blob: 92d94224fc4c2e8a44d74314411ddd661470889b [file] [log] [blame]
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +00007What's New in Python 2.5 alpha 1?
8=================================
9
10Core and builtins
11-----------------
12
Martin v. Löwis13a1fde2005-01-27 18:56:16 +000013- Bug #1074011: closing sys.std{out,err} now causes a flush() and
Martin v. Löwis8e3ca8a2005-01-23 09:41:49 +000014 an ferror() call.
15
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +000016- min() and max() now support key= arguments with the same meaning as in
17 list.sort().
18
Raymond Hettingerc34f8672005-01-02 06:17:33 +000019- The peephole optimizer now performs simple constant folding in expressions:
20 (2+3) --> (5).
21
Raymond Hettingera422c342005-01-11 03:03:27 +000022- set and frozenset objects can now be marshalled. SF #1098985.
23
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000024
25Extension Modules
26-----------------
27
Fred Drake9c131f22005-01-23 15:16:08 +000028- The spwd module has been added, allowing access to the shadow password
29 database.
Martin v. Löwisc3001752005-01-23 09:27:24 +000030
Martin v. Löwisfe33d0b2005-01-16 08:57:39 +000031- stat_float_times is now True.
32
Raymond Hettingerb0900e62004-12-16 16:23:40 +000033- array.array objects are now picklable.
34
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +000035- the cPickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
36 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
37
Raymond Hettingerb2594052004-12-05 09:25:51 +000038- itertools.islice() now accepts None for the start and step arguments.
39 This allows islice() to work more readily with slices:
40 islice(s.start, s.stop, s.step)
41
Skip Montanaro0af3ade2005-01-13 04:12:31 +000042- datetime.datetime() now has a strptime class method which can be used to
43 create datetime object using a string and format.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000044
45Library
46-------
47
Martin v. Löwis1d11de62005-01-29 13:29:23 +000048- Bug #1110478: Revert os.environ.update to do putenv again.
49
Thomas Hellerd6c6e222005-01-20 19:20:16 +000050- Bug #1103844: fix distutils.install.dump_dirs() with negated options.
51
Martin v. Löwis22b457e2005-01-16 08:40:58 +000052- os.{SEEK_SET, SEEK_CUR, SEEK_END} have been added for convenience.
53
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +000054- Enhancements to the csv module:
55
56 + Dialects are now validated by the underlying C code, better
57 reflecting it's capabilities, and improving it's compliance with
58 PEP 305.
59 + Dialect parameter parsing has been re-implemented to improve error
60 reporting.
61 + quotechar=None and quoting=QUOTE_NONE now work the way PEP 305
62 dictates.
63 + the parser now removes the escapechar prefix from escaped characters.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +000064 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the writer now tests for numeric
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +000065 types, rather than any object than can be represented as a numeric.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +000066 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the reader now casts unquoted fields
67 to floats.
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +000068 + reader now allows \r characters to be quoted (previously it only allowed
69 \n to be quoted).
Andrew McNamarac89f2842005-01-12 07:44:42 +000070 + writer doublequote handling improved.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +000071 + Dialect classes passed to the module are no longer instantiated by
72 the module before being parsed (the former validation scheme required
73 this, but the mechanism was unreliable).
74 + The dialect registry now contains instances of the internal
75 C-coded dialect type, rather than references to python objects.
76 + the internal c-coded dialect type is now immutable.
77 + register_dialect now accepts the same keyword dialect specifications
78 as the reader and writer, allowing the user to register dialects
79 without first creating a dialect class.
80 + a configurable limit to the size of parsed fields has been added -
81 previously, an unmatched quote character could result in the entire
82 file being read into the field buffer before an error was reported.
Andrew McNamara31d88962005-01-12 03:45:10 +000083 + A new module method csv.field_size_limit() has been added that sets
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +000084 the parser field size limit (returning the former limit). The initial
85 limit is 128kB.
Andrew McNamara7f2053e2005-01-12 11:17:16 +000086 + A line_num attribute has been added to the reader object, which tracks
87 the number of lines read from the source iterator. This is not
88 the same as the number of records returned, as records can span
89 multiple lines.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +000090 + reader and writer objects were not being registered with the cyclic-GC.
91 This has been fixed.
92
Brett Cannone6539c42005-01-08 02:43:53 +000093- _DummyThread objects in the threading module now delete self.__block that is
94 inherited from _Thread since it uses up a lock allocated by 'thread'. The
95 lock primitives tend to be limited in number and thus should not be wasted on
96 a _DummyThread object. Fixes bug #1089632.
97
Raymond Hettinger97db05d2005-01-07 08:15:41 +000098- The imghdr module now detects Exif files.
99
Raymond Hettinger6065d322004-12-20 23:51:53 +0000100- StringIO.truncate() now correctly adjusts the size attribute.
101 (Bug #951915).
102
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000103- locale.py now uses an updated locale alias table (built using
104 Tools/i18n/makelocalealias.py, a tool to parse the X11 locale
105 alias file); the encoding lookup was enhanced to use Python's
106 encoding alias table
107
Raymond Hettinger3557f422004-12-07 12:02:02 +0000108- moved deprecated modules to Lib/lib-old: whrandom, tzparse, statcache.
109
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000110- the pickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
111 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
112
Brett Cannon84667c02004-12-07 03:25:18 +0000113- optparse now optionally imports gettext. This allows its use in setup.py.
114
Raymond Hettinger3489cad2004-12-05 05:20:42 +0000115- the pickle module no longer uses the deprecated bin parameter.
116
Raymond Hettinger1bc82f82004-12-05 03:58:17 +0000117- the shelve module no longer uses the deprecated binary parameter.
118
Raymond Hettinger6c92d762004-12-05 03:28:00 +0000119- the pstats module no longer uses the deprecated ignore() method.
120
Raymond Hettingerf3fa9462004-12-05 01:58:09 +0000121- the filecmp module no longer uses the deprecated use_statcache argument.
122
Raymond Hettinger664347b2004-12-04 21:21:53 +0000123- unittest.TestCase.run() and unittest.TestSuite.run() can now be successfully
124 extended or overridden by subclasses. Formerly, the subclassed method would
125 be ignored by the rest of the module. (Bug #1078905).
126
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000127- heapq.nsmallest() and heapq.nlargest() now support key= arguments with
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000128 the same meaning as in list.sort().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000129
Walter Dörwald36733692004-12-22 12:50:50 +0000130- Bug #1076985: ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` now calls ``read()`` only
131 once when a size argument is given. This prevents a buffer overflow in the
132 tokenizer with very long source lines.
133
Andrew M. Kuchling3b585b32004-12-28 20:10:48 +0000134- Bug #1083110: ``zlib.decompress.flush()`` would segfault if called immediately
135 after creating the object, without any intervening ``.decompress()`` calls.
136
Skip Montanaro05885812005-01-16 20:48:27 +0000137- The reconvert.quote function can now emit triple-quoted strings. The
138 reconvert module now has some simple documentation.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000139
140Build
141-----
142
Brett Cannon516592f2004-12-07 00:42:59 +0000143- setup.py now uses the directories specified in LDFLAGS using the -L option
144 and in CPPFLAGS using the -I option for adding library and include
145 directories, respectively, for compiling extension modules against. This has
146 led to the core being compiled using the values in CPPFLAGS. It also removes
147 the need for the special-casing of both DarwinPorts and Fink for darwin since
148 the proper directories can be specified in LDFLAGS (``-L/sw/lib`` for Fink,
149 ``-L/opt/local/lib`` for DarwinPorts) and CPPFLAGS (``-I/sw/include`` for
150 Fink, ``-I/opt/local/include`` for DarwinPorts).
151
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000152
153C API
154-----
155
Raymond Hettinger66517482004-12-03 11:45:13 +0000156- Removed PyRange_New().
157
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000158
159Tests
160-----
161
Martin v. Löwis4d394df2005-01-23 09:19:22 +0000162- In test_os, st_?time is now truncated before comparing it with ST_?TIME.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000163
164Mac
165---
166
167
168
169Tools/Demos
170-----------
171
172
173
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000174What's New in Python 2.4 final?
175===============================
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000176
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000177*Release date: 30-NOV-2004*
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000178
179Core and builtins
180-----------------
181
182- Bug 875692: Improve signal handling, especially when using threads, by
183 forcing an early re-execution of PyEval_EvalFrame() "periodic" code when
184 things_to_do is not cleared by Py_MakePendingCalls().
185
186
Anthony Baxter4277ed82004-11-30 11:53:10 +0000187What's New in Python 2.4 (release candidate 1)
188==============================================
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000189
Anthony Baxter5cc727a2004-11-18 12:32:27 +0000190*Release date: 18-NOV-2004*
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000191
192Core and builtins
193-----------------
194
Tim Petersfb1ffb02004-11-08 04:30:21 +0000195- Bug 1061968: Fixes in 2.4a3 to address thread bug 1010677 reintroduced
196 the years-old thread shutdown race bug 225673. Numeric history lesson
197 aside, all bugs in all three reports are fixed now.
198
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000199
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000200Library
201-------
202
203- Bug 1052242: If exceptions are raised by an atexit handler function an
204 attempt is made to execute the remaining handlers. The last exception
205 raised is re-raised.
206
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000207- ``doctest``'s new support for adding ``pdb.set_trace()`` calls to
208 doctests was broken in a dramatic but shallow way. Fixed.
209
Tim Petersbbc0d442004-11-13 16:18:32 +0000210- Bug 1065388: ``calendar``'s ``day_name``, ``day_abbr``, ``month_name``,
211 and ``month_abbr`` attributes emulate sequences of locale-correct
212 spellings of month and day names. Because the locale can change at
213 any time, the correct spelling is recomputed whenever one of these is
214 indexed. In the worst case, the index may be a slice object, so these
215 recomputed every day or month name each time they were indexed. This is
216 much slower than necessary in the usual case, when the index is just an
217 integer. In that case, only the single spelling needed is recomputed
218 now; and, when the index is a slice object, only the spellings needed
219 by the slice are recomputed now.
220
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000221- Patch 1061679: Added ``__all__`` to pickletools.py.
Tim Peters90cf2122004-11-06 23:45:48 +0000222
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000223Build
224-----
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000225
Brett Cannon7d28e962004-11-07 01:19:00 +0000226- Bug 1034277 / Patch 1035255: Remove compilation of core against CoreServices
227 and CoreFoundation on OS X. Involved removing PyMac_GetAppletScriptFile()
228 which has no known users. Thanks Bob Ippolito.
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000229
230C API
231-----
232
Raymond Hettinger39e92ea2004-11-18 09:41:45 +0000233- The PyRange_New() function is deprecated.
234
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000235
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000236What's New in Python 2.4 beta 2?
237================================
238
Anthony Baxter9f41f3a2004-11-03 06:21:37 +0000239*Release date: 03-NOV-2004*
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000240
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000241License
242-------
243
244The Python Software Foundation changed the license under which Python
245is released, to remove Python version numbers. There were no other
246changes to the license. So, for example, wherever the license for
247Python 2.3 said "Python 2.3", the new license says "Python". The
248intent is to make it possible to refer to the PSF license in a more
249durable way. For example, some people say they're confused by that
250the Open Source Initiative's entry for the Python Software Foundation
251License::
252
253 http://www.opensource.org/licenses/PythonSoftFoundation.php
254
255says "Python 2.1.1" all over it, wondering whether it applies only
256to Python 2.1.1.
257
258The official name of the new license is the Python Software Foundation
259License Version 2.
260
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000261Core and builtins
262-----------------
263
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +0000264- Bug #1055820 Cyclic garbage collection was not protecting against that
265 calling a live weakref to a piece of cyclic trash could resurrect an
266 insane mutation of the trash if any Python code ran during gc (via
267 running a dead object's __del__ method, running another callback on a
268 weakref to a dead object, or via any Python code run in any other thread
269 that managed to obtain the GIL while a __del__ or callback was running
270 in the thread doing gc). The most likely symptom was "impossible"
271 ``AttributeEror`` exceptions, appearing seemingly at random, on weakly
272 referenced objects. The cure was to clear all weakrefs to unreachable
273 objects before allowing any callbacks to run.
274
Raymond Hettinger561fbf12004-10-26 01:52:37 +0000275- Bug #1054139 _PyString_Resize() now invalidates its cached hash value.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000276
277Extension Modules
278-----------------
279
Raymond Hettinger9047c8f2004-10-24 00:10:06 +0000280- Bug #1048870: the compiler now generates distinct code objects for
281 functions with identical bodies. This was producing confusing
282 traceback messages which pointed to the function where the code
283 object was first defined rather than the function being executed.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000284
285Library
286-------
287
Barry Warsaw8c72eae2004-11-01 03:52:43 +0000288- Patch #1056967 changes the semantics of Template.safe_substitute() so that
289 no ValueError is raised on an 'invalid' match group. Now the delimiter is
290 returned.
291
Raymond Hettinger2ef7e6c2004-10-24 00:32:24 +0000292- Bug #1052503 pdb.runcall() was not passing along keyword arguments.
293
Raymond Hettingerc64aab82004-10-20 08:21:57 +0000294- Bug #902037: XML.sax.saxutils.prepare_input_source() now combines relative
295 paths with a base path before checking os.path.isfile().
296
Raymond Hettingere54e7262004-10-20 07:17:16 +0000297- The whichdb module can now be run from the command line.
298
Brett Cannon8abcc5d2004-10-18 01:37:57 +0000299- Bug #1045381: time.strptime() can now infer the date using %U or %W (week of
300 the year) when the day of the week and year are also specified.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000301
Andrew M. Kuchling0d19bae2004-10-19 19:54:41 +0000302- Bug #1048816: fix bug in Ctrl-K at start of line in curses.textpad.Textbox
303
Andrew M. Kuchling66e80ba2004-10-20 11:56:15 +0000304- Bug #1017553: fix bug in tarfile.filemode()
305
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000306- Patch #737473: fix bug that old source code is shown in tracebacks even if
Hye-Shik Chang182ac852004-10-26 09:16:42 +0000307 the source code is updated and reloaded.
308
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000309Build
310-----
311
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000312- Patch #1044395: --enable-shared is allowed in FreeBSD also.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000313
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000314What's New in Python 2.4 beta 1?
315================================
316
Anthony Baxter6a587c12004-10-15 08:07:21 +0000317*Release date: 15-OCT-2004*
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000318
319Core and builtins
320-----------------
321
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000322- Patch #975056: Restartable signals were not correctly disabled on
Anthony Baxtere4f8a482004-10-13 14:55:56 +0000323 BSD systems. Consistently use PyOS_setsig() instead of signal().
324
Tim Peters263091e2004-10-10 01:58:44 +0000325- The internal portable implementation of thread-local storage (TLS), used
326 by the ``PyGILState_Ensure()``/``PyGILState_Release()`` API, was not
327 thread-correct. This could lead to a variety of problems, up to and
328 including segfaults. See bug 1041645 for an example.
329
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000330- Added a command line option, -m module, which searches sys.path for the
331 module and then runs it. (Contributed by Nick Coghlan.)
332
Raymond Hettinger2c31a052004-09-22 18:44:21 +0000333- The bytecode optimizer now folds tuples of constants into a single
334 constant.
335
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000336- SF bug #513866: Float/long comparison anomaly. Prior to 2.4b1, when
337 an integer was compared to a float, the integer was coerced to a float.
338 That could yield spurious overflow errors (if the integer was very
339 large), and to anomalies such as
340 ``long(1e200)+1 == 1e200 == long(1e200)-1``. Coercion to float is no
341 longer performed, and cases like ``long(1e200)-1 < 1e200``,
342 ``long(1e200)+1 > 1e200`` and ``(1 << 20000) > 1e200`` are computed
343 correctly now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000344
345Extension modules
346-----------------
347
Tim Peterscf8997f2004-10-01 02:13:16 +0000348- ``collections.deque`` objects didn't play quite right with garbage
349 collection, which could lead to a segfault in a release build, or
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000350 an assert failure in a debug build. Also, added overflow checks,
351 better detection of mutation during iteration, and shielded deque
352 comparisons from unusual subclass overrides of the __iter__() method.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000353
354Library
355-------
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000356
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000357- Patch 1046644: distutils build_ext grew two new options - --swig for
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000358 specifying the swig executable to use, and --swig-opts to specify
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000359 options to pass to swig. --swig-opts="-c++" is the new way to spell
360 --swig-cpp.
361
Anthony Baxter22dcf662004-10-13 15:54:17 +0000362- Patch 983206: distutils now obeys environment variable LDSHARED, if
363 it is set.
364
Andrew M. Kuchling518d3932004-10-12 15:32:10 +0000365- Added Peter Astrand's subprocess.py module. See PEP 324 for details.
Fredrik Lundh5b3687d2004-10-12 15:26:28 +0000366
Brett Cannon4f35c712004-10-06 02:11:37 +0000367- time.strptime() now properly escapes timezones and all other locale-specific
368 strings for regex-specific symbols. Was breaking under Japanese Windows when
369 the timezone was specified as "Tokyo (standard time)".
370 Closes bug #1039270.
371
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000372- Updates for the email package:
Brett Cannon06a30b02004-10-22 06:22:54 +0000373
Barry Warsaw418de1f2004-10-11 14:32:47 +0000374 + email.Utils.formatdate() grew a 'usegmt' argument for HTTP support.
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000375 + All deprecated APIs that in email 2.x issued warnings have been removed:
376 _encoder argument to the MIMEText constructor, Message.add_payload(),
377 Utils.dump_address_pair(), Utils.decode(), Utils.encode()
378 + New deprecations: Generator.__call__(), Message.get_type(),
379 Message.get_main_type(), Message.get_subtype(), the 'strict' argument to
380 the Parser constructor. These will be removed in email 3.1.
381 + Support for Python earlier than 2.3 has been removed (see PEP 291).
382 + All defect classes have been renamed to end in 'Defect'.
383 + Some FeedParser fixes; also a MultipartInvariantViolationDefect will be
384 added to messages that claim to be multipart but really aren't.
385 + Updates to documentation.
386
Raymond Hettinger596ba4d2004-09-24 03:41:05 +0000387- re's findall() and finditer() functions now take an optional flags argument
388 just like the compile(), search(), and match() functions. Also, documented
389 the previously existing start and stop parameters for the findall() and
390 finditer() methods of regular expression objects.
391
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000392- rfc822 Messages now support iterating over the headers.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000393
Martin v. Löwisf3c56112004-09-18 09:08:52 +0000394- The (undocumented) tarfile.Tarfile.membernames has been removed;
395 applications should use the getmember function.
396
Martin v. Löwis39a31782004-09-18 09:03:49 +0000397- httplib now offers symbolic constants for the HTTP status codes.
398
Tim Peters528ca532004-09-16 01:30:50 +0000399- SF bug #1028306: Trying to compare a ``datetime.date`` to a
400 ``datetime.datetime`` mistakenly compared only the year, month and day.
401 Now it acts like a mixed-type comparison: ``False`` for ``==``,
402 ``True`` for ``!=``, and raises ``TypeError`` for other comparison
403 operators. Because datetime is a subclass of date, comparing only the
404 base class (date) members can still be done, if that's desired, by
405 forcing using of the approprate date method; e.g.,
406 ``a_date.__eq__(a_datetime)`` is true if and only if the year, month
407 and day members of ``a_date`` and ``a_datetime`` are equal.
408
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000409- bdist_rpm now supports command line options --force-arch,
410 {pre,post}-install, {pre,post}-uninstall, and
Martin v. Löwis23c48a12004-09-10 06:32:54 +0000411 {prep,build,install,clean,verify}-script.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000412
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000413- SF patch #998993: The UTF-8 and the UTF-16 stateful decoders now support
414 decoding incomplete input (when the input stream is temporarily exhausted).
415 ``codecs.StreamReader`` now implements buffering, which enables proper
416 readline support for the UTF-16 decoders. ``codecs.StreamReader.read()``
417 has a new argument ``chars`` which specifies the number of characters to
418 return. ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` and
419 ``codecs.StreamReader.readlines()`` have a new argument ``keepends``.
420 Trailing "\n"s will be stripped from the lines if ``keepends`` is false.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000421
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000422- The documentation for doctest is greatly expanded, and now covers all
423 the new public features (of which there are many).
424
Walter Dörwald5011d0c2004-09-13 08:53:15 +0000425- ``doctest.master`` was put back in, and ``doctest.testmod()`` once again
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000426 updates it. This isn't good, because every ``testmod()`` call
427 contributes to bloating the "hidden" state of ``doctest.master``, but
428 some old code apparently relies on it. For now, all we can do is
429 encourage people to stitch doctests together via doctest's unittest
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000430 integration features instead.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000431
Skip Montanaro82d0eec2004-09-14 17:58:31 +0000432- httplib now handles ipv6 address/port pairs.
433
David Goodger68a1abd2004-10-03 15:40:25 +0000434- SF bug #1017864: ConfigParser now correctly handles default keys,
435 processing them with ``ConfigParser.optionxform`` when supplied,
436 consistent with the handling of config file entries and runtime-set
437 options.
438
David Goodger1cbf2062004-10-03 15:55:09 +0000439- SF bug #997050: Document, test, & check for non-string values in
440 ConfigParser. Moved the new string-only restriction added in
441 rev. 1.65 to the SafeConfigParser class, leaving existing
442 ConfigParser & RawConfigParser behavior alone, and documented the
443 conditions under which non-string values work.
444
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000445Build
446-----
447
Brett Cannonbfef8692004-09-28 04:08:11 +0000448- Building on darwin now includes /opt/local/include and /opt/local/lib for
449 building extension modules. This is so as to include software installed as
450 a DarwinPorts port <http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/>
451
Tim Peters862f0592004-09-23 19:11:32 +0000452- pyport.h now defines a Py_IS_NAN macro. It works as-is when the
453 platform C computes true for ``x != x`` if and only if X is a NaN.
454 Other platforms can override the default definition with a platform-
455 specific spelling in that platform's pyconfig.h. You can also override
456 pyport.h's default Py_IS_INFINITY definition now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000457
458C API
459-----
460
Tim Peters7f468f22004-10-11 02:40:51 +0000461- SF patch 1044089: New function ``PyEval_ThreadsInitialized()`` returns
462 non-zero if PyEval_InitThreads() has been called.
463
464- The undocumented and unused extern int ``_PyThread_Started`` was removed.
465
Tim Peters84705582004-10-10 02:47:33 +0000466- The C API calls ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
467 are two of the very few advertised as being safe to call without holding
468 the GIL. However, this wasn't true in a debug build, as bug 1041645
469 demonstrated. In a debug build, Python redirects the ``PyMem`` family
470 of calls to Python's small-object allocator, to get the benefit of
471 its extra debugging capabilities. But Python's small-object allocator
472 isn't threadsafe, relying on the GIL to avoid the expense of doing its
473 own locking. ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
474 call the platform ``malloc()`` directly now, regardless of build type.
475
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000476- PyLong_AsUnsignedLong[Mask] now support int objects as well.
477
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000478- SF patch #998993: ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF8Stateful`` and
479 ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF16Stateful`` have been added, which implement stateful
480 decoding.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000481
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000482Tests
483-----
484
485- test__locale ported to unittest
486
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000487Mac
488---
489
Just van Rossumdd3c8372004-10-03 16:27:09 +0000490- ``plistlib`` now supports non-dict root objects. There is also a new
491 interface for reading and writing plist files: ``readPlist(pathOrFile)``
492 and ``writePlist(rootObject, pathOrFile)``
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000493
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000494Tools/Demos
495-----------
496
Tim Peters130e37f2004-10-03 19:03:19 +0000497- The text file comparison scripts ``ndiff.py`` and ``diff.py`` now
498 read the input files in universal-newline mode. This spares them
499 from consuming a great deal of time to deduce the useless result that,
500 e.g., a file with Windows line ends and a file with Linux line ends
501 have no lines in common.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000502
503
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000504What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
505=================================
506
Anthony Baxtere13943a2004-09-02 16:37:15 +0000507*Release date: 02-SEP-2004*
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000508
509Core and builtins
510-----------------
511
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000512- SF patch #1007189: ``from ... import ...`` statements now allow the name
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +0000513 list to be surrounded by parentheses.
514
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000515- Some speedups for long arithmetic, thanks to Trevor Perrin. Gradeschool
516 multiplication was sped a little by optimizing the C code. Gradeschool
517 squaring was sped by about a factor of 2, by exploiting that about half
518 the digit products are duplicates in a square. Because exponentiation
519 uses squaring often, this also speeds long power. For example, the time
520 to compute 17**1000000 dropped from about 14 seconds to 9 on my box due
521 to this much. The cutoff for Karatsuba multiplication was raised,
522 since gradeschool multiplication got quicker, and the cutoff was
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000523 aggressively small regardless. The exponentiation algorithm was switched
524 from right-to-left to left-to-right, which is more efficient for small
525 bases. In addition, if the exponent is large, the algorithm now does
526 5 bits (instead of 1 bit) at a time. That cut the time to compute
527 17**1000000 on my box in half again, down to about 4.5 seconds.
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000528
Tim Petersc8854432004-08-25 02:14:08 +0000529- OverflowWarning is no longer generated. PEP 237 scheduled this to
530 occur in Python 2.3, but since OverflowWarning was disabled by default,
531 nobody realized it was still being generated. On the chance that user
532 code is still using them, the Python builtin OverflowWarning, and
533 corresponding C API PyExc_OverflowWarning, will exist until Python 2.5.
534
Martin v. Löwis336e85f2004-08-19 11:31:58 +0000535- Py_InitializeEx has been added.
536
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +0000537- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
538 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
539
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +0000540- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
541 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
542 modified the list.
543
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +0000544- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
545 functions is now writable.
546
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +0000547- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
548 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
549 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
550 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
551
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000552- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
553 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
554 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
555 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
556 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +0000557
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +0000558- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
559 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
560
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000561Extension modules
562-----------------
563
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000564- difflib now supports HTML side-by-side diff.
565
Martin v. Löwisdc3883f2004-08-29 15:46:35 +0000566- os.urandom has been added for systems that support sources of random
567 data.
568
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000569- Patch 1012740: truncate() on a writeable cStringIO now resets the
570 position to the end of the stream. This is consistent with the original
571 StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was
572 supposed to have been truncated away.
573
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +0000574- Added socket.socketpair().
575
Dave Cole3203efb2004-08-26 00:37:31 +0000576- Added CurrentByteIndex, CurrentColumnNumber, CurrentLineNumber
577 members to xml.parsers.expat.XMLParser object.
578
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000579- The mpz, rotor, and xreadlines modules, all deprecated in earlier
Andrew M. Kuchling00873432004-08-31 13:50:43 +0000580 versions of Python, have now been removed.
581
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000582Library
583-------
584
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000585- Patch #934356: if a module defines __all__, believe that rather than using
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000586 heuristics for filtering out imported names.
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000587
Johannes Gijsbersae882f72004-08-30 10:19:56 +0000588- Patch #941486: added os.path.lexists(), which returns True for broken
589 symlinks, unlike os.path.exists().
590
Raymond Hettinger356a4592004-08-30 06:14:31 +0000591- the random module now uses os.urandom() for seeding if it is available.
592 Added a new generator based on os.urandom().
593
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000594- difflib and diff.py can now generate HTML.
595
Martin v. Löwiscae9e672004-08-25 13:04:53 +0000596- bdist_rpm now includes version and release in the BuildRoot, and
597 replaces - by ``_`` in version and release.
Martin v. Löwiscf525242004-08-25 13:00:34 +0000598
Martin v. Löwis9f5c0c42004-08-25 11:37:43 +0000599- distutils build/build_scripts now has an -e option to specify the
600 path to the Python interpreter for installed scripts.
601
Barry Warsaw8bee7612004-08-25 02:22:30 +0000602- PEP 292 classes Template and SafeTemplate are added to the string module.
603
Martin v. Löwis75b9da42004-08-18 13:57:44 +0000604- tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
605
Martin v. Löwisdeacce22004-08-18 12:46:26 +0000606- HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
607
Johannes Gijsbersc473c992004-08-18 12:40:31 +0000608- Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
609 Percivall.
610
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +0000611- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
612 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
613
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000614- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
615 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
616 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000617 than creating a new one.
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000618
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000619- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
620 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
621 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
622 and exponent.
623
624- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
625
626- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
627 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatability and atexit
628 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
629
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000630- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
631 to the readline module.
632
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000633- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000634 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
635 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000636
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +0000637- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
638 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
639 contains symlinks.
640
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +0000641- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
642 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
643
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +0000644- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
645 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
646 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
647
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000648- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
649 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
650 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
651 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
652 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
653 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
654 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
655 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
656 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
657 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
658 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
659 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
660 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
661
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +0000662- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
663
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000664Tools/Demos
665-----------
666
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000667- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
668 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
669
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +0000670- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
671
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000672Build
673-----
674
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000675- Backward incompatibility: longintrepr.h now triggers a compile-time
676 error if SHIFT (the number of bits in a Python long "digit") isn't
677 divisible by 5. This new requirement allows simple code for the new
678 5-bits-at-a-time long_pow() implementation. If necessary, the
679 restriction could be removed (by complicating long_pow(), or by
680 falling back to the 1-bit-at-a-time algorithm), but there are no
681 plans to do so.
682
Brett Cannoncc8a4f62004-08-26 01:44:07 +0000683- bug #991962: When building with --disable-toolbox-glue on Darwin no
684 attempt to build Mac-specific modules occurs.
685
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +0000686- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
687 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
688
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000689- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
690 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
691
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +0000692- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
693 GNU/k*BSD systems.
694
Hye-Shik Chang3ba5bfc2004-08-19 17:52:37 +0000695- bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings
696 found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64.
697
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000698C API
699-----
700
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000701..
702
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000703Documentation
704-------------
705
Neal Norwitz5268c392004-08-21 15:13:52 +0000706- patch #1005936, bug #1009373: fix index entries which contain
707 an underscore when viewed with Acrobat.
708
709- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if
710 it contains symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment
711 since 1992, but is now in the library reference as well.
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +0000712
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000713New platforms
714-------------
715
Hye-Shik Changf64700a2004-08-18 15:13:41 +0000716- FreeBSD 6 is now supported.
717
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000718Tests
719-----
720
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000721..
722
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000723Windows
724-------
725
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +0000726- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
727 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
728 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
729 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
730 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
731 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
732 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
733 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
734 the problem.
735
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000736Mac
737---
738
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000739..
740
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000741
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000742What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
743=================================
744
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000745*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000746
747Core and builtins
748-----------------
749
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +0000750- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
751 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
752 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
753 sensitive code.
754
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000755- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000756 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so::
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000757
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000758 @staticmethod
759 def foo(bar):
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000760
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000761 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000762
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000763- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
764 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
765 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
766 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
767 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
768 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
769 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
770 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
771 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
772 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
773 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
774
775 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
776 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
777 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
778 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
779 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
780 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
781 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
782
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +0000783- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
784 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
785
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000786- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000787 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000788
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000789- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000790 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000791 which was missing for no apparent reason.
792
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000793- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000794 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
795 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
796
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000797- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
798 types that support garbage collection.
799
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +0000800- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
801
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +0000802- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
803 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
804 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
805 Jython.
806
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000807- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
808
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +0000809- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
810 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
811
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +0000812- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
813 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
814 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +0000815
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +0000816- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
817 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
818 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
819
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000820Extension modules
821-----------------
822
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +0000823- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
824
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000825Library
826-------
827
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +0000828- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
829 TIS-620
830
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +0000831- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
832 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
833 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
834 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
835 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
836 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
837 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
838 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
839 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
840 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
841
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +0000842- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
843
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +0000844- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
845 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
846 same as when the argument is omitted).
847 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
848
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +0000849- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
850
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +0000851- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
852 schemes are offered.
853
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +0000854- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
855
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +0000856- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
857 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
858 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
859
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +0000860- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
861
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +0000862- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
863 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
864
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +0000865- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
866 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
867 when dummy_threading is being used.
868
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +0000869- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
870 from a tarfile.
871
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000872- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000873 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000874
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +0000875- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
876 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
877 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
878 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
879
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +0000880- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
881 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
882
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +0000883- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
884 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
885 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
886 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
887 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
888 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
889 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
890 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
891 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
892 by some other method in progress).
893
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000894- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
895 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
896 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +0000897
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +0000898- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
899
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +0000900- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
901 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
902 AM Kuchling.
903
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +0000904- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
905 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
906 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
907
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +0000908- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
909 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
910 instead of unsigned.
911
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000912- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +0000913 no longer part of the public API.
914
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +0000915- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
916 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
917 string methods of the same name).
918
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000919- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +0000920 SF patch 945642.
921
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000922- doctest unittest integration improvements:
923
924 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
925
926 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
927 DocTestSuites.
928
929- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
930 that provide thread-local data.
931
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000932- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
933 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
934
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000935- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
936
937- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
938 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
939 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
940
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000941- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
942
943 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
944 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
945 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000946
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000947 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
948 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
949 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
950 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
951
952 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
953 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
954
955 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
956 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
957 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
958 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
959
960 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
961 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
962 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
963 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
964 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
965
966 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
967 wrapping help output.
968
969 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
970 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
971 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000972
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000973C API
974-----
975
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000976- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
977 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
978 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
979 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
980 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
981 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
982 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
983 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
984 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
985 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
986 its visible semantics have not changed.
987
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000988- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
989 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
990
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000991Documentation
992-------------
993
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +0000994- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000995
996 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +0000997 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000998
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +0000999 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001000
1001 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
1002
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001003- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001004
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001005Tests
1006-----
1007
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001008- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +00001009 platforms that use the Makefile.
1010
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001011- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
1012 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
1013 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
1014
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001015
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001016What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
1017=================================
1018
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +00001019*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001020
1021Core and builtins
1022-----------------
1023
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +00001024- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
1025 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
1026 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
1027 objects now (one object instead of three).
1028
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +00001029- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
1030 Windows DLLs.
1031
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +00001032- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
1033 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +00001034
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +00001035- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
1036 a new .pyc magic.
1037
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +00001038- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
1039 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
1040 be there.
1041
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +00001042- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
1043 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
1044 the LC_NUMERIC category.
1045
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +00001046- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
1047 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
1048 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
1049
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +00001050- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
1051
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +00001052- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
1053 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
1054 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +00001055
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +00001056- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
1057 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
1058
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +00001059- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
1060
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001061- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001062 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001063
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +00001064- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
1065
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +00001066- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
1067
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +00001068- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
1069 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
1070
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +00001071- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
1072 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
1073 Fixes bug #858016 .
1074
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +00001075- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
1076 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
1077 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
1078
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +00001079- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
1080 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
1081 improves their performance (about 35%).
1082
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +00001083- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
1084 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
1085 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
1086
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +00001087- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
1088 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
1089 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
1090 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
1091
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001092- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
1093 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
1094 list comprehensions, and the list contructor (when the input iterable
1095 length is not known).
1096
1097- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
1098 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +00001099 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
1100 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001101 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
1102
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +00001103- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
1104 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
1105
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +00001106- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
1107 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
1108 keyword arguments.
1109
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +00001110- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
1111 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
1112 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
1113
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +00001114- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
1115 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
1116 cases.
1117
1118- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
1119 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
1120 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
1121 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
1122 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
1123 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
1124 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
1125 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
1126 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
1127 a release build.
1128
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +00001129- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
1130 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
1131
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001132- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001133 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001134
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +00001135- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
1136 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
1137 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
1138 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
1139 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
1140 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
1141 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
1142 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
1143 destroyed.
1144
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +00001145- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
1146 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
1147 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
1148 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
1149 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
1150 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
1151 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
1152 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
1153
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +00001154- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
1155 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
1156 character other than a space.
1157
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +00001158- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
1159 by the function object or by the method object, the function
1160 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
1161 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
1162 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
1163 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
1164 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
1165 attributes with the same name.
1166
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001167- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
1168 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
1169 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
1170 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
1171 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
1172 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
1173 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
1174 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
1175 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
1176 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
1177 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
1178 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
1179 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
1180 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +00001181
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +00001182- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
1183 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
1184 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
1185 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
1186 This has been repaired.
1187
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001188- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
1189
1190- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
1191
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +00001192- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
1193 over a sequence.
1194
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001195- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001196 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001197
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +00001198- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
1199
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +00001200- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
1201 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
1202 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
1203 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
1204 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
1205 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
1206 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
1207 records with equal keys is unchanged).
1208
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +00001209- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
1210 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
1211 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
1212
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +00001213- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
1214 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
1215 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
1216 freelist.
1217
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +00001218- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
1219 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
1220
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +00001221- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
1222 number.
1223
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +00001224- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
1225 a TypeError exception.
1226
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +00001227- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
1228 820195.
1229
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +00001230- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
1231 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
1232 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
1233
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001234- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001235 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
1236 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +00001237
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +00001238- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
1239 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
1240 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
1241
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001242- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
1243 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001244 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001245
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001246- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +00001247 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
1248 the first call.
1249
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001250
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001251Extension modules
1252-----------------
1253
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +00001254- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
1255 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
1256
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001257- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
1258 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
1259 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
1260 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
1261 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
1262 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
1263 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +00001264
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +00001265- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
1266
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +00001267- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
1268
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +00001269- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
1270 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
1271
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +00001272- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
1273 fewer false positives.
1274
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +00001275- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
1276 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
1277
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001278- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +00001279 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
1280
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +00001281- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001282 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +00001283 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
Raymond Hettinger6ab78cd2004-08-29 07:50:43 +00001284 Also, array.array() and array.extend() now accept any iterable argument
1285 for repeated appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +00001286
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +00001287- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
1288 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
1289 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
1290 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
1291
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +00001292- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
1293 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
1294 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
1295 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
1296 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
1297 #897625.
1298
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +00001299- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
1300 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
1301
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +00001302- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
1303 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
1304 and pops on either side of the deque.
1305
1306- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
1307 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
1308
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +00001309- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
1310 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
1311 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
1312 other functions that expect a function argument.
1313
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +00001314- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
1315
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001316- os.getsid was added.
1317
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +00001318- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
1319 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
1320 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
1321
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +00001322- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
1323
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +00001324- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
1325
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +00001326- readline.clear_history was added.
1327
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +00001328- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
1329
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +00001330- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
1331
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +00001332- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
1333
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +00001334- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
1335
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +00001336- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
1337
1338- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
1339
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +00001340- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
1341
1342- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
1343
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001344- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
1345 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
1346 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
1347
1348- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
1349 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
1350 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
1351 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
1352 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
1353 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
1354 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
1355
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +00001356- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
1357 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
1358 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
1359 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001360
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001361- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001362 iterators from a single iterable.
1363
1364- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
1365 of raising a TypeError exception.
1366
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +00001367- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
1368 as parameter.
1369
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001370Library
1371-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001372
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +00001373- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
1374 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
1375 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001376
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +00001377- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
1378 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
1379 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +00001380
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +00001381- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +00001382
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +00001383- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
1384 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +00001385
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +00001386- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
1387 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1388
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001389- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
1390
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001391- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001392 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001393
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001394- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001395 that generate a -debuginfo.rpm
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001396
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +00001397- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
1398
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +00001399- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
1400 on cygwin and mingw32.
1401
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +00001402- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
1403
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +00001404- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
1405 module.
1406
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +00001407- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
1408 installation scheme for all platforms.
1409
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001410- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +00001411 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001412
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001413- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
1414 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
1415 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
1416
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +00001417- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
1418 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
1419 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
1420
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +00001421- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
1422
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +00001423- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
1424
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +00001425- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
1426 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
1427
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +00001428- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
1429 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
1430 type pattern with the same value exists.
1431
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +00001432- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
1433 when run from the command prompt).
1434
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001435- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
1436 not taken into consideration when caching value.
1437
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +00001438- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
1439 default sort).
1440
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +00001441- Added global runctx function to profile module
1442
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +00001443- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
1444
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +00001445- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
1446
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +00001447- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
1448
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001449- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +00001450 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
1451 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
1452 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
1453 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
1454 accordingly.
1455
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +00001456- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
1457 decoding standards.
1458
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +00001459- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
1460 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
1461 called for all requests.
1462
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +00001463- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
1464 they are passed to the compiler.
1465
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +00001466- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
1467 indent, width and depth.
1468
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +00001469- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
1470 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
1471
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +00001472- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
1473 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
1474
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +00001475- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
1476
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +00001477- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
1478
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001479- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
1480
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +00001481- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
1482 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
1483
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +00001484- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +00001485 for better performance.
1486
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001487- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +00001488
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +00001489- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
1490 a string).
1491
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +00001492- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
1493
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +00001494- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
1495
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +00001496- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
1497
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +00001498- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
1499
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +00001500- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
1501 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
1502 list of fieldnames.
1503
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +00001504- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
1505 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
1506
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +00001507- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
1508
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +00001509- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
1510 empty lists.
1511
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +00001512- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
1513 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
1514 and shelves.
1515
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +00001516- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
1517 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
1518
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001519- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +00001520 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
1521 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001522
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +00001523- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
1524 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +00001525 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +00001526
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001527- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +00001528 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
1529 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
1530
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001531- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
1532 and removed in Py2.4.
1533
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +00001534- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
1535
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +00001536- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
1537
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001538Tools/Demos
1539-----------
1540
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +00001541- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
1542 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
1543
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +00001544- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
1545
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +00001546- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
1547 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
1548 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
1549 destination in situations where both files are given.
1550
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +00001551- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
1552 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
1553 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
1554 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
1555
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +00001556- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
1557
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +00001558- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
1559 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
1560 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
1561 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
1562 now.
1563
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001564- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
1565 in effect
1566
1567- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
1568 C-c C-h
1569
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +00001570- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
1571 -d option was given.
1572
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001573Build
1574-----
1575
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +00001576- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
1577 build under OS X.
1578
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +00001579- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
1580 --enable-profiling.
1581
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +00001582- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
1583 is configured --with-tsc.
1584
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +00001585- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
1586 on AMD64.
1587
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +00001588- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
1589 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
1590
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00001591- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
1592 removed.
1593
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00001594- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
1595 supported (see PEP 11).
1596
1597- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
1598
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00001599- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
1600
1601- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
1602 (see PEP 11).
1603
1604- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
1605 sizeof(char) must be 1.
1606
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001607C API
1608-----
1609
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00001610- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
1611 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
1612 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
1613
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001614- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
1615 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
1616 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
1617 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
1618
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00001619- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
1620 generator objects.
1621
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001622- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
1623 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00001624 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
1625 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001626
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00001627- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
1628 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
1629
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00001630- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
1631 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
1632 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
1633 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
1634 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
1635
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00001636- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
1637 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
1638 about 10% faster.
1639
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00001640- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
1641 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
1642
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00001643- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
1644 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
1645 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
1646 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
1647
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001648Windows
1649-------
1650
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00001651- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
1652 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
1653 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
1654 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
1655
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00001656- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
1657 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
1658 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
1659
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001660
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001661What's New in Python 2.3 final?
1662===============================
1663
1664*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
1665
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001666IDLE
1667----
1668
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00001669- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
1670 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
1671 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
1672 context-menu actions.
1673
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001674- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
1675 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
1676 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
1677 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
1678 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
1679 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
1680 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
1681 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
1682 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
1683
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001684
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001685What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
1686=============================================
1687
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00001688*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001689
1690Core and builtins
1691-----------------
1692
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001693- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001694 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001695 comment at the end are still unsupported.
1696
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001697Extension modules
1698-----------------
1699
1700- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
1701 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
1702 than once. This has been fixed.
1703
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00001704- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
1705 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
1706 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
1707 call.
1708
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001709- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
1710
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001711Library
1712-------
1713
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001714- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
1715 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
1716
1717- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
1718 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
1719 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
1720 restored.
1721
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001722IDLE
1723----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001724
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001725- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001726
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001727Build
1728-----
1729
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001730- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
1731 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
1732
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001733C API
1734-----
1735
1736Windows
1737-------
1738
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00001739- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
1740 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
1741
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001742- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
1743
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001744Mac
1745---
1746
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001747- Various fixes to pimp.
1748
1749- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
1750
1751- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
1752 more problems than it solves.
1753
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001754
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001755What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
1756=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001757
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00001758*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
1759
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001760Core and builtins
1761-----------------
1762
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00001763- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
1764 by sys.setcheckinterval().
1765
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001766- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
1767 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001768 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001769
1770- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
1771 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
1772 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001773 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001774
1775- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
1776 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001777
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001778- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
1779 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
1780 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
1781
1782- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001783 770247.
1784
1785- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001786
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001787Extension modules
1788-----------------
1789
1790- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
1791 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
1792
1793- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
1794
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001795- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
1796
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00001797- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
1798 contained within the _strptime module.
1799
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001800- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
1801 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
1802
1803- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001804 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
1805
1806- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
1807 the find_class attribute, if present.
1808
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001809- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001810
1811 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
1812 (SF bug 763298).
1813
1814 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00001815 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
1816 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
1817 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001818
1819 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
1820
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001821Library
1822-------
1823
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001824- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
1825
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00001826- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
1827 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
1828 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
1829 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
1830 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
1831 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
1832 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
1833 or Tester().
1834
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001835- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
1836 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
1837 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
1838 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
1839 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
1840 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
1841 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
1842 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
1843 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00001844
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001845 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00001846
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00001847- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
1848 weren't before was an oversight.
1849
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001850- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
1851 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
1852
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00001853- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
1854 when there are no lines.
1855
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00001856- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
1857 which could occur with Tk 8.4
1858
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001859- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
1860 to child processes.
1861
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001862- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
1863
1864- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
1865
1866- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
1867 xmlrpclib.
1868
1869- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
1870 responses.
1871
1872- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
1873 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
1874
1875- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
1876 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
1877 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
1878
1879- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
1880 used as patterns.
1881
1882- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
1883 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
1884 than Tk 8.3.
1885
1886- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
1887
1888- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001889
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001890Tools/Demos
1891-----------
1892
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001893- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
1894
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00001895- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
1896
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001897- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001898
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001899Build
1900-----
1901
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001902- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
1903
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001904- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
1905
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001906- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
1907 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001908
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001909- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
1910 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
1911 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001912
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001913C API
1914-----
1915
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001916- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
1917 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
1918
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001919Windows
1920-------
1921
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001922- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
1923 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
1924 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
1925 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
1926 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
1927 Python exception ::
1928
1929 thread.error: can't start new thread
1930
1931 is raised now.
1932
1933- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
1934 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
1935 instead of from DLL teardown.
1936
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001937Mac
1938---
1939
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001940- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00001941 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001942 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
1943 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
1944 the executable in the bundle.
1945
1946- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001947
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00001948- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
1949
1950- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
1951 on Panther.
1952
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001953What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
1954================================
1955
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001956*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001957
1958Core and builtins
1959-----------------
1960
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00001961- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
1962 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
1963 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
1964 with the -i option.
1965
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00001966- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
1967 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
1968
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001969- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
1970 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
1971
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00001972- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
1973 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
1974 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
1975 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
1976 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
1977 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
1978 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
1979 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
1980 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
1981 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
1982 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
1983 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
1984 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00001985
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001986- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
1987 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
1988 embedded in a lambda expression.
1989
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00001990- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
1991 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
1992 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
1993 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
1994 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
1995
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001996- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
1997 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
1998 matches the restriction on classic classes.
1999
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00002000- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
2001 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
2002
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00002003- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
2004 It's writable again.
2005
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002006- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
2007 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
2008 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002009 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002010
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002011- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
2012 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
2013 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
2014
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002015Extension modules
2016-----------------
2017
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00002018- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
2019 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
2020
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002021- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
2022 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
2023 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
2024 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
2025
2026- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
2027 collection.
2028
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00002029- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
2030 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
2031 unique within a single program run.
2032
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00002033- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
2034 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
2035
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00002036- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
2037 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
2038
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00002039- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
2040 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00002041
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00002042- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
2043
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00002044- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
2045 Fixes SF bug #730685.
2046
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00002047- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
2048 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
2049 for many BSD-derived systems.
2050
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002051
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002052Library
2053-------
2054
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00002055- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
2056 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
2057 primary ones:
2058
2059 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
2060 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
2061 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
2062
2063 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
2064 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
2065 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
2066 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
2067 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
2068 framework features (which doctest lacks).
2069
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00002070- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
2071 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
2072 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
2073 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
2074 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
2075 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
2076 argument.
2077
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002078- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
2079 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
2080 in the archive.
2081
2082- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
2083 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
2084
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00002085- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
2086 569574).
2087
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002088- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
2089 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
2090 no more.
2091
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002092- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
2093 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
2094 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
2095 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
2096 code coverage.
2097
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002098- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
2099 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
2100 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002101 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
2102 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002103
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002104- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
2105 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
2106 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00002107 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002108
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00002109- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
2110
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00002111- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
2112 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
2113 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
2114 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
2115
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00002116- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
2117 handling.
2118
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00002119- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
2120 __doc__ of data descriptors.
2121
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00002122- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
2123 in socket.py.
2124
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00002125- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
2126
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00002127- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
2128 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
2129 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
2130 opener with proxy support.
2131
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002132- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
2133
2134- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
2135
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002136Tools/Demos
2137-----------
2138
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00002139- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
2140
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002141- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
2142
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002143- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
2144 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00002145
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00002146- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
2147 files.
2148
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002149Build
2150-----
2151
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002152- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00002153 different root directory.
2154
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002155C API
2156-----
2157
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00002158- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
2159 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
2160 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
2161 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
2162 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
2163 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
2164 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
2165 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
2166 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
2167 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
2168
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002169- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
2170 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
2171 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
2172 from Python.
2173
2174
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002175New platforms
2176-------------
2177
2178None this time.
2179
2180Tests
2181-----
2182
2183- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
2184 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
2185
2186Windows
2187-------
2188
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00002189- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
2190
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00002191- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
2192 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
2193 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
2194 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
2195 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
2196 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
2197 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
2198 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
2199 that's what it's for.
2200
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002201Mac
2202---
2203
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00002204- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
2205 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
2206 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
2207 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00002208- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
2209 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
2210- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002211
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002212SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
2213------------------------------------
2214
2215430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
2216598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
2217622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
2218661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
2219683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
2220697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
2221713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
2222724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
2223727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
2224729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
2225730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
2226731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
2227732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
2228733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
2229735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
2230740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
2231744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
2232745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
2233747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
2234749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
2235751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
2236753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
2237755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
2238757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
2239760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
2240
2241
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002242What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
2243================================
2244
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00002245*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002246
2247Core and builtins
2248-----------------
2249
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00002250- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
2251 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
2252
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00002253- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
2254 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
2255 and cannot be strings).
2256
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00002257- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
2258 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
2259 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
2260 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
2261
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00002262- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
2263 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
2264 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
2265 Python itself.
2266
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00002267- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
2268 the referenced object, if it has one.
2269
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00002270- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
2271 the thread started at
2272 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
2273
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00002274- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
2275 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
2276 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
2277 placed on a list index.
2278
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00002279- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
2280 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
2281 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
2282 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
2283
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002284- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
2285 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
2286 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
2287 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
2288 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
2289 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
2290 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
2291
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00002292- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
2293 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
2294 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
2295 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
2296 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
2297
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00002298- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
2299 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00002300
2301- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
2302 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
2303 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
2304 #693195.)
2305
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00002306- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
2307 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002308
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002309- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00002310 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002311 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
2312 interpreter executions, would fail.
2313
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002314- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00002315 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00002316 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002317
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002318Extension modules
2319-----------------
2320
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00002321- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
2322 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
2323 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
2324 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
2325
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00002326- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
2327 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
2328
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00002329- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
2330 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
2331 and Greg Chapman.)
2332
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002333- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
2334 recursively.
2335
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00002336- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00002337 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
2338 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
2339 leaks.
2340
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00002341- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
2342
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00002343- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
2344 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
2345 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
2346 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
2347 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
2348 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
2349 #705836.
2350
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002351- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00002352 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
2353
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00002354- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
2355 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
2356 See SF bug #692416.
2357
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00002358- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
2359 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
2360
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00002361- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
2362 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
2363 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002364
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002365- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00002366 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
2367 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
2368
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00002369- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
2370 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
2371 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
2372 timeouts to work properly.
2373
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002374Library
2375-------
2376
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002377- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
2378 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
2379 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
2380 future release.
2381
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00002382- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
2383 for querying platform dependent features.
2384
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00002385- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00002386
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00002387- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
2388 pickle protocol versions.
2389
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00002390- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
2391 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
2392 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
2393
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00002394- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
2395
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00002396- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
2397 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
2398 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
2399 modules.
2400
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00002401- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
2402 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
2403 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
2404
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002405- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
2406 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
2407
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00002408- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
2409 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
2410 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
2411
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002412- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00002413 MS Office extensions.
2414
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00002415- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
2416 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
2417
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00002418- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
2419 execution speed of expressions and statements.
2420
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002421- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
2422 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
2423 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
2424 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
2425 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
2426 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
2427
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002428- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
2429 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
2430 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002431
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00002432- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
2433 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
2434 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
2435
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00002436- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
2437
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00002438- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
2439 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
2440 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
2441
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002442Tools/Demos
2443-----------
2444
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00002445- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
2446 See the module docstring for details.
2447
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002448Build
2449-----
2450
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00002451- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
2452 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002453
2454C API
2455-----
2456
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002457- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
2458
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00002459- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
2460 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
2461 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
2462
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002463- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
2464 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002465
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002466 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
2467 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
2468 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00002469
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00002470- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00002471 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
2472
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00002473- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
2474 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
2475 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002476
2477New platforms
2478-------------
2479
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002480None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002481
2482Tests
2483-----
2484
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00002485- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
2486 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002487
2488Windows
2489-------
2490
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00002491- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
2492 function.
2493
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00002494- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
2495 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002496
2497Mac
2498---
2499
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002500- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
2501 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00002502
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00002503- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
2504 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002505
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00002506- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
2507 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
2508 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002509
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002510- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00002511 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
2512 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002513
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002514- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
2515 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002516
2517
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002518What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
2519=================================
2520
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002521*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002522
2523Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002524-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002525
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00002526- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
2527 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
2528 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
2529
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00002530- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
2531 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
2532 (SF patch #664376.)
2533
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002534- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
2535 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
2536 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
2537 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
2538 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
2539 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00002540 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002541
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002542- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
2543 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
2544 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
2545 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002546 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002547
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00002548- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
2549 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
2550 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
2551 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
2552 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
2553 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
2554 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
2555 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
2556 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
2557 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
2558 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
2559
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00002560- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
2561 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
2562 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
2563 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
2564 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
2565 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
2566
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00002567- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
2568 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
2569
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00002570- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
2571 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
2572 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
2573 case.)
2574
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00002575- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
2576 passed as unicode strings.
2577
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00002578- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
2579 See SF bug #683467.
2580
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00002581- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
2582 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
2583
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00002584- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
2585
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00002586- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
2587
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00002588- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
2589 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
2590 arguments.
2591
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00002592- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
2593 See SF bug #667147.
2594
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002595- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002596 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002597 See SF bug #676155.
2598
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002599- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002600 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002601 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
2602 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
2603 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
2604 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
2605 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
2606 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002607
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002608Extension modules
2609-----------------
2610
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002611- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
2612 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2613 tp_as_number pointer.
2614
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002615- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
2616 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
2617 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
2618 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
2619 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
2620
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002621- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
2622
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00002623- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
2624
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002625- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00002626 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002627 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
2628 patch #678531.)
2629
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00002630- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
2631 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
2632
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00002633- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
2634 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
2635
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00002636- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
2637
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00002638- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
2639 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
2640 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
2641
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002642- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
2643
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002644- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
2645 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
2646
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002647- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002648
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002649- datetime changes:
2650
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00002651 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
2652
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00002653 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
2654 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
2655 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
2656 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
2657 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
2658 now.
2659
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002660 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002661 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
2662 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002663
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002664 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002665 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002666 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
2667 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
2668 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
2669 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002670
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002671 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
2672 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
2673 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002674 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
2675
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002676 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
2677 by a later example coded by Guido.
2678
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002679 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002680 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
2681 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
2682 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002683 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
2684 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
2685
2686 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
2687 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
2688 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
2689 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
2690 tzinfo subclass instance.
2691
2692 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
2693 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
2694 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
2695 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
2696 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
2697 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
2698 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
2699 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002700
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002701 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
2702 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
2703 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
2704 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
2705 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002706 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
2707
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002708 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002709
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002710 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
2711 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
2712 as a naive datetime object.
2713
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00002714 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
2715 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
2716 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
2717
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00002718 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
2719 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
2720 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
2721 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
2722 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
2723 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
2724 comparison.
2725
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002726 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
2727 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
2728 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
2729 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002730 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002731
2732 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002733
2734 and ::
2735
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002736 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
2737
2738 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
2739 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
2740 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
2741 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
2742
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00002743 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
2744 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
2745 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
2746 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
2747 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
2748
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002749 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
2750 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00002751 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
2752 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002753
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002754Library
2755-------
2756
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002757- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
2758 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
2759
2760- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
2761 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
2762 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
2763 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
2764 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
2765 See PEP 307 for details.
2766
2767- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
2768 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
2769
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002770- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
2771 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002772 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002773 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
2774 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002775 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002776
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00002777- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
2778 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
2779
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002780- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
2781 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
2782 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
2783
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00002784- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
2785
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00002786- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
2787 exception.
2788
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00002789- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
2790 class.
2791
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00002792- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
2793 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
2794 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
2795
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00002796- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
2797 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
2798
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002799- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00002800 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
2801 See SF bug #659228.
2802
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00002803- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
2804 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
2805 See SF patch #651082.
2806
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00002807- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002808
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00002809- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
2810 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
2811
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002812- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002813 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002814
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00002815- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
2816 DOS paths from other platforms.
2817
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002818Tools/Demos
2819-----------
2820
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002821- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
2822 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
2823 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
2824 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
2825 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
2826 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
2827 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
2828 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
2829 example:
2830
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00002831 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
2832 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002833
2834 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
2835
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002836
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002837Build
2838-----
2839
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002840- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
2841 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
2842 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002843 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
2844
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002845 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
2846
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00002847- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
2848 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
2849 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
2850 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
2851 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
2852 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
2853 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
2854 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
2855 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
2856
2857- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
2858 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
2859 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
2860 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
2861
2862- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
2863 from the Tools/scripts directory.
2864
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002865C API
2866-----
2867
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002868- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
2869 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00002870
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002871- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
2872 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2873 tp_as_number pointer.
2874
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00002875- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
2876 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
2877 (SF #681367)
2878
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00002879- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
2880 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
2881 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
2882 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00002883
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002884Tests
2885-----
2886
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00002887- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002888 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
2889 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
2890 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
2891 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
2892 pydoc.)
2893
2894- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
2895
2896- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002897
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002898Windows
2899-------
2900
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002901- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
2902 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
2903 time).
2904
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00002905- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
2906 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
2907
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002908- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
2909 release without strong cryptography.
2910
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002911- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002912 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002913
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002914- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
2915 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
2916
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002917Mac
2918---
2919
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002920- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
2921 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002922
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00002923- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
2924 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
2925 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002926
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002927- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
2928 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002929
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002930- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
2931 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
2932 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
2933 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002934
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002935- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00002936 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
2937 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
2938 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002939
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002940
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002941What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002942=================================
2943
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00002944*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002945
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002946Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002947--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002948
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00002949- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
2950
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002951- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
2952 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002953 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002954 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002955 a different meaning than before.
2956
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002957- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002958 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002959 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002960
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002961- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002962 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002963 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002964
2965- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
2966 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
2967 and deallocation.
2968
2969- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
2970 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
2971
2972- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
2973 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
2974 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
2975 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
2976 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
2977
2978- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
2979 now detected by the garbage collector.
2980
2981- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
2982 [SF bug 519621]
2983
2984- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
2985 identifier.
2986
2987- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
2988 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
2989 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
2990 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
2991 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
2992 [SF bug 563060]
2993
2994- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
2995 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
2996 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
2997 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
2998 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
2999
3000- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
3001 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
3002 not called. [SF bug #537450]
3003
3004- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
3005
3006- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
3007 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
3008 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
3009 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
3010 state of the slots would be lost.)
3011
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003012Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003013-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003014
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003015- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003016 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
3017 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
3018 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
3019 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003020 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
3021 Jython 2.1.
3022
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003023- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003024 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003025 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
3026 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
3027 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
3028 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
3029 these, see PEP 302.
3030
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003031- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
3032 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
3033 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
3034
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00003035- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
3036 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
3037 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
3038
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00003039- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
3040 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
3041 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
3042
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003043- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
3044 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
3045 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
3046 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
3047 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
3048 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
3049 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
3050 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
3051 releases or implementations.
3052
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003053- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003054 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
3055 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003056
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00003057- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
3058 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
3059
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003060- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
3061 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
3062 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
3063
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00003064- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
3065 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
3066
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003067- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
3068 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003069 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
3070 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003071
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00003072- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
3073 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
3074 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
3075 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
3076 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
3077
3078 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
3079 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
3080 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
3081 pattern.
3082
3083 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
3084 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
3085 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
3086 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
3087
3088 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
3089 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
3090 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
3091 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
3092 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
3093 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
3094
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00003095- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
3096 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
3097 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
3098 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
3099 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
3100 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
3101 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
3102 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00003103
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00003104- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
3105 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
3106 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
3107 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
3108 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003109 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
3110 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
3111 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
3112 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
3113 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
3114 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
3115 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003116
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003117- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
3118 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
3119
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00003120- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
3121 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
3122 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
3123 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
3124 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
3125 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
3126 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
3127 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
3128 to Zack Weinberg!
3129
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00003130- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
3131 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
3132 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
3133 type. This has been fixed now.
3134
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00003135- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
3136 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
3137 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
3138
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003139- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
3140 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
3141 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
3142 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
3143 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
3144 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
3145 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
3146 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00003147 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003148
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00003149- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
3150 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
3151 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00003152
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003153- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
3154 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
3155 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
3156 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
3157 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
3158 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
3159 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
3160 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003161 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003162 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
3163 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
3164
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00003165- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
3166 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
3167 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
3168 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
3169 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
3170 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
3171 this.)
3172
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003173- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
3174 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003175 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003176 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003177 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
3178 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00003179 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
3180 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003181
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003182- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
3183 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
3184 currently running.
3185
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00003186- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
3187 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
3188 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
3189 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
3190
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00003191- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
3192 as directory names.
3193
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00003194- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
3195 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
3196
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00003197- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
3198 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
3199
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003200- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00003201 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
3202 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003203
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00003204- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
3205 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
3206 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
3207 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
3208 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
3209
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003210- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
3211 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
3212 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
3213 removed.
3214
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00003215- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
3216 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
3217 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
3218
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00003219- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
3220 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
3221 to __debug__.
3222
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00003223- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
3224 string to the left with zeros. For example,
3225 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
3226
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00003227- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
3228 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
3229 deprecated now.
3230
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00003231- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
3232 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
3233 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00003234
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00003235- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
3236 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
3237 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
3238 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
3239 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00003240
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00003241- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
3242 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
3243
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003244- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
3245 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
3246 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003247 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003248 is backward compatible.
3249
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00003250- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
3251 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
3252 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
3253 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
3254 could access a pointer to freed memory.
3255
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00003256- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
3257 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
3258 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
3259 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
3260 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
3261 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003262
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00003263- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
3264 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
3265
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003266- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
3267 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
3268
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003269- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
3270 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
3271 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
3272 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
3273 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
3274
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00003275- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
3276 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
3277 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
3278
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003279- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00003280 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
3281
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00003282- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
3283 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
3284 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00003285
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00003286- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
3287 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
3288
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00003289- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
3290 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
3291 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
3292
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00003293- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
3294
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003295Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003296-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003297
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00003298- Added three operators to the operator module:
3299 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
3300 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
3301 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
3302
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00003303- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
3304
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003305- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
3306 archives.
3307
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003308- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
3309 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
3310 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
3311
3312 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
3313
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003314- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
3315 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
3316 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00003317 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003318
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00003319- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
3320 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
3321 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
3322 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003323 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
3324 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
3325 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
3326 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00003327
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00003328- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
3329 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00003330
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00003331- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
3332
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00003333- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
3334 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
3335
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00003336- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
3337 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
3338 supported.
3339
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00003340- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
3341
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00003342- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
3343 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00003344
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00003345- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
3346 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
3347
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003348- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
3349
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003350- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
3351 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
3352
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00003353- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
3354 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
3355 functions but callable type objects.
3356
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003357- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003358 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003359 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003360
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00003361- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
3362 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00003363
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00003364- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
3365 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00003366
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00003367- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
3368 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
3369 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
3370 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
3371
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00003372- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
3373 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00003374
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00003375- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
3376 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
3377 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
3378 and __imul__.
3379
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00003380- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00003381 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
3382 is called.
3383
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00003384- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
3385 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
3386 interpreter was compiled.
3387
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003388- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
3389 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
3390 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003391 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003392 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
3393 1, not 2.
3394
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00003395- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
3396 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
3397 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
3398 limit.
3399
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00003400- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
3401 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
3402 bug #623464.
3403
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00003404- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
3405 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
3406 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
3407 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
3408
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003409Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003410-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003411
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00003412- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
3413
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00003414- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
3415 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
3416 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
3417 with Python 2.3a2.
3418
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00003419- os.path exposes getctime.
3420
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003421- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003422 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003423 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003424 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003425 unit tests of floating point results.
3426
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00003427- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
3428 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
3429 has been increased.
3430
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003431- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
3432 executed.
3433
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00003434- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
3435 postinstallation script.
3436
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00003437- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
3438 test the current module.
3439
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003440- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00003441 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
3442 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
3443 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
3444 this behavior needs to be controlled.
3445
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003446- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003447 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003448 Ward's Optik package.
3449
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003450- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
3451 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
3452 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
3453 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
3454
3455- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
3456 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003457 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003458
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00003459- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
3460 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
3461 shelf are binary pickles.
3462
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00003463- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
3464 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
3465
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00003466- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
3467 modules are iterators now.
3468
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00003469- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
3470 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
3471 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
3472 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
3473 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
3474 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003475
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00003476- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
3477 with their entity value.
3478
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00003479- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
3480
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003481- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
3482 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00003483
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003484- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
3485 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003486 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00003487
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00003488- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
3489 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
3490 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
3491 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
3492 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
3493 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
3494 main():
3495
3496 import locale
3497 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
3498
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00003499- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
3500 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
3501
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00003502- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
3503 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
3504 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
3505 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
3506 to the new standard.
3507
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00003508- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
3509 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
3510 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
3511 an extension to the database.
3512
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003513- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
3514 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
3515 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
3516 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00003517 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003518
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003519- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003520 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003521
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003522- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
3523 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
3524 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
3525 bounded integers.
3526
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00003527- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
3528 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
3529 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
3530 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
3531 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
3532 in existence.
3533
3534 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
3535 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
3536 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
3537 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
3538 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
3539 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
3540
3541 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
3542 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
3543 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
3544 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
3545
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00003546- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
3547 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
3548 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
3549
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00003550- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
3551
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003552- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
3553 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
3554 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
3555 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
3556
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00003557- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
3558 argument.
3559
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00003560- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
3561 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
3562 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
3563 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
3564 [SF patch 560794].
3565
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003566- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
3567 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
3568 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003569 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
3570 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
3571 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003572
3573- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
3574 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00003575
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00003576- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
3577 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
3578 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
3579 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00003580
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00003581- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
3582 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
3583 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
3584 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
3585 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
3586
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003587- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00003588
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00003589- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
3590
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00003591- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
3592 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
3593 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
3594 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
3595 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
3596 identical to None.
3597
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00003598- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
3599 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
3600 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
3601 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
3602 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
3603 results now.
3604
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00003605- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
3606 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
3607
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003608- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
3609 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
3610 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
3611 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
3612 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
3613 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
3614 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
3615 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
3616
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00003617- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
3618
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00003619- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
3620 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
3621
3622- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
3623 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
3624 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
3625 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
3626 and other systems.
3627
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003628- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
3629 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
3630 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
3631 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 +00003632 work well with these.
3633
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00003634- compileall now supports quiet operation.
3635
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003636- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00003637 connections.
3638
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00003639- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
3640 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
3641 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
3642
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00003643- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
3644 sets
3645
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00003646- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
3647 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
3648 name.
3649
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00003650- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
3651 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
3652 passed in.
3653
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003654- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00003655 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00003656 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
3657 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00003658
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00003659- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
3660
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00003661- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
3662
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00003663- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
3664 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
3665 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
3666
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003667- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
3668 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
3669 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
3670 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00003671 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003672
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003673- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003674 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003675 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003676
3677- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
3678 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
3679 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
3680
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003681- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00003682 the value of its expression argument.
3683
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003684- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
3685 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
3686 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
3687
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00003688- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
3689 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
3690 skipstone browser was included.
3691
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00003692- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
3693 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
3694
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003695Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003696-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003697
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00003698- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
3699 names in addition to accepting file names.
3700
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00003701- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
3702 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
3703 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
3704 still used and useful.)
3705
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00003706- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
3707 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
3708 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
3709 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00003710
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00003711- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
3712 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
3713 the generated binary.
3714
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003715Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003716-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003717
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00003718- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
3719
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003720- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
3721 except in the hands of experts.
3722
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003723- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003724 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
3725 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
3726 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00003727
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00003728- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
3729 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
3730 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
3731 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
3732 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
3733 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
3734 builds.
3735
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003736- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
3737 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
3738 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
3739 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
3740 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
3741 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
3742 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
3743 new type.
3744
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00003745- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00003746
3747 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
3748 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
3749 positive infinities.
3750
3751 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
3752 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
3753 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
3754 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
3755 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
3756 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
3757 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
3758
3759 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
3760
3761 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
3762
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00003763- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
3764 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
3765 size of the executable.
3766
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003767- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
3768 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
3769 configure script. On other platforms, remove
3770 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00003771
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00003772- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
3773
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00003774- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
3775 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
3776 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00003777
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00003778- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
3779 well as Unix.
3780
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00003781- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
3782 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
3783 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
3784 modules in the README file for details.
3785
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003786C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003787-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003788
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003789- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
3790 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003791 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00003792 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003793 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003794
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003795- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
3796 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
3797 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
3798 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
3799 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
3800 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003801 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003802 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
3803 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
3804 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
3805 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
3806 aligned.)
3807
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00003808- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
3809 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
3810 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
3811
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003812- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
3813 level.
3814
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00003815- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
3816 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
3817 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
3818 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
3819 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
3820
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00003821- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
3822 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
3823 code.
3824
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00003825- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
3826 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
3827 adjusting for negative indices.
3828
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003829- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
3830 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
3831 object.
3832
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00003833- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
3834 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
3835 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
3836
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003837- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
3838 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00003839
3840- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
3841
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00003842- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
3843 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
3844 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
3845 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
3846
3847- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
3848
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00003849- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003850
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003851- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00003852 without going through the buffer API.
3853
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003854- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00003855
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00003856- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
3857 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
3858 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
3859 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
3860
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003861- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
3862 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
3863
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003864- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003865 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
3866
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003867New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003868-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003869
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00003870- OpenVMS is now supported.
3871
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00003872- AtheOS is now supported.
3873
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00003874- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
3875
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00003876- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
3877
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003878Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003879-----
3880
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00003881- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
3882 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
3883 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003884
3885Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003886-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003887
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003888- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
3889 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
3890 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
3891 bugs.
3892 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003893 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00003894 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
3895 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003896 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003897
3898- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00003899 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003900
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00003901- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
3902 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
3903
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003904- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
3905 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003906 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003907 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
3908
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00003909- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
3910 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
3911 use files" uninstall option).
3912
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00003913- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
3914
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003915- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
3916 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
3917
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003918- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
3919 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
3920 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
3921
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003922- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
3923 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
3924 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
3925 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
3926 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003927 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
3928 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
3929 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003930
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003931- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003932 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003933 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
3934 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
3935 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
3936 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
3937 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
3938 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
3939 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
3940 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
3941 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
3942 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
3943 work around.
3944
3945- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
3946 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
3947 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
3948 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
3949 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
3950 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
3951 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
3952 specified with O_CREAT too).
3953
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003954Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003955----
3956
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003957- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003958
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00003959- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
3960 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
3961 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
3962
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003963- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
3964 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
3965 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
3966
3967- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
3968 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
3969 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
3970 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
3971 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
3972 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
3973 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
3974 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003975
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00003976- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
3977 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
3978 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003979
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003980- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
3981 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
3982 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
3983 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
3984 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003985
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003986- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
3987 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
3988 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003989
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003990- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
3991 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003992
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003993- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
3994 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
3995 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
3996 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
3997 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003998
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003999- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
4000 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
4001 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
4002
4003- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
4004 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
4005 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004006
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004007- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
4008 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
4009 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
4010 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004011 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004012
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004013- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
4014 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004015
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004016- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
4017 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00004018
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004019- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00004020 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004021 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
4022 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004023
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00004024
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004025What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004026===============================
4027
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004028*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
4029
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004030Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004031--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004032
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004033- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
4034 with a custom metaclass.
4035
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004036Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004037-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004038
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004039- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
4040 are proxies.
4041
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004042Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004043-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004044
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004045- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
4046 very short strings.
4047
4048- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
4049 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
4050 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
4051 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
4052 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
4053
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004054Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004055-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004056
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004057- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
4058 close or delete time).
4059
4060- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
4061 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
4062
4063- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
4064
4065- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004066 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004067
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004068Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004069-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004070
4071Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004072-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004073
4074C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004075-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004076
4077New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004078-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004079
4080Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004081-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004082
4083Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004084-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004085
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004086- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
4087
4088- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
4089 instances are deleted at process exit time.
4090
4091- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
4092 deleted at process exit time.
4093
4094- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
4095 in backslash.
4096
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004097Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004098----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004099
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004100- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
4101 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
4102 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
4103
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004104
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00004105What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004106===========================
4107
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004108*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
4109
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004110Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004111--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004112
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004113- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
4114 been extensively updated. See
4115
4116 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
4117
4118 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
4119
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00004120- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
4121 deleted!
4122
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00004123- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
4124 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
4125 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
4126 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
4127 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
4128
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004129- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
4130
4131 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
4132 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
4133
4134 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
4135 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
4136 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
4137 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
4138 supported anyway.
4139
4140 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
4141 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
4142
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00004143- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
4144 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
4145 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
4146 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
4147 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004148
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00004149- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
4150 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
4151 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
4152
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004153Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004154-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004155
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004156- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
4157 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
4158 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
4159 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
4160 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
4161 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00004162 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
4163 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
4164 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
4165 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004166
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00004167- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
4168 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
4169 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
4170
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004171Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004172-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004173
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004174- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
4175
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004176Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004177-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004178
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00004179- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
4180 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
4181 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
4182 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
4183 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
4184 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
4185
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00004186- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
4187
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00004188- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
4189
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00004190- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
4191
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004192- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
4193 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
4194 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
4195
4196- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
4197
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004198Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004199-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004200
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004201- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
4202 off a search on Google.
4203
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004204Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004205-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004206
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004207- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
4208 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
4209 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
4210 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
4211 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
4212 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
4213 other platforms should do likewise.
4214
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00004215- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
4216 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
4217 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
4218
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004219C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004220-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004221
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004222- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
4223 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
4224 producing key-value pairs.
4225
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004226- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004227 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004228 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
4229 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
4230 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
4231 previously went unchallenged.
4232
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004233New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004234-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004235
4236Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004237-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004238
4239Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004240-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004241
4242Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004243----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004244
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00004245- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
4246 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004247
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004248- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
4249 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
4250 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
4251 home.
4252
4253
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004254What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004255===========================
4256
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004257*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
4258
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004259Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004260--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004261
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004262- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
4263 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004264
4265 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004266 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004267
4268 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
4269 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004270 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004271 This needs to be documented.
4272
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00004273- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
4274 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
4275
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00004276- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
4277 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
4278 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
4279
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00004280- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
4281 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
4282
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004283- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
4284 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
4285 class forbids it).
4286
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00004287- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
4288 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
4289 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
4290
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004291- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
4292
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004293Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004294-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004295
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004296- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
4297 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004298 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004299
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004300- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
4301 (like 1 + '').
4302
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004303Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004304-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004305
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004306- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
4307 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
4308 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
4309 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004310 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004311 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
4312
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00004313- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
4314 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
4315 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
4316 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
4317
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004318- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
4319 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004320 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
4321 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
4322 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004323
4324- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
4325 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004326
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00004327- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
4328 bytes on its input.
4329
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004330Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004331-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004332
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004333- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00004334 convenience function.
4335
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004336- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
4337 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
4338 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004339 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
4340 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
4341 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
4342 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
4343 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
4344 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004345
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00004346- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
4347 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
4348 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
4349 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
4350
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00004351- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
4352 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
4353 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
4354
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004355- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
4356 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
4357 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
4358 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
4359
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004360- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
4361 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004362 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004363 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
4364 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
4365 new -l and -e options.
4366
4367- statcache is now deprecated.
4368
4369- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
4370 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004371 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004372 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
4373 time properly taken into account.
4374
4375- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
4376 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
4377 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
4378 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
4379
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004380Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004381-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004382
4383Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004384-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004385
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004386- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
4387 is built with libdb3 if available.
4388
4389- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
4390
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004391C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004392-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004393
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00004394- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
4395 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
4396 PySequence_Size().
4397
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004398- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
4399
4400- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
4401 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
4402 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
4403
4404- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
4405 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
4406
4407- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
4408 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
4409
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004410New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004411-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004412
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004413- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
4414 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
4415
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00004416- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
4417 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
4418
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004419- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
4420
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004421Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004422-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004423
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004424- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
4425 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
4426
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004427Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004428-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004429
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004430Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004431----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004432
4433- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
4434 removed completely in the next release.
4435
4436- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
4437 OSX.
4438
4439- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
4440 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
4441
4442- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
4443
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004444
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004445What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004446===========================
4447
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004448*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
4449
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004450Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004451--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004452
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004453- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004454 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004455 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004456 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
4457 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004458 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
4459 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004460 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
4461 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00004462
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00004463- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
4464 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
4465
4466- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
4467 class methods, static methods, and properties.
4468
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004469Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004470-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004471
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00004472- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
4473 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
4474 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
4475 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
4476 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
4477 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
4478 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
4479 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
4480
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004481- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
4482 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
4483 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
4484 example).
4485
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004486- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004487 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004488 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004489 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004490
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004491- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
4492 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
4493 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00004494 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004495
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004496- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
4497 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
4498 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
4499 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
4500 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
4501 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
4502
4503 isinstance(x, (A, B))
4504
4505 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
4506
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004507Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004508-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004509
4510- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
4511
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004512- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
4513
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004514- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
4515 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00004516
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004517- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
4518 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
4519 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
4520 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
4521 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
4522 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00004523 attributes.
4524
4525- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
4526 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
4527 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00004528
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004529- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
4530 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
4531 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004532
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004533- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
4534 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
4535 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004536 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
4537 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
4538
4539- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
4540 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004541
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004542Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004543-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004544
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00004545- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
4546 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
4547
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004548- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
4549 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
4550 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
4551 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
4552
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00004553- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
4554 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
4555 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
4556 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
4557
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00004558 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
4559 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
4560 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
4561 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
4562 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
4563 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
4564 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
4565 without losing information).
4566
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004567- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004568 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
4569 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
4570 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
4571 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
4572 module).
4573
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004574 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004575 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
4576 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
4577 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
4578 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004579
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004580- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00004581 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
4582 encoding.
4583
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00004584- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
4585 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
4586
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004587- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004588 to allow saving the message body to a file.
4589
4590- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
4591 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
4592 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
4593 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
4594
4595- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
4596
4597- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
4598 ON, and OFF.
4599
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004600- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
4601 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
4602
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004603Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004604-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004605
4606- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
4607 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
4608 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004609
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004610- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
4611 been added: -X and -E.
4612
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004613Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004614-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004615
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004616- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
4617 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
4618
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004619C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004620-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004621
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00004622- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
4623 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
4624 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
4625 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
4626 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
4627
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00004628- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
4629 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
4630 as long) arguments.
4631
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004632- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
4633 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
4634 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
4635 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
4636 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
4637 report any bugs or strange behavior).
4638
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004639- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
4640 input.
4641
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004642New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004643-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004644
4645Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004646-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004647
4648Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004649-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004650
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00004651- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
4652 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
4653 is created for .py and .pyw files.
4654
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004655- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
4656 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
4657 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004658 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004659
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004660 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
4661 # (SIGINT) behavior.
4662 import signal
4663 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004664
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004665 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004666 while 1:
4667 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004668 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004669 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
4670 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
4671 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
4672 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004673
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004674
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004675What's New in Python 2.2a4?
4676===========================
4677
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004678*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
4679
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004680Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004681--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004682
4683- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
4684 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
4685 documentation for all operations on list objects.
4686
4687- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
4688 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
4689 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
4690 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
4691 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
4692 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
4693 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004694
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004695- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004696 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004697 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
4698 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
4699 associate a docstring with a property.
4700
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004701- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
4702 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
4703 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
4704 other built-in object types.
4705
4706- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
4707 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
4708 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
4709 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
4710 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
4711
4712- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
4713 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
4714
4715- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
4716 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004717 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004718 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
4719 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
4720 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
4721 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
4722 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
4723
4724- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
4725 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
4726 class.
4727
4728- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
4729 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
4730 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
4731 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
4732
4733- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
4734 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
4735 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
4736 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
4737
4738- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
4739 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
4740
4741- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
4742 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
4743 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
4744 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
4745 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004746 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004747 with the same value as s.
4748
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00004749- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
4750
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004751Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004752----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004753
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00004754- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
4755
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00004756- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
4757 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
4758 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
4759 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
4760 objects.
4761
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004762- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
4763 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00004764 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
4765 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
4766
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004767- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
4768 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
4769 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
4770
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004771Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004772-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004773
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00004774- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4775 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
4776 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
4777 by the instances.
4778
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00004779- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
4780 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
4781 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
4782
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004783- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
4784 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
4785 before the entire comparison is complete.
4786
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00004787- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4788 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
4789 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
4790
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00004791- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
4792 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
4793 getwriter().
4794
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004795- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
4796 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
4797
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00004798- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004799 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
4800 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
4801
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00004802- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
4803 iterable object.
4804
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004805- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
4806 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004807
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004808- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
4809 authentication.
4810
4811- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
4812 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004813
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004814- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00004815 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
4816 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
4817 a sample driver.)
4818
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004819Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004820-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004821
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004822- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
4823 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
4824 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
4825 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
4826 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
4827 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
4828 kernel has large file support.
4829
4830- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
4831 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
4832 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
4833 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
4834 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
4835
4836- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
4837 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
4838 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
4839
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004840C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004841-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004842
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004843- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
4844 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
4845
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004846New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004847-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004848
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004849- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
4850 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
4851
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004852Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004853-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004854
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004855- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
4856 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
4857 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
4858 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
4859 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
4860
4861- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
4862 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
4863 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
4864 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
4865
4866- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
4867 especially in regard to reporting errors.
4868
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004869Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004870-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004871
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004872- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004873 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
4874 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004875
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004876
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004877What's New in Python 2.2a3?
4878===========================
4879
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004880*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
4881
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004882Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004883----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004884
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004885- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
4886 big to represent as a C double.
4887
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00004888- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
4889 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
4890 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
4891 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
4892 restriction).
4893
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00004894- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
4895 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
4896 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
4897 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
4898 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
4899
4900 >>> dir([])
4901 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
4902 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
4903 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
4904 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
4905 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
4906 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
4907 'reverse', 'sort']
4908
4909 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
4910
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004911- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004912 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
4913 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
4914 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
4915 OverflowError exception.
4916
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00004917- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004918 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004919 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
4920 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
4921 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
4922 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
4923 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004924 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004925 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
4926 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
4927
4928 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
4929 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
4930 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
4931 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004932
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004933- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004934 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
4935 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
4936 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
4937 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
4938 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
4939 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
4940 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
4941 once it is created.
4942
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00004943- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
4944 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
4945 (key, value) pairs.
4946
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004947- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004948 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
4949 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
4950
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00004951- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
4952 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
4953 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
4954 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
4955 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004956
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004957- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004958 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
4959 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
4960
4961 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
4962
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004963- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00004964 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
4965
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004966Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004967-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004968
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004969- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00004970 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
4971 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004972
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00004973- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
4974 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
4975 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
4976 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
4977 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
4978 in this area anymore).
4979
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00004980- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
4981 threading.Timer.
4982
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00004983- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
4984 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
4985
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004986- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004987 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
4988
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004989- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00004990 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
4991 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
4992 converted to Python longs.
4993
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004994- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004995 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
4996
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00004997- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
4998 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
4999 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
5000
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005001Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005002-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005003
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005004- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
5005 division operators as per PEP 238.
5006
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005007Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005008-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005009
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005010- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
5011 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
5012 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
5013 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
5014
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005015C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005016-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005017
5018- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005019
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005020- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
5021 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005022 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005023
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005024 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
5025 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005026 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005027 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005028
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005029- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005030 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
5031 module:
5032
5033 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005034
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005035 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
5036 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005037
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005038 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
5039 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005040
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005041 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
5042
5043 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
5044
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005045- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005046 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
5047 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
5048 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005049
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005050New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005051-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005052
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00005053- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
5054 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
5055 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
5056 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
5057 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005058
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005059Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005060-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005061
5062Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005063-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005064
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005065- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
5066 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
5067 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
5068 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00005069 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
5070 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
5071 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
5072 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
5073 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005074
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005075- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00005076 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
5077
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005078
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005079What's New in Python 2.2a2?
5080===========================
5081
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005082*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
5083
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005084Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005085-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005086
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00005087- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
5088 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
5089
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005090- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
5091 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
5092 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005093
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00005094- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
5095 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
5096 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
5097 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005098
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005099- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
5100
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005101- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005102
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005103Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005104-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005105
5106- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00005107 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005108 the module docstring for details.
5109
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005110Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005111-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005112
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005113- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005114 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
5115 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
5116 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005117
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005118- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
5119 Nick Mathewson.
5120
5121Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005122----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005123
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005124- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
5125 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
5126 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
5127 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
5128 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
5129 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
5130 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
5131 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
5132
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00005133- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
5134 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
5135 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
5136 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
5137
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00005138- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
5139 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
5140 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
5141 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
5142 come a long way).
5143
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005144- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
5145 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
5146 write filters for these warnings).
5147
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00005148- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
5149 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
5150 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
5151 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
5152 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
5153
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00005154- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
5155 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
5156 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
5157 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
5158 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
5159 older distribution.
5160
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005161Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005162-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005163
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005164- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
5165 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005166 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005167
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005168- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
5169 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
5170 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
5171
5172- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
5173
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005174- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
5175
5176- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
5177
5178- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
5179
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005180- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005181
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00005182- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
5183
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005184New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005185-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005186
5187C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005188-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005189
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005190- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
5191 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
5192 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
5193 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
5194 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
5195 against buffer overruns.
5196
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005197- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005198 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
5199 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005200 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
5201 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
5202 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
5203
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005204- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
5205 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
5206 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
5207 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
5208 deprecated.
5209
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005210Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005211-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005212
5213- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
5214 relevant is found.
5215
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005216
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005217What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005218===========================
5219
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005220*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
5221
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005222Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005223----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005224
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005225- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
5226 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
5227 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
5228 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
5229 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
5230 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
5231 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
5232 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005233 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005234 repaired.
5235
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005236- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00005237 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005238 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
5239 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
5240 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
5241 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
5242 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
5243 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
5244 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
5245 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
5246
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00005247- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
5248 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
5249 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
5250 leading BMO character).
5251
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005252- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
5253 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
5254 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
5255
5256 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
5257 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
5258 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005259
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005260 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
5261 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
5262 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
5263 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
5264 for various simple to use conversions.
5265
5266 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
5267 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
5268
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005269 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5270 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
5271 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
5272 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
5273 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5274 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
5275 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5276 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
5277 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5278 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
5279 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5280 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
5281 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5282 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
5283 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005284
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005285- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
5286 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
5287 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005288 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005289 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005290
5291 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005292 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
5293 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
5294 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
5295 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
5296 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005297 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
5298 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005299
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005300 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
5301 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
5302 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005303 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005304
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00005305- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
5306 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
5307 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
5308 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
5309 floating arithmetic,
5310
5311 x = 9007199254740992.0
5312 print long(x)
5313
5314 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
5315 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
5316 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
5317 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
5318 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
5319 functions are of good quality).
5320
5321 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
5322 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
5323 algorithms to break.
5324
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00005325- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
5326 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
5327 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
5328 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
5329 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
5330 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
5331 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
5332 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
5333 order.
5334
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005335- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
5336 operation along the most common code paths.
5337
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005338- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
5339 the same as dict.has_key(x).
5340
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00005341- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
5342 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
5343 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
5344 {}.update(UserDict())
5345
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005346- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
5347 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
5348 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
5349 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
5350 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
5351 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
5352 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
5353 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
5354
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005355- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005356 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005357
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005358 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00005359 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
5360 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00005361 join() method of strings
5362 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005363 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
5364 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005365 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00005366 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005367
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00005368- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
5369 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
5370
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005371- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
5372 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
5373
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00005374- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
5375 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
5376 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
5377 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
5378
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005379- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
5380 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005381 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005382 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
5383 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00005384
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00005385- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
5386
5387
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005388Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005389-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005390
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005391- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005392 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005393 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
5394 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
5395
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00005396- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
5397 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
5398
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00005399- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
5400 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
5401 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
5402 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
5403
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00005404- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
5405 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
5406 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
5407
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00005408- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
5409
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00005410- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
5411
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00005412- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
5413 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
5414 that are still imported into string.py).
5415
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005416- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
5417
5418- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
5419 Now it does.
5420
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005421- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
5422
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005423- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
5424 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
5425 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
5426 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
5427 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005428 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
5429 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005430
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00005431- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
5432 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
5433 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
5434 'help(object)'.
5435
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005436Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005437-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005438
5439- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005440 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005441 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
5442 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
5443
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005444- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005445 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
5446 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005447
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005448C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005449-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005450
5451- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
5452 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005453
5454----
5455
5456**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**