as well. The API is unchanged.
39
Tim Petersde7990b2005-07-17 23:45:23 +000040- SF bug #1238681: freed pointer is used in longobject.c:long_pow().
41
Michael W. Hudson0edc7a02005-07-12 10:21:19 +000042- SF bug #1229429: PyObject_CallMethod failed to decrement some
43 reference counts in some error exit cases.
44
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +000045- SF bug #1185883: Python's small-object memory allocator took over
46 a block managed by the platform C library whenever a realloc specified
47 a small new size. However, there's no portable way to know then how
48 much of the address space following the pointer is valid, so no
49 portable way to copy data from the C-managed block into Python's
50 small-object space without risking a memory fault. Python's small-object
51 realloc now leaves such blocks under the control of the platform C
52 realloc.
53
Michael W. Hudsonb8963812005-07-05 15:21:58 +000054- SF bug #1232517: An overflow error was not detected properly when
55 attempting to convert a large float to an int in os.utime().
56
Raymond Hettinger3296e692005-06-29 23:29:56 +000057- SF bug #1224347: hex longs now print with lowercase letters just
58 like their int counterparts.
59
Michael W. Hudson188d4362005-06-20 16:52:57 +000060- SF bug #1163563: the original fix for bug #1010677 ("thread Module
61 Breaks PyGILState_Ensure()") broke badly in the case of multiple
62 interpreter states; back out that fix and do a better job (see
63 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2005-June/054258.html
64 for a longer write-up of the problem).
65
Michael W. Hudsondf888462005-06-03 14:41:55 +000066- SF patch #1180995: marshal now uses a binary format by default when
67 serializing floats.
68
Michael W. Hudsonda85a902005-06-01 11:34:22 +000069- SF patch #1181301: on platforms that appear to use IEEE 754 floats,
70 the routines that promise to produce IEEE 754 binary representations
71 of floats now simply copy bytes around.
72
Skip Montanarobbf12ba2005-05-20 03:07:06 +000073- bug #967182: disallow opening files with 'wU' or 'aU' as specified by PEP
74 278.
75
Brett Cannonc3647ac2005-04-26 03:45:26 +000076- patch #1109424: int, long, float, complex, and unicode now check for the
77 proper magic slot for type conversions when subclassed. Previously the
78 magic slot was ignored during conversion. Semantics now match the way
79 subclasses of str always behaved. int/long/float, conversion of an instance
Walter Dörwald78a78b02005-09-01 12:04:29 +000080 to the base class has been moved to the proper nb_* magic slot and out of
Brett Cannonc3647ac2005-04-26 03:45:26 +000081 PyNumber_*().
82 Thanks Walter Dörwald.
83
Barry Warsawc8d907c2005-04-19 23:43:40 +000084- Descriptors defined in C with a PyGetSetDef structure, where the setter is
85 NULL, now raise an AttributeError when attempting to set or delete the
86 attribute. Previously a TypeError was raised, but this was inconsistent
87 with the equivalent pure-Python implementation.
88
Michael W. Hudson774479c2005-04-18 08:46:17 +000089- It is now safe to call PyGILState_Release() before
90 PyEval_InitThreads() (note that if there is reason to believe there
91 are multiple threads around you still must call PyEval_InitThreads()
92 before using the Python API; this fix is for extension modules that
93 have no way of knowing if Python is multi-threaded yet).
94
Michael W. Hudsone3afc592005-04-07 10:11:19 +000095- Typing Ctrl-C whilst raw_input() was waiting in a build with threads
96 disabled caused a crash.
97
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +000098- Bug #1165306: instancemethod_new allowed the creation of a method
99 with im_class == im_self == NULL, which caused a crash when called.
100
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000101- Move exception finalisation later in the shutdown process - this
Anthony Baxter12b6f6c2005-03-29 13:36:16 +0000102 fixes the crash seen in bug #1165761
103
Raymond Hettinger96229b12005-03-11 06:49:40 +0000104- Added two new builtins, any() and all().
105
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +0000106- Defining a class with empty parentheses is now allowed
Brett Cannonf4189912005-04-09 02:30:16 +0000107 (e.g., ``class C(): pass`` is no longer a syntax error).
108 Patch #1176012 added support to the 'parser' module and 'compiler' package
109 (thanks to logistix for that added support).
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +0000110
Martin v. Löwis96d743e2005-03-03 23:00:26 +0000111- Patch #1115086: Support PY_LONGLONG in structmember.
112
Raymond Hettingerb67cc802005-03-03 16:45:19 +0000113- Bug #1155938: new style classes did not check that __init__() was
114 returning None.
115
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000116- Patch #802188: Report characters after line continuation character
Martin v. Löwis4bf108d2005-03-03 11:45:45 +0000117 ('\') with a specific error message.
118
Martin v. Löwisff232d72005-03-03 09:24:38 +0000119- Bug #723201: Raise a TypeError for passing bad objects to 'L' format.
120
Michael W. Hudson8e1afab2005-02-17 14:55:21 +0000121- Bug #1124295: the __name__ attribute of file objects was
122 inadvertently made inaccessible in restricted mode.
123
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000124- Bug #1074011: closing sys.std{out,err} now causes a flush() and
Martin v. Löwis8e3ca8a2005-01-23 09:41:49 +0000125 an ferror() call.
126
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000127- min() and max() now support key= arguments with the same meaning as in
128 list.sort().
129
Raymond Hettingerc34f8672005-01-02 06:17:33 +0000130- The peephole optimizer now performs simple constant folding in expressions:
131 (2+3) --> (5).
132
Raymond Hettingera422c342005-01-11 03:03:27 +0000133- set and frozenset objects can now be marshalled. SF #1098985.
134
Michael W. Hudsonfaa76482005-01-31 17:09:25 +0000135- Bug #1077106: Poor argument checking could cause memory corruption
136 in calls to os.read().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000137
Jeremy Hyltonab630502005-02-04 18:44:06 +0000138- The parser did not complain about future statements in illegal
139 positions. It once again reports a syntax error if a future
140 statement occurs after anything other than a doc string.
141
Neil Schemenauercf52c072005-08-12 17:34:58 +0000142- Change the %s format specifier for str objects so that it returns a
143 unicode instance if the argument is not an instance of basestring and
144 calling __str__ on the argument returns a unicode instance.
145
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000146Extension Modules
147-----------------
148
Martin v. Löwis8b291e22005-09-18 08:17:56 +0000149- Patch #1213831: Fix typo in unicodedata._getcode.
150
Georg Brandlfb1ef852005-09-14 20:53:32 +0000151- Bug #1007046: os.startfile() did not accept unicode strings encoded in
152 the file system encoding.
153
Georg Brandld2e3ba72005-08-26 08:34:00 +0000154- Patch #756021: Special-case socket.inet_aton('255.255.255.255') for
155 platforms that don't have inet_aton().
Georg Brandl02760f92005-08-25 13:10:41 +0000156
Georg Brandld2e3ba72005-08-26 08:34:00 +0000157- Bug #1215928: Fix bz2.BZ2File.seek() for 64-bit file offsets.
158
159- Bug #1191043: Fix bz2.BZ2File.(x)readlines for files containing one
Georg Brandl02760f92005-08-25 13:10:41 +0000160 line without newlines.
161
Georg Brandl38387b82005-08-24 07:17:40 +0000162- Bug #728515: mmap.resize() now resizes the file on Unix as it did
163 on Windows.
164
Martin v. Löwisebd9d5b2005-08-09 15:00:59 +0000165- Patch #1180695: Add nanosecond stat resolution, and st_gen,
166 st_birthtime for FreeBSD.
167
Michael W. Hudson8137bea2005-07-27 20:24:40 +0000168- Patch #1231069: The fcntl.ioctl function now uses the 'I' code for
169 the request code argument, which results in more C-like behaviour
170 for large or negative values.
171
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000172- Bug #1234979: For the argument of thread.Lock.acquire, the Windows
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000173 implementation treated all integer values except 1 as false.
Georg Brandlaf410b52005-07-08 22:26:13 +0000174
Georg Brandl6b95f1d2005-06-03 19:47:00 +0000175- Bug #1194181: bz2.BZ2File didn't handle mode 'U' correctly.
176
Hye-Shik Chang5f937a72005-06-02 13:09:30 +0000177- Patch #1212117: os.stat().st_flags is now accessible as a attribute
178 if available on the platform.
179
Skip Montanaro5ff14922005-05-16 02:42:22 +0000180- Patch #1103951: Expose O_SHLOCK and O_EXLOCK in the posix module if
181 available on the platform.
182
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +0000183- Bug #1166660: The readline module could segfault if hook functions
184 were set in a different thread than that which called readline.
185
Raymond Hettinger4aec61e2005-03-18 21:20:23 +0000186- collections.deque objects now support a remove() method.
187
Raymond Hettinger984f9bb2005-03-09 16:38:48 +0000188- operator.itemgetter() and operator.attrgetter() now support retrieving
189 multiple fields. This provides direct support for sorting on multiple
190 keys (primary, secondary, etc).
191
Martin v. Löwisb60ae992005-03-08 09:10:29 +0000192- os.access now supports Unicode path names on non-Win32 systems.
193
Martin v. Löwisfd78a6f2005-03-04 14:37:01 +0000194- Patches #925152, #1118602: Avoid reading after the end of the buffer
195 in pyexpat.GetInputContext.
196
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000197- Patches #749830, #1144555: allow UNIX mmap size to default to current
Martin v. Löwis7fe60c02005-03-03 11:22:44 +0000198 file size.
199
Raymond Hettinger9c323f82005-02-28 19:39:44 +0000200- Added functional.partial(). See PEP309.
201
Martin v. Löwis9533e342005-02-27 20:33:25 +0000202- Patch #1093585: raise a ValueError for negative history items in readline.
203 {remove_history,replace_history}
204
Fred Drake9c131f22005-01-23 15:16:08 +0000205- The spwd module has been added, allowing access to the shadow password
206 database.
Martin v. Löwisc3001752005-01-23 09:27:24 +0000207
Martin v. Löwisfe33d0b2005-01-16 08:57:39 +0000208- stat_float_times is now True.
209
Raymond Hettingerb0900e62004-12-16 16:23:40 +0000210- array.array objects are now picklable.
211
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000212- the cPickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
213 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
214
Raymond Hettingerb2594052004-12-05 09:25:51 +0000215- itertools.islice() now accepts None for the start and step arguments.
216 This allows islice() to work more readily with slices:
217 islice(s.start, s.stop, s.step)
218
Skip Montanaro0af3ade2005-01-13 04:12:31 +0000219- datetime.datetime() now has a strptime class method which can be used to
220 create datetime object using a string and format.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000221
222Library
223-------
224
Martin v. Löwis4ed67382005-09-18 08:34:39 +0000225- Patch #1268314: Cache lines in StreamReader.readlines for performance.
226
Brett Cannona783d062005-09-15 02:34:56 +0000227- Bug #1290505: Fix clearing the regex cache for time.strptime().
228
Martin v. Löwis5dbdc592005-08-27 10:07:56 +0000229- Bug #1167128: Fix size of a symlink in a tarfile to be 0.
230
Georg Brandl5a650a22005-08-26 08:51:34 +0000231- Patch #810023: Fix off-by-one bug in urllib.urlretrieve reporthook
232 functionality.
233
Martin v. Löwis8b595142005-08-25 11:03:38 +0000234- Bug #1163178: Make IDNA return an empty string when the input is empty.
235
Georg Brandl532efab2005-08-24 22:34:21 +0000236- Patch #848017: Make Cookie more RFC-compliant. Use CRLF as default output
237 separator and do not output trailing semicola.
238
Georg Brandlb9256022005-08-24 18:46:39 +0000239- Patch #1062060: urllib.urlretrieve() now raises a new exception, named
240 ContentTooShortException, when the actually downloaded size does not
241 match the Content-Length header.
242
Martin v. Löwis0a5d4a22005-08-24 14:55:22 +0000243- Bug #1121494: distutils.dir_utils.mkpath now accepts Unicode strings.
244
Martin v. Löwis56066d22005-08-24 07:38:12 +0000245- Bug #1178484: Return complete lines from codec stream readers
246 even if there is an exception in later lines, resulting in
247 correct line numbers for decoding errors in source code.
248
Georg Brandl6d2b3462005-08-24 07:36:17 +0000249- Bug #1192315: Disallow negative arguments to clear() in pdb.
250
Martin v. Löwisb813c532005-08-07 20:51:04 +0000251- Patch #827386: Support absolute source paths in msvccompiler.py.
252
Georg Brandl649f8e72005-08-03 07:30:12 +0000253- Patch #1105730: Apply the new implementation of commonprefix in posixpath
254 to ntpath, macpath, os2emxpath and riscospath.
255
Guido van Rossum755149f2005-07-27 00:00:44 +0000256- Fix a problem in Tkinter introduced by SF patch #869468: delete bogus
257 __hasattr__ and __delattr__ methods on class Tk that were breaking
258 Tkdnd.
259
Georg Brandl5dbda752005-07-17 20:27:41 +0000260- Bug #1015140: disambiguated the term "article id" in nntplib docs and
261 docstrings to either "article number" or "message id".
262
Georg Brandla4a8b822005-07-15 09:13:21 +0000263- Bug #1238170: threading.Thread.__init__ no longer has "kwargs={}" as a
264 parameter, but uses the usual "kwargs=None".
265
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000266- textwrap now processes text chunks at O(n) speed instead of O(n**2).
Raymond Hettinger8bfa8932005-07-15 06:53:35 +0000267 Patch #1209527 (Contributed by Connelly).
268
Georg Brandl5c5fe2f2005-07-14 06:40:47 +0000269- urllib2 has now an attribute 'httpresponses' mapping from HTTP status code
270 to W3C name (404 -> 'Not Found'). RFE #1216944.
271
Georg Brandl9e43acf2005-07-04 17:16:07 +0000272- Bug #1177468: Don't cache the /dev/urandom file descriptor for os.urandom,
273 as this can cause problems with apps closing all file descriptors.
274
Georg Brandl5284b532005-06-26 22:54:58 +0000275- Bug #839151: Fix an attempt to access sys.argv in the warnings module
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000276 it can be missing in embedded interpreters
Georg Brandl5284b532005-06-26 22:54:58 +0000277
Georg Brandl2f210b62005-06-26 22:09:06 +0000278- Bug #1155638: Fix a bug which affected HTTP 0.9 responses in httplib.
279
Georg Brandlfbff1bc2005-06-26 21:36:25 +0000280- Bug #1100201: Cross-site scripting was possible on BaseHTTPServer via
281 error messages.
282
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000283- Bug #1108948: Cookie.py produced invalid JavaScript code.
284
Raymond Hettingerda99d1c2005-06-21 07:43:58 +0000285- The tokenize module now detects and reports indentation errors.
286 Bug #1224621.
287
Raymond Hettinger68c04532005-06-10 11:05:19 +0000288- The tokenize module has a new untokenize() function to support a full
289 roundtrip from lexed tokens back to Python sourcecode. In addition,
290 the generate_tokens() function now accepts a callable argument that
291 terminates by raising StopIteration.
292
Georg Brandl9166e1a2005-06-04 09:20:03 +0000293- Bug #1196315: fix weakref.WeakValueDictionary constructor.
294
Georg Brandl268e61c2005-06-03 14:28:50 +0000295- Bug #1213894: os.path.realpath didn't resolve symlinks that were the first
296 component of the path.
297
Skip Montanaro174dd222005-05-14 20:54:16 +0000298- Patch #1120353: The xmlrpclib module provides better, more transparent,
299 support for datetime.{datetime,date,time} objects. With use_datetime set
300 to True, applications shouldn't have to fiddle with the DateTime wrapper
301 class at all.
302
Martin v. Löwis55f1bb82005-03-21 20:56:35 +0000303- distutils.commands.upload was added to support uploading distribution
304 files to PyPI.
305
Walter Dörwalda6e8a4a2005-03-31 13:57:38 +0000306- distutils.commands.register now encodes the data as UTF-8 before posting
307 them to PyPI.
308
Raymond Hettinger267b8682005-03-27 10:47:39 +0000309- decimal operator and comparison methods now return NotImplemented
310 instead of raising a TypeError when interacting with other types. This
311 allows other classes to implement __radd__ style methods and have them
312 work as expected.
313
Raymond Hettingerbea3f6f2005-03-15 04:59:17 +0000314- Bug #1163325: Decimal infinities failed to hash. Attempting to
315 hash a NaN raised an InvalidOperation instead of a TypeError.
316
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000317- Patch #918101: Add tarfile open mode r|* for auto-detection of the
Martin v. Löwis78be7df2005-03-05 12:47:42 +0000318 stream compression; add, for symmetry reasons, r:* as a synonym of r.
319
Martin v. Löwis00a73e72005-03-04 19:40:34 +0000320- Patch #1043890: Add extractall method to tarfile.
321
Martin v. Löwisc72dd382005-03-04 13:50:17 +0000322- Patch #1075887: Don't require MSVC in distutils if there is nothing
323 to build.
324
Martin v. Löwis637431b2005-03-03 23:12:42 +0000325- Patch #1103407: Properly deal with tarfile iterators when untarring
326 symbolic links on Windows.
327
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000328- Patch #645894: Use getrusage for computing the time consumption in
Martin v. Löwisa4dac402005-03-03 11:39:45 +0000329 profile.py if available.
330
Martin v. Löwisdf37c8c2005-03-03 11:08:03 +0000331- Patch #1046831: Use get_python_version where appropriate in sysconfig.py.
332
Martin v. Löwisc5574e82005-03-03 10:57:37 +0000333- Patch #1117454: Remove code to special-case cookies without values
334 in LWPCookieJar.
335
Martin v. Löwis4ea3ead2005-03-03 10:48:12 +0000336- Patch #1117339: Add cookielib special name tests.
337
Martin v. Löwise869eb12005-03-03 09:46:07 +0000338- Patch #1112812: Make bsddb/__init__.py more friendly for modulefinder.
339
Martin v. Löwisf2a8d632005-03-03 08:35:22 +0000340- Patch #1110248: SYNC_FLUSH the zlib buffer for GZipFile.flush.
341
Martin v. Löwisdf241532005-03-03 08:17:42 +0000342- Patch #1107973: Allow to iterate over the lines of a tarfile.ExFileObject.
343
Martin v. Löwis8ed338a2005-03-03 08:12:27 +0000344- Patch #1104111: Alter setup.py --help and --help-commands.
345
Martin v. Löwis4afe1542005-03-01 08:09:28 +0000346- Patch #1121234: Properly cleanup _exit and tkerror commands.
347
Martin v. Löwisc2a0ac22005-02-24 20:22:10 +0000348- Patch #1049151: xdrlib now unpacks booleans as True or False.
349
Raymond Hettingerbab41432005-02-05 01:31:19 +0000350- Fixed bug in a NameError bug in cookielib. Patch #1116583.
351
Guido van Rossumd0641422005-02-03 15:01:24 +0000352- Applied a security fix to SimpleXMLRPCserver (PSF-2005-001). This
353 disables recursive traversal through instance attributes, which can
354 be exploited in various ways.
355
Martin v. Löwis1d11de62005-01-29 13:29:23 +0000356- Bug #1110478: Revert os.environ.update to do putenv again.
357
Thomas Hellerd6c6e222005-01-20 19:20:16 +0000358- Bug #1103844: fix distutils.install.dump_dirs() with negated options.
359
Martin v. Löwis22b457e2005-01-16 08:40:58 +0000360- os.{SEEK_SET, SEEK_CUR, SEEK_END} have been added for convenience.
361
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000362- Enhancements to the csv module:
363
364 + Dialects are now validated by the underlying C code, better
Georg Brandl7eb4b7d2005-07-22 21:49:32 +0000365 reflecting its capabilities, and improving its compliance with
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000366 PEP 305.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000367 + Dialect parameter parsing has been re-implemented to improve error
368 reporting.
369 + quotechar=None and quoting=QUOTE_NONE now work the way PEP 305
370 dictates.
371 + the parser now removes the escapechar prefix from escaped characters.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000372 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the writer now tests for numeric
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000373 types, rather than any object than can be represented as a numeric.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000374 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the reader now casts unquoted fields
375 to floats.
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000376 + reader now allows \r characters to be quoted (previously it only allowed
377 \n to be quoted).
Andrew McNamarac89f2842005-01-12 07:44:42 +0000378 + writer doublequote handling improved.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000379 + Dialect classes passed to the module are no longer instantiated by
380 the module before being parsed (the former validation scheme required
381 this, but the mechanism was unreliable).
382 + The dialect registry now contains instances of the internal
383 C-coded dialect type, rather than references to python objects.
384 + the internal c-coded dialect type is now immutable.
385 + register_dialect now accepts the same keyword dialect specifications
386 as the reader and writer, allowing the user to register dialects
387 without first creating a dialect class.
388 + a configurable limit to the size of parsed fields has been added -
389 previously, an unmatched quote character could result in the entire
390 file being read into the field buffer before an error was reported.
Andrew McNamara31d88962005-01-12 03:45:10 +0000391 + A new module method csv.field_size_limit() has been added that sets
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000392 the parser field size limit (returning the former limit). The initial
393 limit is 128kB.
Andrew McNamara7f2053e2005-01-12 11:17:16 +0000394 + A line_num attribute has been added to the reader object, which tracks
395 the number of lines read from the source iterator. This is not
396 the same as the number of records returned, as records can span
397 multiple lines.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000398 + reader and writer objects were not being registered with the cyclic-GC.
399 This has been fixed.
400
Brett Cannone6539c42005-01-08 02:43:53 +0000401- _DummyThread objects in the threading module now delete self.__block that is
402 inherited from _Thread since it uses up a lock allocated by 'thread'. The
403 lock primitives tend to be limited in number and thus should not be wasted on
404 a _DummyThread object. Fixes bug #1089632.
405
Raymond Hettinger97db05d2005-01-07 08:15:41 +0000406- The imghdr module now detects Exif files.
407
Raymond Hettinger6065d322004-12-20 23:51:53 +0000408- StringIO.truncate() now correctly adjusts the size attribute.
409 (Bug #951915).
410
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000411- locale.py now uses an updated locale alias table (built using
412 Tools/i18n/makelocalealias.py, a tool to parse the X11 locale
413 alias file); the encoding lookup was enhanced to use Python's
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000414 encoding alias table.
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000415
Raymond Hettinger3557f422004-12-07 12:02:02 +0000416- moved deprecated modules to Lib/lib-old: whrandom, tzparse, statcache.
417
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000418- the pickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
419 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
420
Brett Cannon84667c02004-12-07 03:25:18 +0000421- optparse now optionally imports gettext. This allows its use in setup.py.
422
Raymond Hettinger3489cad2004-12-05 05:20:42 +0000423- the pickle module no longer uses the deprecated bin parameter.
424
Raymond Hettinger1bc82f82004-12-05 03:58:17 +0000425- the shelve module no longer uses the deprecated binary parameter.
426
Raymond Hettinger6c92d762004-12-05 03:28:00 +0000427- the pstats module no longer uses the deprecated ignore() method.
428
Raymond Hettingerf3fa9462004-12-05 01:58:09 +0000429- the filecmp module no longer uses the deprecated use_statcache argument.
430
Raymond Hettinger664347b2004-12-04 21:21:53 +0000431- unittest.TestCase.run() and unittest.TestSuite.run() can now be successfully
432 extended or overridden by subclasses. Formerly, the subclassed method would
433 be ignored by the rest of the module. (Bug #1078905).
434
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000435- heapq.nsmallest() and heapq.nlargest() now support key= arguments with
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000436 the same meaning as in list.sort().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000437
Walter Dörwald36733692004-12-22 12:50:50 +0000438- Bug #1076985: ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` now calls ``read()`` only
439 once when a size argument is given. This prevents a buffer overflow in the
440 tokenizer with very long source lines.
441
Andrew M. Kuchling3b585b32004-12-28 20:10:48 +0000442- Bug #1083110: ``zlib.decompress.flush()`` would segfault if called immediately
443 after creating the object, without any intervening ``.decompress()`` calls.
444
Skip Montanaro05885812005-01-16 20:48:27 +0000445- The reconvert.quote function can now emit triple-quoted strings. The
446 reconvert module now has some simple documentation.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000447
Walter Dörwaldaf3b39a2005-02-18 13:22:43 +0000448- ``UserString.MutableString`` now supports negative indices in
449 ``__setitem__`` and ``__delitem__``
450
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000451- Bug #1149508: ``textwrap`` now handles hyphenated numbers (eg. "2004-03-05")
452 correctly.
453
Walter Dörwaldbc8e6422005-04-21 21:32:03 +0000454- Partial fixes for SF bugs #1163244 and #1175396: If a chunk read by
455 ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` has a trailing "\r", read one more
456 character even if the user has passed a size parameter to get a proper
457 line ending. Remove the special handling of a "\r\n" that has been split
458 between two lines.
459
Walter Dörwalda47d1c02005-08-30 10:23:14 +0000460- Bug #1251300: On UCS-4 builds the "unicode-internal" codec will now complain
461 about illegal code points. The codec now supports PEP 293 style error
462 handlers.
463
Walter Dörwald78a78b02005-09-01 12:04:29 +0000464- Bug #1235646: ``codecs.StreamRecoder.next()`` now reencodes the data it reads
Walter Dörwaldc5238b82005-09-01 11:56:53 +0000465 from the input stream, so that the output is a byte string in the correct
466 encoding instead of a unicode string.
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000467
Gustavo Niemeyer6fa0c5a2005-09-14 08:54:39 +0000468- Bug #1202493: Fixing SRE parser to handle '{}' as perl does, rather than
469 considering it exactly like a '*'.
470
471
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000472Build
473-----
474
Martin v. Löwis147fbe52005-08-07 21:09:30 +0000475- Bug #1189330: configure did not correctly determine the necessary
476 value of LINKCC if python was built with GCC 4.0.
477
Trent Mick8321b422005-07-26 02:29:21 +0000478- Upgrade Windows build to zlib 1.2.3 which eliminates a potential security
479 vulnerability in zlib 1.2.1 and 1.2.2.
480
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000481- EXTRA_CFLAGS has been introduced as an environment variable to hold compiler
482 flags that change binary compatibility. Changes were also made to
483 distutils.sysconfig to also use the environment variable when used during
Martin v. Löwisd7c795e2005-04-25 07:14:03 +0000484 compilation of the interpreter and of C extensions through distutils.
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000485
Bob Ippolitoed233462005-03-29 13:47:59 +0000486- SF patch 1171735: Darwin 8's headers are anal about POSIX compliance,
487 and linking has changed (prebinding is now deprecated, and libcc_dynamic
488 no longer exists). This configure patch makes things right.
489
Martin v. Löwise2713be2005-03-08 15:03:08 +0000490- Bug #1158607: Build with --disable-unicode again.
491
Brett Cannon46d96232005-02-16 00:07:19 +0000492- spwdmodule.c is built only if either HAVE_GETSPNAM or HAVE_HAVE_GETSPENT is
493 defined. Discovered as a result of not being able to build on OS X.
494
Brett Cannon516592f2004-12-07 00:42:59 +0000495- setup.py now uses the directories specified in LDFLAGS using the -L option
496 and in CPPFLAGS using the -I option for adding library and include
497 directories, respectively, for compiling extension modules against. This has
498 led to the core being compiled using the values in CPPFLAGS. It also removes
499 the need for the special-casing of both DarwinPorts and Fink for darwin since
500 the proper directories can be specified in LDFLAGS (``-L/sw/lib`` for Fink,
501 ``-L/opt/local/lib`` for DarwinPorts) and CPPFLAGS (``-I/sw/include`` for
502 Fink, ``-I/opt/local/include`` for DarwinPorts).
503
Brett Cannon43802422005-02-10 20:48:03 +0000504- Test in configure.in that checks for tzset no longer dependent on tm->tm_zone
505 to exist in the struct (not required by either ISO C nor the UNIX 2 spec).
506 Tests for sanity in tzname when HAVE_TZNAME defined were also defined.
507 Closes bug #1096244. Thanks Gregory Bond.
508
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000509
510C API
511-----
512
Raymond Hettingerbeb31012005-08-16 03:47:52 +0000513- Added a C API for set and frozenset objects.
514
Raymond Hettinger66517482004-12-03 11:45:13 +0000515- Removed PyRange_New().
516
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000517
518Tests
519-----
520
Martin v. Löwis4d394df2005-01-23 09:19:22 +0000521- In test_os, st_?time is now truncated before comparing it with ST_?TIME.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000522
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000523
524Documentation
525-------------
526
Georg Brandl32252422005-09-14 20:42:00 +0000527- Bug #1274828: Document os.path.splitunc().
528
Georg Brandl79c122f2005-08-24 07:31:33 +0000529- Bug #1190204: Clarify which directories are searched by site.py.
530
Georg Brandl6f2bbd32005-08-24 07:26:55 +0000531- Bug #1193849: Clarify os.path.expanduser() documentation.
532
Georg Brandlf13c4ba2005-08-02 10:28:08 +0000533- Bug #1243192: re.UNICODE and re.LOCALE affect \d, \D, \s and \S.
534
Georg Brandl150db732005-07-18 08:53:17 +0000535- Bug #755617: Document the effects of os.chown() on Windows.
536
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000537- Patch #1180012: The documentation for modulefinder is now in the library reference.
538
539- Patch #1213031: Document that os.chown() accepts argument values of -1.
540
541- Bug #1190563: Document os.waitpid() return value with WNOHANG flag.
542
543- Bug #1175022: Correct the example code for property().
544
Georg Brandl40c71652005-06-25 21:08:46 +0000545- Document the IterableUserDict class in the UserDict module.
546 Closes bug #1166582.
547
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000548- Remove all latent references for "Macintosh" that referred to semantics for
549 Mac OS 9 and change to reflect the state for OS X.
550 Closes patch #1095802. Thanks Jack Jansen.
551
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000552Mac
553---
554
555
Hye-Shik Chang4e422812005-07-17 02:36:59 +0000556New platforms
557-------------
558
559- FreeBSD 7 support is added.
560
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000561
562Tools/Demos
563-----------
564
Georg Brandl56897312005-08-24 18:32:30 +0000565- Added two new files to Tools/scripts: pysource.py, which recursively
566 finds Python source files, and findnocoding.py, which finds Python
567 source files that need an encoding declaration.
568 Patch #784089, credits to Oleg Broytmann.
569
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000570- Bug #1072853: pindent.py used an uninitialized variable.
571
Martin v. Löwisab9ec162005-04-09 10:53:34 +0000572- Patch #1177597: Correct Complex.__init__.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000573
574
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000575What's New in Python 2.4 final?
576===============================
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000577
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000578*Release date: 30-NOV-2004*
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000579
580Core and builtins
581-----------------
582
583- Bug 875692: Improve signal handling, especially when using threads, by
584 forcing an early re-execution of PyEval_EvalFrame() "periodic" code when
585 things_to_do is not cleared by Py_MakePendingCalls().
586
587
Anthony Baxter4277ed82004-11-30 11:53:10 +0000588What's New in Python 2.4 (release candidate 1)
589==============================================
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000590
Anthony Baxter5cc727a2004-11-18 12:32:27 +0000591*Release date: 18-NOV-2004*
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000592
593Core and builtins
594-----------------
595
Tim Petersfb1ffb02004-11-08 04:30:21 +0000596- Bug 1061968: Fixes in 2.4a3 to address thread bug 1010677 reintroduced
597 the years-old thread shutdown race bug 225673. Numeric history lesson
598 aside, all bugs in all three reports are fixed now.
599
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000600
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000601Library
602-------
603
604- Bug 1052242: If exceptions are raised by an atexit handler function an
605 attempt is made to execute the remaining handlers. The last exception
606 raised is re-raised.
607
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000608- ``doctest``'s new support for adding ``pdb.set_trace()`` calls to
609 doctests was broken in a dramatic but shallow way. Fixed.
610
Tim Petersbbc0d442004-11-13 16:18:32 +0000611- Bug 1065388: ``calendar``'s ``day_name``, ``day_abbr``, ``month_name``,
612 and ``month_abbr`` attributes emulate sequences of locale-correct
613 spellings of month and day names. Because the locale can change at
614 any time, the correct spelling is recomputed whenever one of these is
615 indexed. In the worst case, the index may be a slice object, so these
616 recomputed every day or month name each time they were indexed. This is
617 much slower than necessary in the usual case, when the index is just an
618 integer. In that case, only the single spelling needed is recomputed
619 now; and, when the index is a slice object, only the spellings needed
620 by the slice are recomputed now.
621
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000622- Patch 1061679: Added ``__all__`` to pickletools.py.
Tim Peters90cf2122004-11-06 23:45:48 +0000623
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000624Build
625-----
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000626
Brett Cannon7d28e962004-11-07 01:19:00 +0000627- Bug 1034277 / Patch 1035255: Remove compilation of core against CoreServices
628 and CoreFoundation on OS X. Involved removing PyMac_GetAppletScriptFile()
629 which has no known users. Thanks Bob Ippolito.
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000630
631C API
632-----
633
Raymond Hettinger39e92ea2004-11-18 09:41:45 +0000634- The PyRange_New() function is deprecated.
635
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000636
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000637What's New in Python 2.4 beta 2?
638================================
639
Anthony Baxter9f41f3a2004-11-03 06:21:37 +0000640*Release date: 03-NOV-2004*
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000641
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000642License
643-------
644
645The Python Software Foundation changed the license under which Python
646is released, to remove Python version numbers. There were no other
647changes to the license. So, for example, wherever the license for
648Python 2.3 said "Python 2.3", the new license says "Python". The
649intent is to make it possible to refer to the PSF license in a more
650durable way. For example, some people say they're confused by that
651the Open Source Initiative's entry for the Python Software Foundation
652License::
653
654 http://www.opensource.org/licenses/PythonSoftFoundation.php
655
656says "Python 2.1.1" all over it, wondering whether it applies only
657to Python 2.1.1.
658
659The official name of the new license is the Python Software Foundation
660License Version 2.
661
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000662Core and builtins
663-----------------
664
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +0000665- Bug #1055820 Cyclic garbage collection was not protecting against that
666 calling a live weakref to a piece of cyclic trash could resurrect an
667 insane mutation of the trash if any Python code ran during gc (via
668 running a dead object's __del__ method, running another callback on a
669 weakref to a dead object, or via any Python code run in any other thread
670 that managed to obtain the GIL while a __del__ or callback was running
671 in the thread doing gc). The most likely symptom was "impossible"
672 ``AttributeEror`` exceptions, appearing seemingly at random, on weakly
673 referenced objects. The cure was to clear all weakrefs to unreachable
674 objects before allowing any callbacks to run.
675
Raymond Hettinger561fbf12004-10-26 01:52:37 +0000676- Bug #1054139 _PyString_Resize() now invalidates its cached hash value.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000677
678Extension Modules
679-----------------
680
Raymond Hettinger9047c8f2004-10-24 00:10:06 +0000681- Bug #1048870: the compiler now generates distinct code objects for
682 functions with identical bodies. This was producing confusing
683 traceback messages which pointed to the function where the code
684 object was first defined rather than the function being executed.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000685
686Library
687-------
688
Barry Warsaw8c72eae2004-11-01 03:52:43 +0000689- Patch #1056967 changes the semantics of Template.safe_substitute() so that
690 no ValueError is raised on an 'invalid' match group. Now the delimiter is
691 returned.
692
Raymond Hettinger2ef7e6c2004-10-24 00:32:24 +0000693- Bug #1052503 pdb.runcall() was not passing along keyword arguments.
694
Raymond Hettingerc64aab82004-10-20 08:21:57 +0000695- Bug #902037: XML.sax.saxutils.prepare_input_source() now combines relative
696 paths with a base path before checking os.path.isfile().
697
Raymond Hettingere54e7262004-10-20 07:17:16 +0000698- The whichdb module can now be run from the command line.
699
Brett Cannon8abcc5d2004-10-18 01:37:57 +0000700- Bug #1045381: time.strptime() can now infer the date using %U or %W (week of
701 the year) when the day of the week and year are also specified.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000702
Andrew M. Kuchling0d19bae2004-10-19 19:54:41 +0000703- Bug #1048816: fix bug in Ctrl-K at start of line in curses.textpad.Textbox
704
Andrew M. Kuchling66e80ba2004-10-20 11:56:15 +0000705- Bug #1017553: fix bug in tarfile.filemode()
706
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000707- Patch #737473: fix bug that old source code is shown in tracebacks even if
Hye-Shik Chang182ac852004-10-26 09:16:42 +0000708 the source code is updated and reloaded.
709
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000710Build
711-----
712
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000713- Patch #1044395: --enable-shared is allowed in FreeBSD also.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000714
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000715What's New in Python 2.4 beta 1?
716================================
717
Anthony Baxter6a587c12004-10-15 08:07:21 +0000718*Release date: 15-OCT-2004*
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000719
720Core and builtins
721-----------------
722
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000723- Patch #975056: Restartable signals were not correctly disabled on
Anthony Baxtere4f8a482004-10-13 14:55:56 +0000724 BSD systems. Consistently use PyOS_setsig() instead of signal().
725
Tim Peters263091e2004-10-10 01:58:44 +0000726- The internal portable implementation of thread-local storage (TLS), used
727 by the ``PyGILState_Ensure()``/``PyGILState_Release()`` API, was not
728 thread-correct. This could lead to a variety of problems, up to and
729 including segfaults. See bug 1041645 for an example.
730
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000731- Added a command line option, -m module, which searches sys.path for the
732 module and then runs it. (Contributed by Nick Coghlan.)
733
Raymond Hettinger2c31a052004-09-22 18:44:21 +0000734- The bytecode optimizer now folds tuples of constants into a single
735 constant.
736
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000737- SF bug #513866: Float/long comparison anomaly. Prior to 2.4b1, when
738 an integer was compared to a float, the integer was coerced to a float.
739 That could yield spurious overflow errors (if the integer was very
740 large), and to anomalies such as
741 ``long(1e200)+1 == 1e200 == long(1e200)-1``. Coercion to float is no
742 longer performed, and cases like ``long(1e200)-1 < 1e200``,
743 ``long(1e200)+1 > 1e200`` and ``(1 << 20000) > 1e200`` are computed
744 correctly now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000745
746Extension modules
747-----------------
748
Tim Peterscf8997f2004-10-01 02:13:16 +0000749- ``collections.deque`` objects didn't play quite right with garbage
750 collection, which could lead to a segfault in a release build, or
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000751 an assert failure in a debug build. Also, added overflow checks,
752 better detection of mutation during iteration, and shielded deque
753 comparisons from unusual subclass overrides of the __iter__() method.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000754
755Library
756-------
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000757
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000758- Patch 1046644: distutils build_ext grew two new options - --swig for
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000759 specifying the swig executable to use, and --swig-opts to specify
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000760 options to pass to swig. --swig-opts="-c++" is the new way to spell
761 --swig-cpp.
762
Anthony Baxter22dcf662004-10-13 15:54:17 +0000763- Patch 983206: distutils now obeys environment variable LDSHARED, if
764 it is set.
765
Andrew M. Kuchling518d3932004-10-12 15:32:10 +0000766- Added Peter Astrand's subprocess.py module. See PEP 324 for details.
Fredrik Lundh5b3687d2004-10-12 15:26:28 +0000767
Brett Cannon4f35c712004-10-06 02:11:37 +0000768- time.strptime() now properly escapes timezones and all other locale-specific
769 strings for regex-specific symbols. Was breaking under Japanese Windows when
770 the timezone was specified as "Tokyo (standard time)".
771 Closes bug #1039270.
772
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000773- Updates for the email package:
Brett Cannon06a30b02004-10-22 06:22:54 +0000774
Barry Warsaw418de1f2004-10-11 14:32:47 +0000775 + email.Utils.formatdate() grew a 'usegmt' argument for HTTP support.
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000776 + All deprecated APIs that in email 2.x issued warnings have been removed:
777 _encoder argument to the MIMEText constructor, Message.add_payload(),
778 Utils.dump_address_pair(), Utils.decode(), Utils.encode()
779 + New deprecations: Generator.__call__(), Message.get_type(),
780 Message.get_main_type(), Message.get_subtype(), the 'strict' argument to
781 the Parser constructor. These will be removed in email 3.1.
782 + Support for Python earlier than 2.3 has been removed (see PEP 291).
783 + All defect classes have been renamed to end in 'Defect'.
784 + Some FeedParser fixes; also a MultipartInvariantViolationDefect will be
785 added to messages that claim to be multipart but really aren't.
786 + Updates to documentation.
787
Raymond Hettinger596ba4d2004-09-24 03:41:05 +0000788- re's findall() and finditer() functions now take an optional flags argument
789 just like the compile(), search(), and match() functions. Also, documented
790 the previously existing start and stop parameters for the findall() and
791 finditer() methods of regular expression objects.
792
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000793- rfc822 Messages now support iterating over the headers.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000794
Martin v. Löwisf3c56112004-09-18 09:08:52 +0000795- The (undocumented) tarfile.Tarfile.membernames has been removed;
796 applications should use the getmember function.
797
Martin v. Löwis39a31782004-09-18 09:03:49 +0000798- httplib now offers symbolic constants for the HTTP status codes.
799
Tim Peters528ca532004-09-16 01:30:50 +0000800- SF bug #1028306: Trying to compare a ``datetime.date`` to a
801 ``datetime.datetime`` mistakenly compared only the year, month and day.
802 Now it acts like a mixed-type comparison: ``False`` for ``==``,
803 ``True`` for ``!=``, and raises ``TypeError`` for other comparison
804 operators. Because datetime is a subclass of date, comparing only the
805 base class (date) members can still be done, if that's desired, by
806 forcing using of the approprate date method; e.g.,
807 ``a_date.__eq__(a_datetime)`` is true if and only if the year, month
808 and day members of ``a_date`` and ``a_datetime`` are equal.
809
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000810- bdist_rpm now supports command line options --force-arch,
811 {pre,post}-install, {pre,post}-uninstall, and
Martin v. Löwis23c48a12004-09-10 06:32:54 +0000812 {prep,build,install,clean,verify}-script.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000813
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000814- SF patch #998993: The UTF-8 and the UTF-16 stateful decoders now support
815 decoding incomplete input (when the input stream is temporarily exhausted).
816 ``codecs.StreamReader`` now implements buffering, which enables proper
817 readline support for the UTF-16 decoders. ``codecs.StreamReader.read()``
818 has a new argument ``chars`` which specifies the number of characters to
819 return. ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` and
820 ``codecs.StreamReader.readlines()`` have a new argument ``keepends``.
821 Trailing "\n"s will be stripped from the lines if ``keepends`` is false.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000822
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000823- The documentation for doctest is greatly expanded, and now covers all
824 the new public features (of which there are many).
825
Walter Dörwald5011d0c2004-09-13 08:53:15 +0000826- ``doctest.master`` was put back in, and ``doctest.testmod()`` once again
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000827 updates it. This isn't good, because every ``testmod()`` call
828 contributes to bloating the "hidden" state of ``doctest.master``, but
829 some old code apparently relies on it. For now, all we can do is
830 encourage people to stitch doctests together via doctest's unittest
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000831 integration features instead.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000832
Skip Montanaro82d0eec2004-09-14 17:58:31 +0000833- httplib now handles ipv6 address/port pairs.
834
David Goodger68a1abd2004-10-03 15:40:25 +0000835- SF bug #1017864: ConfigParser now correctly handles default keys,
836 processing them with ``ConfigParser.optionxform`` when supplied,
837 consistent with the handling of config file entries and runtime-set
838 options.
839
David Goodger1cbf2062004-10-03 15:55:09 +0000840- SF bug #997050: Document, test, & check for non-string values in
841 ConfigParser. Moved the new string-only restriction added in
842 rev. 1.65 to the SafeConfigParser class, leaving existing
843 ConfigParser & RawConfigParser behavior alone, and documented the
844 conditions under which non-string values work.
845
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000846Build
847-----
848
Brett Cannonbfef8692004-09-28 04:08:11 +0000849- Building on darwin now includes /opt/local/include and /opt/local/lib for
850 building extension modules. This is so as to include software installed as
851 a DarwinPorts port <http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/>
852
Tim Peters862f0592004-09-23 19:11:32 +0000853- pyport.h now defines a Py_IS_NAN macro. It works as-is when the
854 platform C computes true for ``x != x`` if and only if X is a NaN.
855 Other platforms can override the default definition with a platform-
856 specific spelling in that platform's pyconfig.h. You can also override
857 pyport.h's default Py_IS_INFINITY definition now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000858
859C API
860-----
861
Tim Peters7f468f22004-10-11 02:40:51 +0000862- SF patch 1044089: New function ``PyEval_ThreadsInitialized()`` returns
863 non-zero if PyEval_InitThreads() has been called.
864
865- The undocumented and unused extern int ``_PyThread_Started`` was removed.
866
Tim Peters84705582004-10-10 02:47:33 +0000867- The C API calls ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
868 are two of the very few advertised as being safe to call without holding
869 the GIL. However, this wasn't true in a debug build, as bug 1041645
870 demonstrated. In a debug build, Python redirects the ``PyMem`` family
871 of calls to Python's small-object allocator, to get the benefit of
872 its extra debugging capabilities. But Python's small-object allocator
873 isn't threadsafe, relying on the GIL to avoid the expense of doing its
874 own locking. ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
875 call the platform ``malloc()`` directly now, regardless of build type.
876
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000877- PyLong_AsUnsignedLong[Mask] now support int objects as well.
878
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000879- SF patch #998993: ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF8Stateful`` and
880 ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF16Stateful`` have been added, which implement stateful
881 decoding.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000882
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000883Tests
884-----
885
886- test__locale ported to unittest
887
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000888Mac
889---
890
Just van Rossumdd3c8372004-10-03 16:27:09 +0000891- ``plistlib`` now supports non-dict root objects. There is also a new
892 interface for reading and writing plist files: ``readPlist(pathOrFile)``
893 and ``writePlist(rootObject, pathOrFile)``
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000894
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000895Tools/Demos
896-----------
897
Tim Peters130e37f2004-10-03 19:03:19 +0000898- The text file comparison scripts ``ndiff.py`` and ``diff.py`` now
899 read the input files in universal-newline mode. This spares them
900 from consuming a great deal of time to deduce the useless result that,
901 e.g., a file with Windows line ends and a file with Linux line ends
902 have no lines in common.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000903
904
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000905What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
906=================================
907
Anthony Baxtere13943a2004-09-02 16:37:15 +0000908*Release date: 02-SEP-2004*
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000909
910Core and builtins
911-----------------
912
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000913- SF patch #1007189: ``from ... import ...`` statements now allow the name
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +0000914 list to be surrounded by parentheses.
915
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000916- Some speedups for long arithmetic, thanks to Trevor Perrin. Gradeschool
917 multiplication was sped a little by optimizing the C code. Gradeschool
918 squaring was sped by about a factor of 2, by exploiting that about half
919 the digit products are duplicates in a square. Because exponentiation
920 uses squaring often, this also speeds long power. For example, the time
921 to compute 17**1000000 dropped from about 14 seconds to 9 on my box due
922 to this much. The cutoff for Karatsuba multiplication was raised,
923 since gradeschool multiplication got quicker, and the cutoff was
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000924 aggressively small regardless. The exponentiation algorithm was switched
925 from right-to-left to left-to-right, which is more efficient for small
926 bases. In addition, if the exponent is large, the algorithm now does
927 5 bits (instead of 1 bit) at a time. That cut the time to compute
928 17**1000000 on my box in half again, down to about 4.5 seconds.
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000929
Tim Petersc8854432004-08-25 02:14:08 +0000930- OverflowWarning is no longer generated. PEP 237 scheduled this to
931 occur in Python 2.3, but since OverflowWarning was disabled by default,
932 nobody realized it was still being generated. On the chance that user
933 code is still using them, the Python builtin OverflowWarning, and
934 corresponding C API PyExc_OverflowWarning, will exist until Python 2.5.
935
Martin v. Löwis336e85f2004-08-19 11:31:58 +0000936- Py_InitializeEx has been added.
937
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +0000938- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
939 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
940
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +0000941- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
942 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
943 modified the list.
944
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +0000945- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
946 functions is now writable.
947
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +0000948- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
949 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
950 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
951 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
952
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000953- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
954 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
955 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
956 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
957 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +0000958
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +0000959- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
960 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
961
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000962Extension modules
963-----------------
964
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000965- difflib now supports HTML side-by-side diff.
966
Martin v. Löwisdc3883f2004-08-29 15:46:35 +0000967- os.urandom has been added for systems that support sources of random
968 data.
969
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000970- Patch 1012740: truncate() on a writeable cStringIO now resets the
971 position to the end of the stream. This is consistent with the original
972 StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was
973 supposed to have been truncated away.
974
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +0000975- Added socket.socketpair().
976
Dave Cole3203efb2004-08-26 00:37:31 +0000977- Added CurrentByteIndex, CurrentColumnNumber, CurrentLineNumber
978 members to xml.parsers.expat.XMLParser object.
979
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000980- The mpz, rotor, and xreadlines modules, all deprecated in earlier
Andrew M. Kuchling00873432004-08-31 13:50:43 +0000981 versions of Python, have now been removed.
982
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000983Library
984-------
985
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000986- Patch #934356: if a module defines __all__, believe that rather than using
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000987 heuristics for filtering out imported names.
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000988
Johannes Gijsbersae882f72004-08-30 10:19:56 +0000989- Patch #941486: added os.path.lexists(), which returns True for broken
990 symlinks, unlike os.path.exists().
991
Raymond Hettinger356a4592004-08-30 06:14:31 +0000992- the random module now uses os.urandom() for seeding if it is available.
993 Added a new generator based on os.urandom().
994
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000995- difflib and diff.py can now generate HTML.
996
Martin v. Löwiscae9e672004-08-25 13:04:53 +0000997- bdist_rpm now includes version and release in the BuildRoot, and
998 replaces - by ``_`` in version and release.
Martin v. Löwiscf525242004-08-25 13:00:34 +0000999
Martin v. Löwis9f5c0c42004-08-25 11:37:43 +00001000- distutils build/build_scripts now has an -e option to specify the
1001 path to the Python interpreter for installed scripts.
1002
Barry Warsaw8bee7612004-08-25 02:22:30 +00001003- PEP 292 classes Template and SafeTemplate are added to the string module.
1004
Martin v. Löwis75b9da42004-08-18 13:57:44 +00001005- tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
1006
Martin v. Löwisdeacce22004-08-18 12:46:26 +00001007- HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
1008
Johannes Gijsbersc473c992004-08-18 12:40:31 +00001009- Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
1010 Percivall.
1011
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +00001012- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
1013 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
1014
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +00001015- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
1016 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
1017 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +00001018 than creating a new one.
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +00001019
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001020- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
1021 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
1022 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
1023 and exponent.
1024
1025- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
1026
1027- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
Georg Brandl08c02db2005-07-22 18:39:19 +00001028 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatibility and atexit
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001029 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
1030
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001031- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
1032 to the readline module.
1033
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +00001034- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001035 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
1036 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +00001037
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +00001038- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
1039 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
1040 contains symlinks.
1041
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +00001042- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
1043 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
1044
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +00001045- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
1046 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
1047 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1048
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +00001049- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
1050 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
1051 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
1052 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
1053 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
1054 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
1055 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
1056 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
1057 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
1058 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
1059 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
1060 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
1061 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
1062
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +00001063- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
1064
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001065Tools/Demos
1066-----------
1067
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001068- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
1069 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
1070
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +00001071- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
1072
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001073Build
1074-----
1075
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +00001076- Backward incompatibility: longintrepr.h now triggers a compile-time
1077 error if SHIFT (the number of bits in a Python long "digit") isn't
1078 divisible by 5. This new requirement allows simple code for the new
1079 5-bits-at-a-time long_pow() implementation. If necessary, the
1080 restriction could be removed (by complicating long_pow(), or by
1081 falling back to the 1-bit-at-a-time algorithm), but there are no
1082 plans to do so.
1083
Brett Cannoncc8a4f62004-08-26 01:44:07 +00001084- bug #991962: When building with --disable-toolbox-glue on Darwin no
1085 attempt to build Mac-specific modules occurs.
1086
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +00001087- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
1088 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
1089
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001090- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
1091 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
1092
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +00001093- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
1094 GNU/k*BSD systems.
1095
Hye-Shik Chang3ba5bfc2004-08-19 17:52:37 +00001096- bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings
1097 found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64.
1098
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001099C API
1100-----
1101
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001102..
1103
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001104Documentation
1105-------------
1106
Neal Norwitz5268c392004-08-21 15:13:52 +00001107- patch #1005936, bug #1009373: fix index entries which contain
1108 an underscore when viewed with Acrobat.
1109
1110- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if
1111 it contains symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment
1112 since 1992, but is now in the library reference as well.
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +00001113
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001114New platforms
1115-------------
1116
Hye-Shik Changf64700a2004-08-18 15:13:41 +00001117- FreeBSD 6 is now supported.
1118
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001119Tests
1120-----
1121
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001122..
1123
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001124Windows
1125-------
1126
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +00001127- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
1128 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
1129 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
1130 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
1131 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
1132 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
1133 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
1134 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
1135 the problem.
1136
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001137Mac
1138---
1139
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001140..
1141
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001142
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001143What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
1144=================================
1145
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +00001146*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001147
1148Core and builtins
1149-----------------
1150
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +00001151- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
1152 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
1153 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
1154 sensitive code.
1155
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001156- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001157 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so::
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001158
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001159 @staticmethod
1160 def foo(bar):
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001161
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +00001162 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001163
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001164- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
1165 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
1166 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
1167 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
1168 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
1169 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
1170 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
1171 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
1172 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
1173 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
1174 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
1175
1176 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
1177 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
1178 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
1179 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
1180 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
1181 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
1182 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
1183
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +00001184- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
1185 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
1186
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +00001187- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001188 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +00001189
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001190- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001191 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001192 which was missing for no apparent reason.
1193
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001194- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001195 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
1196 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
1197
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001198- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
1199 types that support garbage collection.
1200
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +00001201- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
1202
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +00001203- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
1204 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
1205 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
1206 Jython.
1207
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001208- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
1209
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +00001210- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
1211 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
1212
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +00001213- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
1214 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
1215 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +00001216
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +00001217- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
1218 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
1219 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
1220
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001221Extension modules
1222-----------------
1223
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +00001224- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
1225
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001226Library
1227-------
1228
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +00001229- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
1230 TIS-620
1231
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +00001232- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
1233 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
1234 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
1235 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
1236 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
1237 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
1238 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
1239 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
1240 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
1241 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
1242
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +00001243- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
1244
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +00001245- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
1246 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
1247 same as when the argument is omitted).
1248 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
1249
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +00001250- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
1251
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +00001252- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
1253 schemes are offered.
1254
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +00001255- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
1256
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +00001257- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
1258 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
1259 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
1260
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +00001261- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
1262
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +00001263- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
1264 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
1265
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +00001266- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
1267 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
1268 when dummy_threading is being used.
1269
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +00001270- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
1271 from a tarfile.
1272
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001273- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001274 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001275
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +00001276- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
1277 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
1278 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
1279 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
1280
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +00001281- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
1282 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
1283
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +00001284- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
1285 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
1286 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
1287 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
1288 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
1289 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
1290 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
1291 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
1292 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
1293 by some other method in progress).
1294
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001295- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
1296 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
1297 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +00001298
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +00001299- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
1300
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +00001301- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
1302 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
1303 AM Kuchling.
1304
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +00001305- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
1306 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
1307 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
1308
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +00001309- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
1310 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
1311 instead of unsigned.
1312
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001313- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +00001314 no longer part of the public API.
1315
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +00001316- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
1317 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
1318 string methods of the same name).
1319
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001320- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +00001321 SF patch 945642.
1322
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001323- doctest unittest integration improvements:
1324
1325 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
1326
1327 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
1328 DocTestSuites.
1329
1330- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
1331 that provide thread-local data.
1332
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001333- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
1334 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
1335
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001336- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
1337
1338- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
1339 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
1340 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
1341
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001342- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
1343
1344 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
1345 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
1346 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001347
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001348 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
1349 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
1350 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
1351 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
1352
1353 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
1354 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
1355
1356 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
1357 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
1358 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
1359 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
1360
1361 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
1362 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
1363 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
1364 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
1365 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
1366
1367 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
1368 wrapping help output.
1369
1370 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
1371 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
1372 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001373
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001374C API
1375-----
1376
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001377- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
1378 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
1379 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
1380 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
1381 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
1382 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
1383 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
1384 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
1385 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
1386 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
1387 its visible semantics have not changed.
1388
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001389- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
1390 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
1391
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001392Documentation
1393-------------
1394
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001395- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001396
1397 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +00001398 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001399
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +00001400 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001401
1402 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
1403
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001404- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001405
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001406Tests
1407-----
1408
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001409- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +00001410 platforms that use the Makefile.
1411
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001412- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
1413 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
1414 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
1415
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001416
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001417What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
1418=================================
1419
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +00001420*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001421
1422Core and builtins
1423-----------------
1424
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +00001425- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
1426 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
1427 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
1428 objects now (one object instead of three).
1429
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +00001430- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
1431 Windows DLLs.
1432
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +00001433- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
1434 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +00001435
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +00001436- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
1437 a new .pyc magic.
1438
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +00001439- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
1440 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
1441 be there.
1442
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +00001443- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
1444 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
1445 the LC_NUMERIC category.
1446
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +00001447- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
1448 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
1449 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
1450
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +00001451- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
1452
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +00001453- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
1454 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
1455 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +00001456
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +00001457- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
1458 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
1459
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +00001460- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
1461
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001462- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001463 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001464
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +00001465- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
1466
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +00001467- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
1468
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +00001469- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
1470 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
1471
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +00001472- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
1473 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
1474 Fixes bug #858016 .
1475
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +00001476- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
1477 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
1478 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
1479
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +00001480- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
1481 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
1482 improves their performance (about 35%).
1483
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +00001484- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
1485 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
1486 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
1487
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +00001488- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
1489 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
1490 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
1491 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
1492
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001493- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
1494 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
Walter Dörwald09515af2005-03-18 10:28:24 +00001495 list comprehensions, and the list constructor (when the input iterable
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001496 length is not known).
1497
1498- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
1499 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +00001500 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
1501 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001502 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
1503
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +00001504- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
1505 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
1506
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +00001507- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
1508 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
1509 keyword arguments.
1510
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +00001511- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
1512 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
1513 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
1514
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +00001515- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
1516 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
1517 cases.
1518
1519- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
1520 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
1521 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
1522 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
1523 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
1524 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
1525 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
1526 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
1527 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
1528 a release build.
1529
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +00001530- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
1531 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
1532
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001533- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001534 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001535
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +00001536- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
1537 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
1538 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
1539 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
1540 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
1541 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
1542 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
1543 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
1544 destroyed.
1545
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +00001546- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
1547 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
1548 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
1549 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
1550 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
1551 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
1552 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
1553 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
1554
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +00001555- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
1556 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
1557 character other than a space.
1558
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +00001559- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
1560 by the function object or by the method object, the function
1561 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
1562 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
1563 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
1564 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
1565 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
1566 attributes with the same name.
1567
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001568- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
1569 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
1570 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
1571 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
1572 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
1573 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
1574 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
1575 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
1576 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
1577 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
1578 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
1579 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
1580 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
1581 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +00001582
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +00001583- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
1584 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
1585 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
1586 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
1587 This has been repaired.
1588
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001589- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
1590
1591- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
1592
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +00001593- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
1594 over a sequence.
1595
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001596- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001597 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001598
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +00001599- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
1600
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +00001601- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
1602 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
1603 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
1604 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
1605 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
1606 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
1607 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
1608 records with equal keys is unchanged).
1609
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +00001610- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
1611 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
1612 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
1613
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +00001614- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
1615 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
1616 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
1617 freelist.
1618
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +00001619- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
1620 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
1621
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +00001622- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
1623 number.
1624
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +00001625- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
1626 a TypeError exception.
1627
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +00001628- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
1629 820195.
1630
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +00001631- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
1632 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
1633 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
1634
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001635- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001636 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
1637 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +00001638
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +00001639- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
1640 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
1641 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
1642
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001643- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
1644 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001645 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001646
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001647- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +00001648 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
1649 the first call.
1650
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001651
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001652Extension modules
1653-----------------
1654
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +00001655- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
1656 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
1657
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001658- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
1659 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
1660 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
1661 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
1662 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
1663 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
1664 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +00001665
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +00001666- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
1667
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +00001668- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
1669
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +00001670- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
1671 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
1672
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +00001673- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
1674 fewer false positives.
1675
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +00001676- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
1677 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
1678
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001679- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +00001680 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
1681
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +00001682- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001683 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +00001684 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
Raymond Hettinger6ab78cd2004-08-29 07:50:43 +00001685 Also, array.array() and array.extend() now accept any iterable argument
1686 for repeated appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +00001687
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +00001688- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
1689 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
1690 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
1691 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
1692
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +00001693- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
1694 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
1695 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
1696 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
1697 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
1698 #897625.
1699
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +00001700- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
1701 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
1702
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +00001703- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
1704 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
1705 and pops on either side of the deque.
1706
1707- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
1708 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
1709
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +00001710- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
1711 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
1712 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
1713 other functions that expect a function argument.
1714
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +00001715- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
1716
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001717- os.getsid was added.
1718
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +00001719- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
1720 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
1721 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
1722
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +00001723- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
1724
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +00001725- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
1726
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +00001727- readline.clear_history was added.
1728
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +00001729- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
1730
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +00001731- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
1732
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +00001733- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
1734
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +00001735- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
1736
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +00001737- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
1738
1739- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
1740
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +00001741- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
1742
1743- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
1744
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001745- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
1746 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
1747 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
1748
1749- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
1750 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
1751 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
1752 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
1753 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
1754 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
1755 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
1756
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +00001757- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
1758 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
1759 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
1760 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001761
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001762- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001763 iterators from a single iterable.
1764
1765- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
1766 of raising a TypeError exception.
1767
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +00001768- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
1769 as parameter.
1770
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001771Library
1772-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001773
Georg Brandlf0de6a12005-08-22 18:02:59 +00001774- Bug #1266283: The new function "lexists" is now in os.path.__all__.
1775
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +00001776- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
1777 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
1778 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001779
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +00001780- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
1781 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
1782 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +00001783
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +00001784- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +00001785
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +00001786- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
1787 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +00001788
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +00001789- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
1790 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1791
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001792- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
1793
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001794- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001795 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001796
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001797- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001798 that generate a -debuginfo.rpm
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001799
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +00001800- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
1801
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +00001802- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
1803 on cygwin and mingw32.
1804
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +00001805- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
1806
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +00001807- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
1808 module.
1809
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +00001810- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
1811 installation scheme for all platforms.
1812
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001813- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +00001814 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001815
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001816- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
1817 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
1818 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
1819
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +00001820- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
1821 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
1822 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
1823
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +00001824- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
1825
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +00001826- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
1827
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +00001828- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
1829 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
1830
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +00001831- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
1832 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
1833 type pattern with the same value exists.
1834
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +00001835- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
1836 when run from the command prompt).
1837
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001838- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
1839 not taken into consideration when caching value.
1840
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +00001841- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
1842 default sort).
1843
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +00001844- Added global runctx function to profile module
1845
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +00001846- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
1847
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +00001848- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
1849
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +00001850- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
1851
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001852- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +00001853 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
1854 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
1855 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
1856 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
1857 accordingly.
1858
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +00001859- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
1860 decoding standards.
1861
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +00001862- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
1863 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
1864 called for all requests.
1865
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +00001866- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
1867 they are passed to the compiler.
1868
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +00001869- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
1870 indent, width and depth.
1871
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +00001872- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
1873 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
1874
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +00001875- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
1876 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
1877
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +00001878- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
1879
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +00001880- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
1881
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001882- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
1883
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +00001884- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
1885 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
1886
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +00001887- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +00001888 for better performance.
1889
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001890- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +00001891
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +00001892- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
1893 a string).
1894
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +00001895- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
1896
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +00001897- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
1898
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +00001899- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
1900
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +00001901- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
1902
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +00001903- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
1904 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
1905 list of fieldnames.
1906
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +00001907- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
1908 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
1909
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +00001910- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
1911
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +00001912- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
1913 empty lists.
1914
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +00001915- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
1916 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
1917 and shelves.
1918
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +00001919- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
1920 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
1921
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001922- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +00001923 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
1924 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001925
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +00001926- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
1927 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +00001928 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +00001929
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001930- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +00001931 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
1932 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
1933
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001934- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
1935 and removed in Py2.4.
1936
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +00001937- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
1938
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +00001939- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
1940
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001941Tools/Demos
1942-----------
1943
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +00001944- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
1945 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
1946
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +00001947- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
1948
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +00001949- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
1950 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
1951 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
1952 destination in situations where both files are given.
1953
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +00001954- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
1955 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
1956 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
1957 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
1958
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +00001959- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
1960
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +00001961- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
1962 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
1963 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
1964 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
1965 now.
1966
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001967- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
1968 in effect
1969
1970- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
1971 C-c C-h
1972
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +00001973- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
1974 -d option was given.
1975
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001976Build
1977-----
1978
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +00001979- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
1980 build under OS X.
1981
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +00001982- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
1983 --enable-profiling.
1984
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +00001985- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
1986 is configured --with-tsc.
1987
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +00001988- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
1989 on AMD64.
1990
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +00001991- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
1992 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
1993
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00001994- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
1995 removed.
1996
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00001997- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
1998 supported (see PEP 11).
1999
2000- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
2001
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00002002- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
2003
2004- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
2005 (see PEP 11).
2006
2007- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
2008 sizeof(char) must be 1.
2009
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002010C API
2011-----
2012
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00002013- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
2014 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
2015 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
2016
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00002017- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
2018 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
2019 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
2020 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
2021
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00002022- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
2023 generator objects.
2024
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00002025- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
2026 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00002027 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
2028 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00002029
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00002030- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
2031 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
2032
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00002033- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
2034 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
2035 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
2036 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
2037 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
2038
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00002039- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
2040 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
2041 about 10% faster.
2042
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00002043- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
2044 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
2045
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00002046- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
2047 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
2048 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
2049 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
2050
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002051Windows
2052-------
2053
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00002054- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
2055 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
2056 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
2057 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
2058
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00002059- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
2060 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
2061 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
2062
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002063
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002064What's New in Python 2.3 final?
2065===============================
2066
2067*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
2068
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002069IDLE
2070----
2071
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00002072- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
2073 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
2074 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
2075 context-menu actions.
2076
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002077- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
2078 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
2079 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
2080 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
2081 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
2082 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
2083 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
2084 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
2085 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
2086
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002087
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002088What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
2089=============================================
2090
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00002091*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002092
2093Core and builtins
2094-----------------
2095
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00002096- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002097 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00002098 comment at the end are still unsupported.
2099
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002100Extension modules
2101-----------------
2102
2103- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
2104 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
2105 than once. This has been fixed.
2106
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00002107- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
2108 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
2109 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
2110 call.
2111
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002112- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
2113
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002114Library
2115-------
2116
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002117- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
2118 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
2119
2120- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
2121 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
2122 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
2123 restored.
2124
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00002125IDLE
2126----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002127
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00002128- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002129
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002130Build
2131-----
2132
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002133- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
2134 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
2135
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002136C API
2137-----
2138
2139Windows
2140-------
2141
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00002142- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
2143 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
2144
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002145- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
2146
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002147Mac
2148---
2149
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002150- Various fixes to pimp.
2151
2152- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
2153
2154- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
2155 more problems than it solves.
2156
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002157
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002158What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
2159=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002160
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00002161*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
2162
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002163Core and builtins
2164-----------------
2165
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00002166- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
2167 by sys.setcheckinterval().
2168
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002169- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
2170 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002171 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002172
2173- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
2174 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
2175 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002176 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002177
2178- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
2179 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002180
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002181- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
2182 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
2183 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
2184
2185- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002186 770247.
2187
2188- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002189
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002190Extension modules
2191-----------------
2192
2193- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
2194 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
2195
2196- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
2197
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002198- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
2199
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00002200- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
2201 contained within the _strptime module.
2202
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002203- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
2204 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
2205
2206- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002207 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
2208
2209- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
2210 the find_class attribute, if present.
2211
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002212- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002213
2214 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
2215 (SF bug 763298).
2216
2217 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00002218 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
2219 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
2220 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002221
2222 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
2223
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002224Library
2225-------
2226
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002227- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
2228
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00002229- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
2230 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
2231 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
2232 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
2233 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
2234 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
2235 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
2236 or Tester().
2237
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002238- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
2239 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
2240 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
2241 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
2242 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
2243 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
2244 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
2245 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
2246 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00002247
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002248 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00002249
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00002250- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
2251 weren't before was an oversight.
2252
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002253- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
2254 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
2255
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00002256- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
2257 when there are no lines.
2258
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00002259- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
2260 which could occur with Tk 8.4
2261
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002262- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
2263 to child processes.
2264
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002265- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
2266
2267- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
2268
2269- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
2270 xmlrpclib.
2271
2272- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
2273 responses.
2274
2275- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
2276 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
2277
2278- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
2279 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
2280 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
2281
2282- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
2283 used as patterns.
2284
2285- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
2286 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
2287 than Tk 8.3.
2288
2289- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
2290
2291- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002292
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002293Tools/Demos
2294-----------
2295
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002296- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
2297
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00002298- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
2299
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002300- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002301
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002302Build
2303-----
2304
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002305- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
2306
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002307- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
2308
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002309- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
2310 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002311
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002312- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
2313 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
2314 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002315
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002316C API
2317-----
2318
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002319- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
2320 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
2321
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002322Windows
2323-------
2324
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002325- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
2326 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
2327 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
2328 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
2329 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
2330 Python exception ::
2331
2332 thread.error: can't start new thread
2333
2334 is raised now.
2335
2336- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
2337 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
2338 instead of from DLL teardown.
2339
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002340Mac
2341---
2342
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002343- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00002344 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002345 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
2346 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
2347 the executable in the bundle.
2348
2349- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002350
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00002351- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
2352
2353- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
2354 on Panther.
2355
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002356What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
2357================================
2358
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002359*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002360
2361Core and builtins
2362-----------------
2363
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00002364- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
2365 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
2366 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
2367 with the -i option.
2368
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00002369- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
2370 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
2371
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002372- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
2373 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
2374
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00002375- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
2376 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
2377 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
2378 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
2379 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
2380 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
2381 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
2382 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
2383 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
2384 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
2385 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
2386 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
2387 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00002388
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002389- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
2390 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
2391 embedded in a lambda expression.
2392
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00002393- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
2394 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
2395 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
2396 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
2397 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
2398
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002399- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
2400 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
2401 matches the restriction on classic classes.
2402
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00002403- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
2404 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
2405
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00002406- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
2407 It's writable again.
2408
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002409- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
2410 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
2411 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002412 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002413
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002414- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
2415 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
2416 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
2417
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002418Extension modules
2419-----------------
2420
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00002421- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
2422 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
2423
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002424- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
2425 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
2426 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
2427 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
2428
2429- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
2430 collection.
2431
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00002432- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
2433 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
2434 unique within a single program run.
2435
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00002436- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
2437 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
2438
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00002439- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
2440 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
2441
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00002442- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
2443 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00002444
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00002445- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
2446
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00002447- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
2448 Fixes SF bug #730685.
2449
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00002450- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
2451 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
2452 for many BSD-derived systems.
2453
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002454
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002455Library
2456-------
2457
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00002458- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
2459 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
2460 primary ones:
2461
2462 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
2463 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
2464 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
2465
2466 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
2467 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
2468 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
2469 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
2470 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
2471 framework features (which doctest lacks).
2472
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00002473- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
2474 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
2475 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
2476 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
2477 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
2478 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
2479 argument.
2480
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002481- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
2482 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
2483 in the archive.
2484
2485- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
2486 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
2487
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00002488- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
2489 569574).
2490
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002491- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
2492 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
2493 no more.
2494
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002495- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
2496 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
2497 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
2498 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
2499 code coverage.
2500
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002501- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
2502 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
2503 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002504 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
2505 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002506
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002507- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
2508 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
2509 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00002510 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002511
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00002512- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
2513
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00002514- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
2515 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
2516 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
2517 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
2518
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00002519- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
2520 handling.
2521
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00002522- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
2523 __doc__ of data descriptors.
2524
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00002525- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
2526 in socket.py.
2527
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00002528- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
2529
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00002530- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
2531 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
2532 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
2533 opener with proxy support.
2534
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002535- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
2536
2537- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
2538
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002539Tools/Demos
2540-----------
2541
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00002542- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
2543
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002544- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
2545
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002546- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
2547 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00002548
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00002549- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
2550 files.
2551
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002552Build
2553-----
2554
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002555- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00002556 different root directory.
2557
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002558C API
2559-----
2560
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00002561- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
2562 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
2563 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
2564 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
2565 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
2566 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
2567 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
2568 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
2569 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
2570 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
2571
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002572- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
2573 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
2574 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
2575 from Python.
2576
2577
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002578New platforms
2579-------------
2580
2581None this time.
2582
2583Tests
2584-----
2585
2586- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
2587 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
2588
2589Windows
2590-------
2591
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00002592- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
2593
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00002594- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
2595 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
2596 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
2597 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
2598 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
2599 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
2600 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
2601 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
2602 that's what it's for.
2603
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002604Mac
2605---
2606
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00002607- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
2608 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
2609 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
2610 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00002611- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
2612 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
2613- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002614
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002615SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
2616------------------------------------
2617
2618430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
2619598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
2620622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
2621661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
2622683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
2623697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
2624713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
2625724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
2626727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
2627729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
2628730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
2629731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
2630732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
2631733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
2632735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
2633740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
2634744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
2635745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
2636747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
2637749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
2638751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
2639753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
2640755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
2641757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
2642760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
2643
2644
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002645What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
2646================================
2647
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00002648*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002649
2650Core and builtins
2651-----------------
2652
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00002653- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
2654 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
2655
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00002656- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
2657 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
2658 and cannot be strings).
2659
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00002660- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
2661 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
2662 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
2663 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
2664
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00002665- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
2666 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
2667 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
2668 Python itself.
2669
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00002670- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
2671 the referenced object, if it has one.
2672
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00002673- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
2674 the thread started at
2675 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
2676
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00002677- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
2678 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
2679 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
2680 placed on a list index.
2681
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00002682- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
2683 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
2684 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
2685 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
2686
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002687- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
2688 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
2689 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
2690 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
2691 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
2692 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
2693 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
2694
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00002695- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
2696 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
2697 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
2698 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
2699 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
2700
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00002701- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
2702 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00002703
2704- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
2705 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
2706 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
2707 #693195.)
2708
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00002709- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
2710 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002711
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002712- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00002713 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002714 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
2715 interpreter executions, would fail.
2716
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002717- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00002718 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00002719 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002720
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002721Extension modules
2722-----------------
2723
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00002724- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
2725 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
2726 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
2727 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
2728
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00002729- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
2730 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
2731
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00002732- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
2733 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
2734 and Greg Chapman.)
2735
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002736- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
2737 recursively.
2738
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00002739- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00002740 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
2741 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
2742 leaks.
2743
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00002744- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
2745
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00002746- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
2747 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
2748 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
2749 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
2750 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
2751 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
2752 #705836.
2753
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002754- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00002755 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
2756
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00002757- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
2758 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
2759 See SF bug #692416.
2760
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00002761- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
2762 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
2763
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00002764- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
2765 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
2766 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002767
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002768- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00002769 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
2770 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
2771
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00002772- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
2773 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
2774 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
2775 timeouts to work properly.
2776
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002777Library
2778-------
2779
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002780- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
2781 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
2782 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
2783 future release.
2784
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00002785- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
2786 for querying platform dependent features.
2787
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00002788- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00002789
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00002790- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
2791 pickle protocol versions.
2792
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00002793- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
2794 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
2795 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
2796
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00002797- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
2798
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00002799- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
2800 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
2801 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
2802 modules.
2803
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00002804- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
2805 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
2806 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
2807
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002808- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
2809 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
2810
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00002811- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
2812 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
2813 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
2814
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002815- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00002816 MS Office extensions.
2817
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00002818- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
2819 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
2820
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00002821- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
2822 execution speed of expressions and statements.
2823
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002824- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
2825 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
2826 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
2827 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
2828 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
2829 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
2830
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002831- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
2832 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
2833 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002834
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00002835- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
2836 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
2837 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
2838
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00002839- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
2840
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00002841- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
2842 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
2843 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
2844
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002845Tools/Demos
2846-----------
2847
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00002848- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
2849 See the module docstring for details.
2850
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002851Build
2852-----
2853
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00002854- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
2855 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002856
2857C API
2858-----
2859
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002860- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
2861
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00002862- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
2863 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
2864 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
2865
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002866- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
2867 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002868
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002869 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
2870 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
2871 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00002872
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00002873- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00002874 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
2875
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00002876- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
2877 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
2878 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002879
2880New platforms
2881-------------
2882
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002883None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002884
2885Tests
2886-----
2887
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00002888- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
2889 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002890
2891Windows
2892-------
2893
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00002894- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
2895 function.
2896
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00002897- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
2898 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002899
2900Mac
2901---
2902
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002903- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
2904 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00002905
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00002906- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
2907 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002908
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00002909- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
2910 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
2911 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002912
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002913- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00002914 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
2915 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002916
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002917- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
2918 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002919
2920
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002921What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
2922=================================
2923
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002924*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002925
2926Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002927-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002928
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00002929- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
2930 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
2931 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
2932
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00002933- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
2934 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
2935 (SF patch #664376.)
2936
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002937- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
2938 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
2939 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
2940 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
2941 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
2942 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00002943 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002944
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002945- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
2946 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
2947 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
2948 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002949 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002950
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00002951- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
2952 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
2953 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
2954 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
2955 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
2956 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
2957 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
2958 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
2959 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
2960 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
2961 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
2962
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00002963- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
2964 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
2965 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
2966 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
2967 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
2968 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
2969
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00002970- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
2971 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
2972
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00002973- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
2974 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
2975 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
2976 case.)
2977
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00002978- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
2979 passed as unicode strings.
2980
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00002981- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
2982 See SF bug #683467.
2983
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00002984- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
2985 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
2986
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00002987- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
2988
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00002989- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
2990
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00002991- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
2992 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
2993 arguments.
2994
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00002995- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
2996 See SF bug #667147.
2997
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002998- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002999 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00003000 See SF bug #676155.
3001
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00003002- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00003003 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00003004 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
3005 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
3006 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
3007 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
3008 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
3009 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00003010
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003011Extension modules
3012-----------------
3013
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00003014- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
3015 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
3016 tp_as_number pointer.
3017
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00003018- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
3019 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
3020 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
3021 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
3022 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
3023
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003024- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
3025
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00003026- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
3027
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00003028- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00003029 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00003030 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
3031 patch #678531.)
3032
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00003033- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
3034 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
3035
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00003036- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
3037 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
3038
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00003039- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
3040
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00003041- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
3042 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
3043 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
3044
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003045- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
3046
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00003047- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
3048 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
3049
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003050- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003051
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003052- datetime changes:
3053
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00003054 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
3055
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00003056 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
3057 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
3058 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
3059 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
3060 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
3061 now.
3062
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003063 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003064 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
3065 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003066
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003067 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003068 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003069 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
3070 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
3071 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
3072 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003073
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00003074 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
3075 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
3076 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003077 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
3078
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00003079 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
3080 by a later example coded by Guido.
3081
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003082 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003083 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
3084 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
3085 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003086 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
3087 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
3088
3089 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
3090 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
3091 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
3092 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
3093 tzinfo subclass instance.
3094
3095 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
3096 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
3097 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
3098 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
3099 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
3100 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
3101 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
3102 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003103
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003104 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
3105 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
3106 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
3107 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
3108 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003109 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
3110
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003111 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003112
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003113 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
3114 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
3115 as a naive datetime object.
3116
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00003117 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
3118 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
3119 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
3120
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00003121 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
3122 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
3123 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
3124 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
3125 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
3126 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
3127 comparison.
3128
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003129 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
3130 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
3131 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
3132 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003133 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003134
3135 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003136
3137 and ::
3138
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003139 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
3140
3141 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
3142 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
3143 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
3144 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
3145
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00003146 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
3147 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
3148 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
3149 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
3150 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
3151
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003152 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
3153 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00003154 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
3155 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003156
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003157Library
3158-------
3159
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003160- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
3161 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
3162
3163- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
3164 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
3165 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
3166 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
3167 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
3168 See PEP 307 for details.
3169
3170- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
3171 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
3172
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00003173- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
3174 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00003175 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003176 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
3177 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00003178 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00003179
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00003180- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
3181 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
3182
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003183- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
3184 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
3185 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
3186
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00003187- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
3188
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00003189- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
3190 exception.
3191
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00003192- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
3193 class.
3194
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00003195- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
3196 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
3197 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
3198
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00003199- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
3200 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
3201
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003202- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00003203 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
3204 See SF bug #659228.
3205
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00003206- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
3207 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
3208 See SF patch #651082.
3209
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00003210- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003211
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00003212- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
3213 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
3214
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003215- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003216 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003217
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00003218- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
3219 DOS paths from other platforms.
3220
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003221Tools/Demos
3222-----------
3223
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003224- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
3225 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
3226 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
3227 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
3228 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
3229 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
3230 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
3231 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
3232 example:
3233
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00003234 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
3235 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003236
3237 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
3238
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003239
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003240Build
3241-----
3242
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003243- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
3244 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
3245 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003246 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
3247
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003248 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
3249
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00003250- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
3251 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
3252 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
3253 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
3254 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
3255 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
3256 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
3257 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
3258 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
3259
3260- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
3261 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
3262 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
3263 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
3264
3265- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
3266 from the Tools/scripts directory.
3267
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003268C API
3269-----
3270
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003271- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
3272 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00003273
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00003274- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
3275 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
3276 tp_as_number pointer.
3277
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00003278- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
3279 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
3280 (SF #681367)
3281
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00003282- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
3283 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
3284 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
3285 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00003286
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003287Tests
3288-----
3289
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00003290- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003291 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
3292 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
3293 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
3294 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
3295 pydoc.)
3296
3297- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
3298
3299- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003300
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003301Windows
3302-------
3303
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00003304- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
3305 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
3306 time).
3307
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00003308- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
3309 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
3310
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00003311- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
3312 release without strong cryptography.
3313
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003314- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003315 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003316
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003317- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
3318 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
3319
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003320Mac
3321---
3322
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003323- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
3324 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003325
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00003326- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
3327 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
3328 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003329
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003330- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
3331 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003332
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003333- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
3334 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
3335 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
3336 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003337
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003338- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00003339 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
3340 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
3341 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003342
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003343
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003344What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003345=================================
3346
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00003347*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003348
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003349Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003350--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003351
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00003352- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
3353
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003354- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
3355 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003356 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003357 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003358 a different meaning than before.
3359
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003360- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003361 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003362 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003363
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003364- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003365 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003366 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003367
3368- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
3369 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
3370 and deallocation.
3371
3372- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
3373 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
3374
3375- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
3376 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
3377 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
3378 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
3379 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
3380
3381- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
3382 now detected by the garbage collector.
3383
3384- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
3385 [SF bug 519621]
3386
3387- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
3388 identifier.
3389
3390- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
3391 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
3392 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
3393 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
3394 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
3395 [SF bug 563060]
3396
3397- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
3398 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
3399 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
3400 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
3401 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
3402
3403- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
3404 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
3405 not called. [SF bug #537450]
3406
3407- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
3408
3409- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
3410 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
3411 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
3412 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
3413 state of the slots would be lost.)
3414
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003415Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003416-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003417
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003418- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003419 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
3420 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
3421 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
3422 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003423 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
3424 Jython 2.1.
3425
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003426- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003427 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003428 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
3429 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
3430 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
3431 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
3432 these, see PEP 302.
3433
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003434- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
3435 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
3436 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
3437
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00003438- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
3439 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
3440 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
3441
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00003442- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
3443 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
3444 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
3445
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003446- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
3447 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
3448 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
3449 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
3450 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
3451 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
3452 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
3453 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
3454 releases or implementations.
3455
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003456- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003457 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
3458 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003459
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00003460- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
3461 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
3462
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003463- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
3464 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
3465 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
3466
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00003467- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
3468 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
3469
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003470- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
3471 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003472 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
3473 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003474
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00003475- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
3476 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
3477 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
3478 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
3479 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
3480
3481 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
3482 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
3483 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
3484 pattern.
3485
3486 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
3487 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
3488 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
3489 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
3490
3491 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
3492 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
3493 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
3494 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
3495 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
3496 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
3497
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00003498- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
3499 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
3500 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
3501 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
3502 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
3503 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
3504 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
3505 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00003506
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00003507- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
3508 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
3509 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
3510 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
3511 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003512 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
3513 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
3514 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
3515 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
3516 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
3517 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
3518 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003519
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003520- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
3521 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
3522
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00003523- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
3524 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
3525 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
3526 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
3527 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
3528 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
3529 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
3530 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
3531 to Zack Weinberg!
3532
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00003533- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
3534 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
3535 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
3536 type. This has been fixed now.
3537
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00003538- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
3539 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
3540 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
3541
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003542- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
3543 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
3544 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
3545 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
3546 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
3547 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
3548 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
3549 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00003550 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003551
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00003552- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
3553 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
3554 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00003555
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003556- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
3557 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
3558 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
3559 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
3560 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
3561 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
3562 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
3563 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003564 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003565 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
3566 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
3567
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00003568- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
3569 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
3570 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
3571 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
3572 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
3573 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
3574 this.)
3575
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003576- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
3577 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003578 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003579 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003580 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
3581 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00003582 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
3583 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003584
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003585- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
3586 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
3587 currently running.
3588
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00003589- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
3590 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
3591 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
3592 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
3593
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00003594- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
3595 as directory names.
3596
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00003597- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
3598 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
3599
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00003600- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
3601 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
3602
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003603- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00003604 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
3605 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003606
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00003607- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
3608 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
3609 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
3610 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
3611 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
3612
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003613- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
3614 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
3615 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
3616 removed.
3617
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00003618- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
3619 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
3620 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
3621
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00003622- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
3623 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
3624 to __debug__.
3625
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00003626- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
3627 string to the left with zeros. For example,
3628 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
3629
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00003630- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
3631 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
3632 deprecated now.
3633
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00003634- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
3635 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
3636 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00003637
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00003638- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
3639 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
3640 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
3641 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
3642 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00003643
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00003644- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
3645 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
3646
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003647- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
3648 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
3649 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003650 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003651 is backward compatible.
3652
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00003653- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
3654 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
3655 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
3656 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
3657 could access a pointer to freed memory.
3658
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00003659- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
3660 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
3661 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
3662 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
3663 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
3664 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003665
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00003666- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
3667 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
3668
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003669- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
3670 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
3671
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003672- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
3673 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
3674 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
3675 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
3676 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
3677
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00003678- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
3679 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
3680 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
3681
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003682- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00003683 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
3684
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00003685- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
3686 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
3687 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00003688
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00003689- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
3690 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
3691
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00003692- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
3693 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
3694 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
3695
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00003696- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
3697
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003698Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003699-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003700
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00003701- Added three operators to the operator module:
3702 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
3703 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
3704 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
3705
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00003706- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
3707
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003708- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
3709 archives.
3710
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003711- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
3712 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
3713 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
3714
3715 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
3716
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003717- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
3718 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
3719 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00003720 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003721
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00003722- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
3723 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
3724 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
3725 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003726 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
3727 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
3728 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
3729 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00003730
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00003731- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
3732 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00003733
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00003734- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
3735
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00003736- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
3737 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
3738
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00003739- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
3740 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
3741 supported.
3742
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00003743- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
3744
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00003745- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
3746 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00003747
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00003748- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
3749 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
3750
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003751- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
3752
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003753- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
3754 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
3755
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00003756- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
3757 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
3758 functions but callable type objects.
3759
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003760- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003761 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003762 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003763
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00003764- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
3765 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00003766
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00003767- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
3768 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00003769
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00003770- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
3771 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
3772 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
3773 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
3774
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00003775- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
3776 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00003777
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00003778- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
3779 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
3780 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
3781 and __imul__.
3782
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00003783- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00003784 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
3785 is called.
3786
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00003787- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
3788 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
3789 interpreter was compiled.
3790
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003791- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
3792 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
3793 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003794 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003795 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
3796 1, not 2.
3797
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00003798- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
3799 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
3800 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
3801 limit.
3802
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00003803- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
3804 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
3805 bug #623464.
3806
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00003807- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
3808 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
3809 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
3810 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
3811
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003812Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003813-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003814
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00003815- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
3816
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00003817- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
3818 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
3819 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
3820 with Python 2.3a2.
3821
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00003822- os.path exposes getctime.
3823
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003824- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003825 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003826 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003827 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003828 unit tests of floating point results.
3829
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00003830- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
3831 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
3832 has been increased.
3833
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003834- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
3835 executed.
3836
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00003837- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
3838 postinstallation script.
3839
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00003840- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
3841 test the current module.
3842
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003843- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00003844 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
3845 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
3846 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
3847 this behavior needs to be controlled.
3848
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003849- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003850 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003851 Ward's Optik package.
3852
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003853- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
3854 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
3855 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
3856 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
3857
3858- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
3859 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003860 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003861
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00003862- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
3863 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
3864 shelf are binary pickles.
3865
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00003866- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
3867 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
3868
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00003869- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
3870 modules are iterators now.
3871
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00003872- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
3873 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
3874 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
3875 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
3876 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
3877 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003878
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00003879- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
3880 with their entity value.
3881
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00003882- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
3883
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003884- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
3885 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00003886
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003887- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
3888 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003889 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00003890
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00003891- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
3892 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
3893 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
3894 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
3895 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
3896 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
3897 main():
3898
3899 import locale
3900 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
3901
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00003902- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
3903 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
3904
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00003905- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
3906 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
3907 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
3908 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
3909 to the new standard.
3910
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00003911- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
3912 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
3913 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
3914 an extension to the database.
3915
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003916- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
3917 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
3918 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
3919 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00003920 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003921
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003922- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003923 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003924
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003925- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
3926 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
3927 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
3928 bounded integers.
3929
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00003930- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
3931 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
3932 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
3933 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
3934 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
3935 in existence.
3936
3937 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
3938 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
3939 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
3940 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
3941 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
3942 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
3943
3944 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
3945 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
3946 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
3947 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
3948
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00003949- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
3950 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
3951 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
3952
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00003953- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
3954
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003955- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
3956 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
3957 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
3958 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
3959
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00003960- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
3961 argument.
3962
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00003963- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
3964 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
3965 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
3966 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
3967 [SF patch 560794].
3968
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003969- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
3970 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
3971 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003972 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
3973 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
3974 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003975
3976- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
3977 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00003978
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00003979- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
3980 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
3981 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
3982 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00003983
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00003984- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
3985 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
3986 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
3987 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
3988 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
3989
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003990- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00003991
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00003992- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
3993
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00003994- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
3995 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
3996 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
3997 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
3998 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
3999 identical to None.
4000
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00004001- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
4002 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
4003 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
4004 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
4005 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
4006 results now.
4007
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00004008- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
4009 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
4010
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00004011- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
4012 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
4013 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
4014 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
4015 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
4016 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
4017 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
4018 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
4019
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00004020- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
4021
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00004022- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
4023 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
4024
4025- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
4026 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
4027 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
4028 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
4029 and other systems.
4030
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00004031- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
4032 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
4033 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
4034 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 +00004035 work well with these.
4036
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00004037- compileall now supports quiet operation.
4038
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004039- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00004040 connections.
4041
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00004042- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
4043 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
4044 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
4045
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00004046- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
4047 sets
4048
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00004049- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
4050 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
4051 name.
4052
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00004053- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
4054 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
4055 passed in.
4056
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004057- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00004058 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00004059 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
4060 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00004061
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00004062- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
4063
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00004064- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
4065
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00004066- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
4067 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
4068 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
4069
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00004070- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
4071 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
4072 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
4073 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00004074 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00004075
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004076- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00004077 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004078 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00004079
4080- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
4081 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
4082 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
4083
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004084- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00004085 the value of its expression argument.
4086
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00004087- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
4088 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
4089 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
4090
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00004091- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
4092 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
4093 skipstone browser was included.
4094
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00004095- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
4096 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
4097
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004098Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004099-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004100
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00004101- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
4102 names in addition to accepting file names.
4103
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00004104- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
4105 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
4106 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
4107 still used and useful.)
4108
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00004109- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
4110 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
4111 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
4112 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00004113
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00004114- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
4115 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
4116 the generated binary.
4117
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004118Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004119-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004120
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00004121- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
4122
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00004123- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
4124 except in the hands of experts.
4125
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00004126- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00004127 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
4128 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
4129 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00004130
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00004131- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
4132 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
4133 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
4134 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
4135 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
4136 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
4137 builds.
4138
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00004139- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
4140 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
4141 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
4142 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
4143 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
4144 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
4145 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
4146 new type.
4147
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00004148- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00004149
4150 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
4151 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
4152 positive infinities.
4153
4154 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
4155 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
4156 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
4157 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
4158 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
4159 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
4160 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
4161
4162 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
4163
4164 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
4165
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00004166- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
4167 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
4168 size of the executable.
4169
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00004170- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
4171 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
4172 configure script. On other platforms, remove
4173 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00004174
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00004175- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
4176
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00004177- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
4178 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
4179 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00004180
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00004181- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
4182 well as Unix.
4183
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00004184- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
4185 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
4186 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
4187 modules in the README file for details.
4188
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004189C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004190-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004191
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004192- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
4193 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004194 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00004195 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004196 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004197
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004198- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
4199 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
4200 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
4201 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
4202 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
4203 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004204 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004205 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
4206 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
4207 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
4208 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
4209 aligned.)
4210
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00004211- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
4212 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
4213 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
4214
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00004215- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
4216 level.
4217
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00004218- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
4219 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
4220 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
4221 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
4222 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
4223
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00004224- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
4225 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
4226 code.
4227
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00004228- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
4229 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
4230 adjusting for negative indices.
4231
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00004232- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
4233 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
4234 object.
4235
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00004236- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
4237 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
4238 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
4239
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004240- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
4241 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00004242
4243- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
4244
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00004245- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
4246 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
4247 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
4248 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
4249
4250- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
4251
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00004252- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00004253
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004254- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00004255 without going through the buffer API.
4256
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004257- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00004258
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00004259- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
4260 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
4261 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
4262 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
4263
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004264- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
4265 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
4266
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004267- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00004268 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
4269
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004270New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004271-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004272
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00004273- OpenVMS is now supported.
4274
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00004275- AtheOS is now supported.
4276
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00004277- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
4278
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00004279- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
4280
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004281Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004282-----
4283
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00004284- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
4285 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
4286 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004287
4288Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004289-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004290
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004291- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
4292 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
4293 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
4294 bugs.
4295 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004296 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00004297 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
4298 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004299 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00004300
4301- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00004302 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004303
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00004304- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
4305 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
4306
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004307- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
4308 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004309 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004310 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
4311
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00004312- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
4313 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
4314 use files" uninstall option).
4315
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00004316- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
4317
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004318- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
4319 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
4320
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004321- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
4322 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
4323 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
4324
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004325- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
4326 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
4327 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
4328 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
4329 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004330 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
4331 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
4332 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004333
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004334- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004335 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004336 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
4337 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
4338 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
4339 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
4340 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
4341 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
4342 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
4343 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
4344 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
4345 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
4346 work around.
4347
4348- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
4349 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
4350 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
4351 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
4352 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
4353 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
4354 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
4355 specified with O_CREAT too).
4356
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004357Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004358----
4359
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004360- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004361
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00004362- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
4363 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
4364 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
4365
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004366- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
4367 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
4368 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
4369
4370- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
4371 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
4372 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
4373 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
4374 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
4375 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
4376 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
4377 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00004378
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00004379- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
4380 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
4381 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004382
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004383- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
4384 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
4385 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
4386 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
4387 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004388
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004389- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
4390 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
4391 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004392
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004393- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
4394 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004395
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004396- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
4397 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
4398 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
4399 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
4400 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004401
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004402- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
4403 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
4404 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
4405
4406- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
4407 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
4408 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004409
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004410- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
4411 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
4412 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
4413 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004414 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004415
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004416- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
4417 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004418
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004419- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
4420 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00004421
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004422- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00004423 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004424 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
4425 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004426
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00004427
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004428What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004429===============================
4430
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004431*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
4432
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004433Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004434--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004435
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004436- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
4437 with a custom metaclass.
4438
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004439Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004440-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004441
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004442- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
4443 are proxies.
4444
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004445Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004446-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004447
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004448- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
4449 very short strings.
4450
4451- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
4452 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
4453 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
4454 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
4455 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
4456
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004457Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004458-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004459
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004460- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
4461 close or delete time).
4462
4463- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
4464 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
4465
4466- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
4467
4468- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004469 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004470
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004471Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004472-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004473
4474Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004475-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004476
4477C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004478-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004479
4480New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004481-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004482
4483Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004484-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004485
4486Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004487-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004488
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004489- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
4490
4491- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
4492 instances are deleted at process exit time.
4493
4494- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
4495 deleted at process exit time.
4496
4497- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
4498 in backslash.
4499
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004500Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004501----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004502
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004503- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
4504 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
4505 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
4506
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004507
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00004508What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004509===========================
4510
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004511*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
4512
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004513Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004514--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004515
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004516- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
4517 been extensively updated. See
4518
4519 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
4520
4521 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
4522
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00004523- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
4524 deleted!
4525
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00004526- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
4527 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
4528 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
4529 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
4530 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
4531
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004532- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
4533
4534 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
4535 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
4536
4537 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
4538 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
4539 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
4540 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
4541 supported anyway.
4542
4543 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
4544 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
4545
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00004546- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
4547 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
4548 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
4549 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
4550 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004551
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00004552- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
4553 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
4554 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
4555
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004556Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004557-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004558
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004559- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
4560 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
4561 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
4562 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
4563 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
4564 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00004565 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
4566 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
4567 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
4568 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004569
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00004570- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
4571 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
4572 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
4573
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004574Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004575-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004576
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004577- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
4578
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004579Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004580-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004581
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00004582- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
4583 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
4584 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
4585 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
4586 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
4587 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
4588
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00004589- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
4590
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00004591- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
4592
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00004593- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
4594
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004595- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
4596 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
4597 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
4598
4599- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
4600
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004601Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004602-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004603
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004604- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
4605 off a search on Google.
4606
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004607Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004608-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004609
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004610- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
4611 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
4612 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
4613 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
4614 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
4615 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
4616 other platforms should do likewise.
4617
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00004618- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
4619 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
4620 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
4621
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004622C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004623-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004624
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004625- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
4626 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
4627 producing key-value pairs.
4628
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004629- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004630 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004631 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
4632 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
4633 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
4634 previously went unchallenged.
4635
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004636New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004637-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004638
4639Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004640-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004641
4642Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004643-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004644
4645Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004646----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004647
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00004648- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
4649 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004650
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004651- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
4652 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
4653 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
4654 home.
4655
4656
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004657What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004658===========================
4659
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004660*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
4661
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004662Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004663--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004664
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004665- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
4666 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004667
4668 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004669 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004670
4671 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
4672 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004673 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004674 This needs to be documented.
4675
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00004676- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
4677 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
4678
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00004679- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
4680 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
4681 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
4682
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00004683- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
4684 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
4685
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004686- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
4687 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
4688 class forbids it).
4689
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00004690- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
4691 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
4692 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
4693
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004694- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
4695
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004696Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004697-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004698
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004699- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
4700 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004701 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004702
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004703- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
4704 (like 1 + '').
4705
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004706Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004707-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004708
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004709- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
4710 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
4711 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
4712 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004713 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004714 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
4715
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00004716- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
4717 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
4718 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
4719 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
4720
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004721- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
4722 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004723 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
4724 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
4725 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004726
4727- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
4728 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004729
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00004730- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
4731 bytes on its input.
4732
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004733Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004734-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004735
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004736- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00004737 convenience function.
4738
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004739- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
4740 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
4741 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004742 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
4743 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
4744 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
4745 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
4746 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
4747 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004748
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00004749- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
4750 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
4751 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
4752 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
4753
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00004754- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
4755 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
4756 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
4757
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004758- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
4759 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
4760 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
4761 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
4762
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004763- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
4764 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004765 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004766 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
4767 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
4768 new -l and -e options.
4769
4770- statcache is now deprecated.
4771
4772- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
4773 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004774 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004775 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
4776 time properly taken into account.
4777
4778- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
4779 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
4780 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
4781 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
4782
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004783Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004784-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004785
4786Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004787-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004788
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004789- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
4790 is built with libdb3 if available.
4791
4792- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
4793
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004794C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004795-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004796
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00004797- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
4798 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
4799 PySequence_Size().
4800
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004801- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
4802
4803- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
4804 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
4805 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
4806
4807- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
4808 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
4809
4810- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
4811 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
4812
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004813New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004814-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004815
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004816- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
4817 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
4818
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00004819- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
4820 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
4821
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004822- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
4823
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004824Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004825-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004826
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004827- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
4828 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
4829
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004830Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004831-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004832
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004833Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004834----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004835
4836- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
4837 removed completely in the next release.
4838
4839- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
4840 OSX.
4841
4842- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
4843 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
4844
4845- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
4846
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004847
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004848What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004849===========================
4850
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004851*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
4852
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004853Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004854--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004855
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004856- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004857 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004858 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004859 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
4860 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004861 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
4862 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004863 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
4864 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00004865
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00004866- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
4867 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
4868
4869- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
4870 class methods, static methods, and properties.
4871
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004872Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004873-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004874
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00004875- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
4876 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
4877 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
4878 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
4879 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
4880 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
4881 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
4882 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
4883
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004884- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
4885 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
4886 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
4887 example).
4888
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004889- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004890 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004891 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004892 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004893
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004894- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
4895 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
4896 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00004897 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004898
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004899- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
4900 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
4901 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
4902 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
4903 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
4904 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
4905
4906 isinstance(x, (A, B))
4907
4908 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
4909
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004910Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004911-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004912
4913- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
4914
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004915- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
4916
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004917- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
4918 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00004919
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004920- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
4921 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
4922 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
4923 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
4924 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
4925 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00004926 attributes.
4927
4928- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
4929 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
4930 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00004931
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004932- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
4933 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
4934 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004935
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004936- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
4937 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
4938 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004939 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
4940 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
4941
4942- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
4943 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004944
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004945Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004946-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004947
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00004948- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
4949 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
4950
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004951- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
4952 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
4953 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
4954 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
4955
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00004956- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
4957 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
4958 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
4959 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
4960
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00004961 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
4962 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
4963 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
4964 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
4965 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
4966 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
4967 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
4968 without losing information).
4969
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004970- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004971 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
4972 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
4973 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
4974 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
4975 module).
4976
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004977 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004978 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
4979 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
4980 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
4981 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004982
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004983- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00004984 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
4985 encoding.
4986
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00004987- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
4988 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
4989
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004990- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004991 to allow saving the message body to a file.
4992
4993- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
4994 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
4995 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
4996 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
4997
4998- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
4999
5000- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
5001 ON, and OFF.
5002
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00005003- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
5004 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
5005
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00005006Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005007-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00005008
5009- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
5010 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
5011 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005012
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005013- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
5014 been added: -X and -E.
5015
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005016Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005017-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005018
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005019- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
5020 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
5021
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005022C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005023-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005024
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00005025- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
5026 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
5027 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
5028 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
5029 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
5030
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00005031- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
5032 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
5033 as long) arguments.
5034
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00005035- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
5036 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
5037 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
5038 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
5039 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
5040 report any bugs or strange behavior).
5041
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00005042- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
5043 input.
5044
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005045New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005046-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005047
5048Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005049-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005050
5051Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005052-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005053
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00005054- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
5055 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
5056 is created for .py and .pyw files.
5057
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005058- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
5059 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
5060 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005061 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005062
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005063 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
5064 # (SIGINT) behavior.
5065 import signal
5066 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005067
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005068 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005069 while 1:
5070 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005071 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005072 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
5073 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
5074 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
5075 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005076
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005077
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005078What's New in Python 2.2a4?
5079===========================
5080
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005081*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
5082
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005083Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005084--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005085
5086- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
5087 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
5088 documentation for all operations on list objects.
5089
5090- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
5091 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
5092 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
5093 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
5094 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
5095 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
5096 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005097
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00005098- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005099 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00005100 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
5101 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
5102 associate a docstring with a property.
5103
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005104- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
5105 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
5106 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
5107 other built-in object types.
5108
5109- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
5110 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
5111 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
5112 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
5113 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
5114
5115- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
5116 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
5117
5118- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
5119 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005120 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005121 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
5122 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
5123 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
5124 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
5125 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
5126
5127- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
5128 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
5129 class.
5130
5131- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
5132 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
5133 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
5134 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
5135
5136- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
5137 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
5138 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
5139 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
5140
5141- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
5142 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
5143
5144- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
5145 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
5146 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
5147 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
5148 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005149 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005150 with the same value as s.
5151
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00005152- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
5153
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005154Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005155----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005156
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00005157- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
5158
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00005159- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
5160 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
5161 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
5162 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
5163 objects.
5164
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005165- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
5166 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00005167 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
5168 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
5169
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005170- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
5171 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
5172 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
5173
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005174Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005175-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005176
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00005177- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
5178 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
5179 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
5180 by the instances.
5181
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00005182- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
5183 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
5184 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
5185
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005186- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
5187 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
5188 before the entire comparison is complete.
5189
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00005190- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
5191 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
5192 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
5193
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00005194- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
5195 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
5196 getwriter().
5197
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005198- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
5199 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
5200
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00005201- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005202 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
5203 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
5204
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00005205- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
5206 iterable object.
5207
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005208- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
5209 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005210
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005211- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
5212 authentication.
5213
5214- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
5215 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005216
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005217- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00005218 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
5219 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
5220 a sample driver.)
5221
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005222Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005223-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005224
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005225- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
5226 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
5227 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
5228 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
5229 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
5230 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
5231 kernel has large file support.
5232
5233- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
5234 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
5235 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
5236 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
5237 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
5238
5239- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
5240 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
5241 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
5242
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005243C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005244-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005245
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005246- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
5247 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
5248
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005249New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005250-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005251
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005252- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
5253 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
5254
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005255Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005256-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005257
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005258- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
5259 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
5260 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
5261 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
5262 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
5263
5264- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
5265 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
5266 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
5267 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
5268
5269- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
5270 especially in regard to reporting errors.
5271
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005272Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005273-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005274
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005275- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005276 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
5277 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005278
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005279
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005280What's New in Python 2.2a3?
5281===========================
5282
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005283*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
5284
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005285Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005286----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005287
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005288- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
5289 big to represent as a C double.
5290
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00005291- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
5292 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
5293 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
5294 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
5295 restriction).
5296
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00005297- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
5298 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
5299 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
5300 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
5301 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
5302
5303 >>> dir([])
5304 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
5305 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
5306 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
5307 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
5308 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
5309 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
5310 'reverse', 'sort']
5311
5312 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
5313
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005314- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005315 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
5316 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
5317 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
5318 OverflowError exception.
5319
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00005320- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005321 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005322 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
5323 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
5324 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
5325 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
5326 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00005327 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005328 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
5329 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
5330
5331 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
5332 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
5333 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
5334 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005335
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005336- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005337 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
5338 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
5339 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
5340 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
5341 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
5342 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
5343 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
5344 once it is created.
5345
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00005346- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
5347 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
5348 (key, value) pairs.
5349
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005350- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005351 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
5352 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
5353
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00005354- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
5355 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
5356 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
5357 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
5358 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005359
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005360- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005361 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
5362 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
5363
5364 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
5365
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005366- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00005367 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
5368
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005369Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005370-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005371
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005372- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00005373 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
5374 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005375
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00005376- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
5377 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
5378 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
5379 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
5380 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
5381 in this area anymore).
5382
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00005383- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
5384 threading.Timer.
5385
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00005386- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
5387 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
5388
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005389- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005390 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
5391
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005392- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00005393 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
5394 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
5395 converted to Python longs.
5396
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005397- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005398 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
5399
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00005400- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
5401 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
5402 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
5403
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005404Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005405-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005406
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005407- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
5408 division operators as per PEP 238.
5409
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005410Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005411-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005412
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005413- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
5414 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
5415 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
5416 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
5417
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005418C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005419-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005420
5421- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005422
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005423- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
5424 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005425 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005426
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005427 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
5428 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005429 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005430 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005431
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005432- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005433 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
5434 module:
5435
5436 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005437
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005438 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
5439 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005440
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005441 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
5442 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005443
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005444 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
5445
5446 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
5447
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005448- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005449 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
5450 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
5451 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005452
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005453New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005454-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005455
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00005456- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
5457 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
5458 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
5459 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
5460 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005461
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005462Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005463-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005464
5465Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005466-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005467
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005468- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
5469 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
5470 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
5471 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00005472 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
5473 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
5474 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
5475 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
5476 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005477
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005478- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00005479 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
5480
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005481
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005482What's New in Python 2.2a2?
5483===========================
5484
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005485*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
5486
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005487Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005488-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005489
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00005490- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
5491 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
5492
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005493- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
5494 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
5495 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005496
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00005497- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
5498 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
5499 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
5500 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005501
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005502- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
5503
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005504- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005505
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005506Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005507-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005508
5509- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00005510 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005511 the module docstring for details.
5512
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005513Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005514-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005515
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005516- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005517 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
5518 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
5519 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005520
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005521- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
5522 Nick Mathewson.
5523
5524Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005525----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005526
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005527- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
5528 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
5529 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
5530 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
5531 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
5532 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
5533 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
5534 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
5535
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00005536- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
5537 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
5538 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
5539 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
5540
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00005541- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
5542 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
5543 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
5544 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
5545 come a long way).
5546
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005547- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
5548 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
5549 write filters for these warnings).
5550
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00005551- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
5552 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
5553 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
5554 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
5555 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
5556
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00005557- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
5558 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
5559 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
5560 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
5561 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
5562 older distribution.
5563
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005564Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005565-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005566
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005567- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
5568 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005569 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005570
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005571- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
5572 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
5573 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
5574
5575- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
5576
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005577- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
5578
5579- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
5580
5581- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
5582
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005583- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005584
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00005585- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
5586
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005587New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005588-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005589
5590C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005591-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005592
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005593- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
5594 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
5595 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
5596 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
5597 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
5598 against buffer overruns.
5599
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005600- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005601 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
5602 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005603 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
5604 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
5605 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
5606
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005607- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
5608 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
5609 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
5610 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
5611 deprecated.
5612
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005613Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005614-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005615
5616- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
5617 relevant is found.
5618
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005619
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005620What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005621===========================
5622
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005623*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
5624
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005625Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005626----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005627
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005628- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
5629 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
5630 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
5631 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
5632 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
5633 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
5634 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
5635 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005636 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005637 repaired.
5638
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005639- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00005640 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005641 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
5642 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
5643 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
5644 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
5645 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
5646 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
5647 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
5648 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
5649
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00005650- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
5651 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
5652 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
5653 leading BMO character).
5654
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005655- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
5656 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
5657 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
5658
5659 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
5660 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
5661 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005662
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005663 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
5664 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
5665 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
5666 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
5667 for various simple to use conversions.
5668
5669 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
5670 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
5671
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005672 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5673 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
5674 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
5675 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
5676 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5677 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
5678 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5679 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
5680 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5681 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
5682 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5683 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
5684 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5685 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
5686 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005687
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005688- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
5689 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
5690 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005691 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005692 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005693
5694 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005695 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
5696 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
5697 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
5698 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
5699 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005700 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
5701 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005702
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005703 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
5704 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
5705 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005706 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005707
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00005708- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
5709 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
5710 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
5711 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
5712 floating arithmetic,
5713
5714 x = 9007199254740992.0
5715 print long(x)
5716
5717 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
5718 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
5719 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
5720 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
5721 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
5722 functions are of good quality).
5723
5724 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
5725 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
5726 algorithms to break.
5727
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00005728- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
5729 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
5730 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
5731 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
5732 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
5733 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
5734 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
5735 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
5736 order.
5737
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005738- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
5739 operation along the most common code paths.
5740
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005741- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
5742 the same as dict.has_key(x).
5743
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00005744- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
5745 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
5746 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
5747 {}.update(UserDict())
5748
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005749- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
5750 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
5751 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
5752 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
5753 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
5754 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
5755 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
5756 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
5757
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005758- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005759 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005760
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005761 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00005762 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
5763 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00005764 join() method of strings
5765 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005766 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
5767 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005768 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00005769 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005770
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00005771- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
5772 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
5773
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005774- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
5775 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
5776
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00005777- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
5778 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
5779 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
5780 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
5781
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005782- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
5783 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005784 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005785 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
5786 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00005787
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00005788- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
5789
5790
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005791Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005792-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005793
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005794- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005795 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005796 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
5797 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
5798
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00005799- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
5800 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
5801
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00005802- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
5803 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
5804 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
5805 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
5806
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00005807- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
5808 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
5809 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
5810
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00005811- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
5812
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00005813- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
5814
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00005815- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
5816 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
5817 that are still imported into string.py).
5818
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005819- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
5820
5821- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
5822 Now it does.
5823
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005824- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
5825
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005826- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
5827 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
5828 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
5829 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
5830 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005831 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
5832 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005833
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00005834- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
5835 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
5836 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
5837 'help(object)'.
5838
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005839Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005840-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005841
5842- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005843 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005844 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
5845 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
5846
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005847- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005848 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
5849 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005850
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005851C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005852-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005853
5854- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
5855 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005856
5857----
5858
5859**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**