blob: 32f6047385dec6e8aa5ec4ddf30b6fb136aaa960 [file] [log] [blame]
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +00007What's New in Python 2.5 alpha 1?
8=================================
9
Anthony Baxter12b6f6c2005-03-29 13:36:16 +000010*Release date: XX-XXX-2006*
11
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000012Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Marc-André Lemburgfe4b34c2006-02-19 15:22:22 +000015- Fix the encodings package codec search function to only search
16 inside its own package. Fixes problem reported in patch #1433198.
17
18 Note: Codec packages should implement and register their own
19 codec search function. PEP 100 has the details.
20
Martin v. Löwis18e16552006-02-15 17:27:45 +000021- PEP 353: Using ssize_t as the index type.
22
Neal Norwitzfc76d632006-01-10 06:03:13 +000023- Patch #1400181, fix unicode string formatting to not use the locale.
24 This is how string objects work. u'%f' could use , instead of .
25 for the decimal point. Now both strings and unicode always use periods.
26
Neal Norwitz671b9e32006-01-09 07:07:12 +000027- Bug #1244610, #1392915, fix build problem on OpenBSD 3.7 and 3.8.
28 configure would break checking curses.h.
29
Georg Brandlcd4d1e82005-12-27 17:37:07 +000030- Bug #959576: The pwd module is now builtin. This allows Python to be
31 built on UNIX platforms without $HOME set.
32
Neal Norwitzc10978f2005-12-19 06:07:16 +000033- Bug #1072182, fix some potential problems if characters are signed.
34
Neal Norwitz5d0ad502005-12-19 04:27:42 +000035- Bug #889500, fix line number on SyntaxWarning for global declarations.
36
Neal Norwitzdb83eb32005-12-18 05:29:30 +000037- Bug #1378022, UTF-8 files with a leading BOM crashed the interpreter.
38
Neal Norwitze7214a12005-12-18 05:03:17 +000039- Support for converting hex strings to floats no longer works.
40 This was not portable. float('0x3') now raises a ValueError.
41
Barry Warsaw2a38a862005-12-18 01:27:35 +000042- Patch #1382163: Expose Subversion revision number to Python. New C API
43 function Py_GetBuildNumber(). New attribute sys.build_number. Build number
44 is now displayed in interactive prompt banner.
45
Georg Brandlfa166682005-12-17 21:45:17 +000046- Implementation of PEP 341 - Unification of try/except and try/finally.
47 "except" clauses can now be written together with a "finally" clause in
Neal Norwitz11ca77e2005-12-17 22:24:12 +000048 one try statement instead of two nested ones. Patch #1355913.
Georg Brandlfa166682005-12-17 21:45:17 +000049
Hye-Shik Chang835b2432005-12-17 04:38:31 +000050- Bug #1379994: Builtin unicode_escape and raw_unicode_escape codec
51 now encodes backslash correctly.
52
Martin v. Löwisb45b3152005-11-28 17:34:23 +000053- Patch #1350409: Work around signal handling bug in Visual Studio 2005.
54
Georg Brandlf06e30a2005-11-24 15:37:42 +000055- Bug #1281408: Py_BuildValue now works correct even with unsigned longs
56 and long longs.
57
Neal Norwitz67715f02005-11-09 06:59:35 +000058- SF Bug #1350188, "setdlopenflags" leads to crash upon "import"
59 It was possible dlerror() returns a NULL pointer, use a default error
60 message in this case.
61
Marc-André Lemburga5bafc42005-10-23 13:43:40 +000062- Replaced most Unicode charmap codecs with new ones using the
63 new Unicode translate string feature in the builtin charmap
64 codec; the codecs were created from the mapping tables available
65 at ftp.unicode.org and contain a few updates (e.g. the Mac OS
66 encodings now include a mapping for the Apple logo)
67
Tim Peterse3547fd2005-12-16 23:13:57 +000068- Added a few more codecs for Mac OS encodings
Marc-André Lemburga5bafc42005-10-23 13:43:40 +000069
Neal Norwitzfed9b3e2005-10-21 06:32:02 +000070- Speed up some Unicode operations.
71
72- A new AST parser implementation was completed.
73
Neal Norwitzb6570f52005-10-21 06:26:10 +000074- SF bug #1167751: fix incorrect code being for generator expressions.
Neal Norwitz16af7342005-10-21 06:25:33 +000075 The following code now raises a SyntaxError: foo(a = i for i in range(10))
76
Neal Norwitz708e51a2005-10-03 04:48:15 +000077- SF Bug #976608: fix SystemError when mtime of an imported file is -1.
78
Neal Norwitz11bd1192005-10-03 00:54:56 +000079- SF Bug #887946: fix segfault when redirecting stdin from a directory.
80 Provide a warning when a directory is passed on the command line.
81
Neal Norwitz40d37812005-10-02 01:48:49 +000082- Fix segfault with invalid coding.
83
84- SF bug #772896: unknown encoding results in MemoryError.
85
Raymond Hettinger6b27cda2005-09-24 21:23:05 +000086- All iterators now have a Boolean value of true. Formerly, some iterators
87 supported a __len__() method which evaluated to False when the iterator
88 was empty.
89
Guido van Rossum630db602005-09-20 18:49:54 +000090- On 64-bit platforms, when __len__() returns a value that cannot be
91 represented as a C int, raise OverflowError.
92
Skip Montanarof8948ca2005-09-19 03:54:46 +000093- test__locale is skipped on OS X < 10.4 (only partial locale support is
Walter Dörwald6611a8b2005-10-09 19:28:35 +000094 present).
Skip Montanarof8948ca2005-09-19 03:54:46 +000095
Georg Brandl80bbf3f2005-09-14 19:38:29 +000096- SF bug #893549: parsing keyword arguments was broken with a few format
97 codes.
98
Guido van Rossum8ee3e5a2005-09-14 18:09:42 +000099- Changes donated by Elemental Security to make it work on AIX 5.3
100 with IBM's 64-bit compiler (SF patch #1284289). This also closes SF
101 bug #105470: test_pwd fails on 64bit system (Opteron).
102
Guido van Rossum539c6622005-09-14 17:49:54 +0000103- Changes donated by Elemental Security to make it work on HP-UX 11 on
104 Itanium2 with HP's 64-bit compiler (SF patch #1225212).
105
Georg Brandl4550b8d2005-08-26 06:43:52 +0000106- Disallow keyword arguments for type constructors that don't use them
Georg Brandl02c42872005-08-26 06:42:30 +0000107 (fixes bug #1119418).
108
Martin v. Löwisd35edda2005-08-24 08:39:24 +0000109- Forward UnicodeDecodeError into SyntaxError for source encoding errors.
110
Barry Warsawe2eca0b2005-08-15 18:14:19 +0000111- SF bug #900092: When tracing (e.g. for hotshot), restore 'return' events for
112 exceptions that cause a function to exit.
113
Raymond Hettinger9f1a6792005-07-31 01:16:36 +0000114- The implementation of set() and frozenset() was revised to use its
115 own internal data structure. Memory consumption is reduced by 1/3
116 and there are modest speed-ups as well. The API is unchanged.
117
Tim Petersde7990b2005-07-17 23:45:23 +0000118- SF bug #1238681: freed pointer is used in longobject.c:long_pow().
119
Michael W. Hudson0edc7a02005-07-12 10:21:19 +0000120- SF bug #1229429: PyObject_CallMethod failed to decrement some
121 reference counts in some error exit cases.
122
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000123- SF bug #1185883: Python's small-object memory allocator took over
124 a block managed by the platform C library whenever a realloc specified
125 a small new size. However, there's no portable way to know then how
126 much of the address space following the pointer is valid, so no
127 portable way to copy data from the C-managed block into Python's
128 small-object space without risking a memory fault. Python's small-object
129 realloc now leaves such blocks under the control of the platform C
130 realloc.
131
Michael W. Hudsonb8963812005-07-05 15:21:58 +0000132- SF bug #1232517: An overflow error was not detected properly when
133 attempting to convert a large float to an int in os.utime().
134
Raymond Hettinger3296e692005-06-29 23:29:56 +0000135- SF bug #1224347: hex longs now print with lowercase letters just
136 like their int counterparts.
137
Michael W. Hudson188d4362005-06-20 16:52:57 +0000138- SF bug #1163563: the original fix for bug #1010677 ("thread Module
139 Breaks PyGILState_Ensure()") broke badly in the case of multiple
140 interpreter states; back out that fix and do a better job (see
141 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2005-June/054258.html
142 for a longer write-up of the problem).
143
Michael W. Hudsondf888462005-06-03 14:41:55 +0000144- SF patch #1180995: marshal now uses a binary format by default when
145 serializing floats.
146
Michael W. Hudsonda85a902005-06-01 11:34:22 +0000147- SF patch #1181301: on platforms that appear to use IEEE 754 floats,
148 the routines that promise to produce IEEE 754 binary representations
149 of floats now simply copy bytes around.
150
Skip Montanarobbf12ba2005-05-20 03:07:06 +0000151- bug #967182: disallow opening files with 'wU' or 'aU' as specified by PEP
152 278.
153
Brett Cannonc3647ac2005-04-26 03:45:26 +0000154- patch #1109424: int, long, float, complex, and unicode now check for the
155 proper magic slot for type conversions when subclassed. Previously the
156 magic slot was ignored during conversion. Semantics now match the way
157 subclasses of str always behaved. int/long/float, conversion of an instance
Walter Dörwald78a78b02005-09-01 12:04:29 +0000158 to the base class has been moved to the proper nb_* magic slot and out of
Brett Cannonc3647ac2005-04-26 03:45:26 +0000159 PyNumber_*().
160 Thanks Walter Dörwald.
161
Barry Warsawc8d907c2005-04-19 23:43:40 +0000162- Descriptors defined in C with a PyGetSetDef structure, where the setter is
163 NULL, now raise an AttributeError when attempting to set or delete the
164 attribute. Previously a TypeError was raised, but this was inconsistent
165 with the equivalent pure-Python implementation.
166
Michael W. Hudson774479c2005-04-18 08:46:17 +0000167- It is now safe to call PyGILState_Release() before
168 PyEval_InitThreads() (note that if there is reason to believe there
169 are multiple threads around you still must call PyEval_InitThreads()
170 before using the Python API; this fix is for extension modules that
171 have no way of knowing if Python is multi-threaded yet).
172
Michael W. Hudsone3afc592005-04-07 10:11:19 +0000173- Typing Ctrl-C whilst raw_input() was waiting in a build with threads
174 disabled caused a crash.
175
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +0000176- Bug #1165306: instancemethod_new allowed the creation of a method
177 with im_class == im_self == NULL, which caused a crash when called.
178
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000179- Move exception finalisation later in the shutdown process - this
Anthony Baxter12b6f6c2005-03-29 13:36:16 +0000180 fixes the crash seen in bug #1165761
181
Raymond Hettinger96229b12005-03-11 06:49:40 +0000182- Added two new builtins, any() and all().
183
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +0000184- Defining a class with empty parentheses is now allowed
Brett Cannonf4189912005-04-09 02:30:16 +0000185 (e.g., ``class C(): pass`` is no longer a syntax error).
186 Patch #1176012 added support to the 'parser' module and 'compiler' package
187 (thanks to logistix for that added support).
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +0000188
Martin v. Löwis96d743e2005-03-03 23:00:26 +0000189- Patch #1115086: Support PY_LONGLONG in structmember.
190
Raymond Hettingerb67cc802005-03-03 16:45:19 +0000191- Bug #1155938: new style classes did not check that __init__() was
192 returning None.
193
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000194- Patch #802188: Report characters after line continuation character
Martin v. Löwis4bf108d2005-03-03 11:45:45 +0000195 ('\') with a specific error message.
196
Martin v. Löwisff232d72005-03-03 09:24:38 +0000197- Bug #723201: Raise a TypeError for passing bad objects to 'L' format.
198
Michael W. Hudson8e1afab2005-02-17 14:55:21 +0000199- Bug #1124295: the __name__ attribute of file objects was
200 inadvertently made inaccessible in restricted mode.
201
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000202- Bug #1074011: closing sys.std{out,err} now causes a flush() and
Martin v. Löwis8e3ca8a2005-01-23 09:41:49 +0000203 an ferror() call.
204
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000205- min() and max() now support key= arguments with the same meaning as in
206 list.sort().
207
Raymond Hettingerc34f8672005-01-02 06:17:33 +0000208- The peephole optimizer now performs simple constant folding in expressions:
209 (2+3) --> (5).
210
Raymond Hettingera422c342005-01-11 03:03:27 +0000211- set and frozenset objects can now be marshalled. SF #1098985.
212
Michael W. Hudsonfaa76482005-01-31 17:09:25 +0000213- Bug #1077106: Poor argument checking could cause memory corruption
214 in calls to os.read().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000215
Jeremy Hyltonab630502005-02-04 18:44:06 +0000216- The parser did not complain about future statements in illegal
217 positions. It once again reports a syntax error if a future
218 statement occurs after anything other than a doc string.
219
Neil Schemenauercf52c072005-08-12 17:34:58 +0000220- Change the %s format specifier for str objects so that it returns a
221 unicode instance if the argument is not an instance of basestring and
222 calling __str__ on the argument returns a unicode instance.
223
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000224Extension Modules
225-----------------
226
Georg Brandlf4f44152006-02-18 22:29:33 +0000227- Patch #1393157: os.startfile() now has an optional argument to specify
228 a "command verb" to invoke on the file.
229
Neal Norwitz082b2df2006-02-07 07:04:46 +0000230- Bug #876637, prevent stack corruption when socket descriptor
231 is larger than FD_SETSIZE.
232
Neal Norwitz0e6bc8c2006-02-05 05:45:43 +0000233- Patch #1407135, bug #1424041: harmonize mmap behavior of anonymous memory.
234 mmap.mmap(-1, size) now returns anonymous memory in both Unix and Windows.
235 mmap.mmap(0, size) should not be used on Windows for anonymous memory.
236
Martin v. Löwis57a34e82006-02-04 19:12:37 +0000237- Patch #1422385: The nis module now supports access to domains other
238 than the system default domain.
239
Martin v. Löwis14694662006-02-03 12:54:16 +0000240- Use Win32 API to implement os.stat/fstat. As a result, subsecond timestamps
241 are reported, the limit on path name lengths is removed, and stat reports
242 WindowsError now (instead of OSError).
243
Gregory P. Smithcfc4a8d2006-01-29 19:46:23 +0000244- Add bsddb.db.DBEnv.set_tx_timestamp allowing time based database recovery.
245
Neal Norwitz62a21122006-01-25 05:21:55 +0000246- Bug #1413192, fix seg fault in bsddb if a transaction was deleted
247 before the env.
248
Martin v. Löwis11017b12006-01-14 18:12:57 +0000249- Patch #1103116: Basic AF_NETLINK support.
250
Neal Norwitz3b4fff82006-01-11 08:54:45 +0000251- Bug #1402308, (possible) segfault when using mmap.mmap(-1, ...)
252
Neal Norwitz88bbd732006-01-10 07:05:44 +0000253- Bug #1400822, _curses over{lay,write} doesn't work when passing 6 ints.
254 Also fix ungetmouse() which did not accept arguments properly.
255 The code now conforms to the documented signature.
256
Neal Norwitz5e3d8622006-01-09 06:24:35 +0000257- Bug #1400115, Fix segfault when calling curses.panel.userptr()
258 without prior setting of the userptr.
259
Neal Norwitz40c6b472006-01-05 05:43:35 +0000260- Fix 64-bit problems in bsddb.
261
Neal Norwitz8856fb72005-12-18 03:34:22 +0000262- Patch #1365916: fix some unsafe 64-bit mmap methods.
263
Hye-Shik Changc5c57e62005-12-12 11:48:32 +0000264- Bug #1290333: Added a workaround for cjkcodecs' _codecs_cn build
265 problem on AIX.
266
Georg Brandla13c2442005-11-22 19:30:31 +0000267- Bug #869197: os.setgroups rejects long integer arguments
268
Neal Norwitz0f46bbf2005-11-03 05:00:25 +0000269- Bug #1346533, select.poll() doesn't raise an error if timeout > sys.maxint
270
Neal Norwitz7b631792005-11-02 05:26:07 +0000271- Bug #1344508, Fix UNIX mmap leaking file descriptors
272
Neal Norwitzf3396542005-10-28 05:52:22 +0000273- Patch #1338314, Bug #1336623: fix tarfile so it can extract
274 REGTYPE directories from tarfiles written by old programs.
275
Gregory P. Smithe101df92006-01-24 20:09:45 +0000276- Patch #1407992, fixes broken bsddb module db associate when using
277 BerkeleyDB 3.3, 4.0 or 4.1.
278
279- Get bsddb module to build with BerkeleyDB version 4.4
280
281- Get bsddb module to build with BerkeleyDB version 3.2
Neal Norwitzfed9b3e2005-10-21 06:32:02 +0000282
Neal Norwitz484d9a42005-09-30 04:46:49 +0000283- Patch #1309009, Fix segfault in pyexpat when the XML document is in latin_1,
284 but Python incorrectly assumes it is in UTF-8 format
285
Georg Brandle677adc2005-09-29 13:40:49 +0000286- Fix parse errors in the readline module when compiling without threads.
287
Hye-Shik Chang9ceebd52005-09-24 14:58:47 +0000288- Patch #1288833: Removed thread lock from socket.getaddrinfo on
289 FreeBSD 5.3 and later versions which got thread-safe getaddrinfo(3).
290
Michael W. Hudson10402a32005-09-22 09:19:01 +0000291- Patches #1298449 and #1298499: Add some missing checks for error
292 returns in cStringIO.c.
293
Neal Norwitz058bde12005-09-21 06:44:25 +0000294- Patch #1297028: fix segfault if call type on MultibyteCodec,
295 MultibyteStreamReader, or MultibyteStreamWriter
296
Neal Norwitzcfe7dd92005-09-19 06:49:27 +0000297- Fix memory leak in posix.access().
298
Martin v. Löwis8b291e22005-09-18 08:17:56 +0000299- Patch #1213831: Fix typo in unicodedata._getcode.
300
Georg Brandlfb1ef852005-09-14 20:53:32 +0000301- Bug #1007046: os.startfile() did not accept unicode strings encoded in
302 the file system encoding.
303
Georg Brandld2e3ba72005-08-26 08:34:00 +0000304- Patch #756021: Special-case socket.inet_aton('255.255.255.255') for
305 platforms that don't have inet_aton().
Georg Brandl02760f92005-08-25 13:10:41 +0000306
Georg Brandld2e3ba72005-08-26 08:34:00 +0000307- Bug #1215928: Fix bz2.BZ2File.seek() for 64-bit file offsets.
308
309- Bug #1191043: Fix bz2.BZ2File.(x)readlines for files containing one
Georg Brandl02760f92005-08-25 13:10:41 +0000310 line without newlines.
311
Georg Brandl38387b82005-08-24 07:17:40 +0000312- Bug #728515: mmap.resize() now resizes the file on Unix as it did
313 on Windows.
314
Walter Dörwalda05834e2005-10-09 19:38:21 +0000315- Patch #1180695: Add nanosecond stat resolution, and st_gen,
Martin v. Löwisebd9d5b2005-08-09 15:00:59 +0000316 st_birthtime for FreeBSD.
317
Michael W. Hudson8137bea2005-07-27 20:24:40 +0000318- Patch #1231069: The fcntl.ioctl function now uses the 'I' code for
319 the request code argument, which results in more C-like behaviour
320 for large or negative values.
321
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000322- Bug #1234979: For the argument of thread.Lock.acquire, the Windows
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000323 implementation treated all integer values except 1 as false.
Georg Brandlaf410b52005-07-08 22:26:13 +0000324
Georg Brandl6b95f1d2005-06-03 19:47:00 +0000325- Bug #1194181: bz2.BZ2File didn't handle mode 'U' correctly.
326
Hye-Shik Chang5f937a72005-06-02 13:09:30 +0000327- Patch #1212117: os.stat().st_flags is now accessible as a attribute
328 if available on the platform.
329
Skip Montanaro5ff14922005-05-16 02:42:22 +0000330- Patch #1103951: Expose O_SHLOCK and O_EXLOCK in the posix module if
331 available on the platform.
332
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +0000333- Bug #1166660: The readline module could segfault if hook functions
334 were set in a different thread than that which called readline.
335
Raymond Hettinger4aec61e2005-03-18 21:20:23 +0000336- collections.deque objects now support a remove() method.
337
Raymond Hettinger984f9bb2005-03-09 16:38:48 +0000338- operator.itemgetter() and operator.attrgetter() now support retrieving
339 multiple fields. This provides direct support for sorting on multiple
340 keys (primary, secondary, etc).
341
Martin v. Löwisb60ae992005-03-08 09:10:29 +0000342- os.access now supports Unicode path names on non-Win32 systems.
343
Martin v. Löwisfd78a6f2005-03-04 14:37:01 +0000344- Patches #925152, #1118602: Avoid reading after the end of the buffer
345 in pyexpat.GetInputContext.
346
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000347- Patches #749830, #1144555: allow UNIX mmap size to default to current
Martin v. Löwis7fe60c02005-03-03 11:22:44 +0000348 file size.
349
Raymond Hettinger9c323f82005-02-28 19:39:44 +0000350- Added functional.partial(). See PEP309.
351
Martin v. Löwis9533e342005-02-27 20:33:25 +0000352- Patch #1093585: raise a ValueError for negative history items in readline.
353 {remove_history,replace_history}
354
Fred Drake9c131f22005-01-23 15:16:08 +0000355- The spwd module has been added, allowing access to the shadow password
356 database.
Martin v. Löwisc3001752005-01-23 09:27:24 +0000357
Martin v. Löwisfe33d0b2005-01-16 08:57:39 +0000358- stat_float_times is now True.
359
Raymond Hettingerb0900e62004-12-16 16:23:40 +0000360- array.array objects are now picklable.
361
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000362- the cPickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
363 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
364
Raymond Hettingerb2594052004-12-05 09:25:51 +0000365- itertools.islice() now accepts None for the start and step arguments.
366 This allows islice() to work more readily with slices:
367 islice(s.start, s.stop, s.step)
368
Skip Montanaro0af3ade2005-01-13 04:12:31 +0000369- datetime.datetime() now has a strptime class method which can be used to
370 create datetime object using a string and format.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000371
372Library
373-------
374
Georg Brandlc98eeed2006-02-19 14:57:47 +0000375- Patch #1215184: FileInput now can be given an opening hook which can
376 be used to control how files are opened.
377
Georg Brandlc029f872006-02-19 14:12:34 +0000378- Patch #1212287: fileinput.input() now has a mode parameter for
379 specifying the file mode input files should be opened with.
380
Georg Brandl67e9fb92006-02-19 13:56:17 +0000381- Patch #1215184: fileinput now has a fileno() function for getting the
382 current file number.
383
Georg Brandl602b9ba2006-02-19 13:26:36 +0000384- Patch #1349274: gettext.install() now optionally installs additional
385 translation functions other than _() in the builtin namespace.
386
Georg Brandle4662172006-02-19 09:51:27 +0000387- Patch #1337756: fileinput now accepts Unicode filenames.
388
Georg Brandl7b4e7c22006-02-18 21:10:56 +0000389- Patch #1373643: The chunk module can now read chunks larger than
390 two gigabytes.
391
Georg Brandl21dd1af2006-02-17 13:35:13 +0000392- Patch #1417555: SimpleHTTPServer now returns Last-Modified headers.
393
Georg Brandlbd3bc4d2006-02-17 09:52:53 +0000394- Bug #1430298: It is now possible to send a mail with an empty
395 return address using smtplib.
396
Georg Brandl0e1abe22006-02-17 09:48:14 +0000397- Bug #1432260: The names of lambda functions are now properly displayed
398 in pydoc.
Georg Brandl501dd0d2006-02-17 09:45:40 +0000399
Martin v. Löwis00756902006-02-05 17:09:41 +0000400- Patch #1412872: zipfile now sets the creator system to 3 (Unix)
401 unless the system is Win32.
402
Martin v. Löwisc81e3a62006-01-30 15:04:31 +0000403- Patch #1349118: urllib now supports user:pass@ style proxy
Martin v. Löwis3e865952006-01-24 15:51:21 +0000404 specifications, raises IOErrors when proxies for unsupported protocols
405 are defined, and uses the https proxy on https redirections.
406
Georg Brandl531ceba2006-01-21 07:20:56 +0000407- Bug #902075: urllib2 now supports 'host:port' style proxy specifications.
408
409- Bug #1407902: Add support for sftp:// URIs to urlparse.
Georg Brandl89f35ac2006-01-20 17:24:23 +0000410
Georg Brandlb709c2c2006-01-20 09:07:35 +0000411- Bug #1371247: Update Windows locale identifiers in locale.py.
412
Neal Norwitzf60cd472006-01-14 07:05:13 +0000413- Bug #1394565: SimpleHTTPServer now doesn't choke on query parameters
Georg Brandl45ab2332006-01-13 17:05:56 +0000414 any more.
Georg Brandlb709c2c2006-01-20 09:07:35 +0000415
Georg Brandl4edd9892006-01-13 16:59:46 +0000416- Bug #1403410: The warnings module now doesn't get confused
417 when it can't find out the module name it generates a warning for.
Georg Brandlb709c2c2006-01-20 09:07:35 +0000418
Martin v. Löwis412ed3b2006-01-08 10:45:39 +0000419- Patch #1177307: Added a new codec utf_8_sig for UTF-8 with a BOM signature.
420
Neal Norwitzab86f8e2005-12-23 21:44:36 +0000421- Patch #1157027: cookielib mishandles RFC 2109 cookies in Netscape mode
422
Neal Norwitz338e7862005-12-23 21:27:46 +0000423- Patch #1117398: cookielib.LWPCookieJar and .MozillaCookieJar now raise
424 LoadError as documented, instead of IOError. For compatibility,
425 LoadError subclasses IOError.
426
Brett Cannon3cbd0382005-12-16 22:49:23 +0000427- Added the hashlib module. It provides secure hash functions for MD5 and
Tim Peterse3547fd2005-12-16 23:13:57 +0000428 SHA1, 224, 256, 384, and 512. Note that recent developments make the
429 historic MD5 and SHA1 unsuitable for cryptographic-strength applications.
430 In <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2005-December/058850.html>
431 Ronald L. Rivest offered this advice for Python:
432
433 "The consensus of researchers in this area (at least as
434 expressed at the NIST Hash Function Workshop 10/31/05),
435 is that SHA-256 is a good choice for the time being, but
436 that research should continue, and other alternatives may
437 arise from this research. The larger SHA's also seem OK."
Brett Cannon3cbd0382005-12-16 22:49:23 +0000438
Fredrik Lundh7e0aef02005-12-12 18:54:55 +0000439- Added a subset of Fredrik Lundh's ElementTree package. Available
440 modules are xml.etree.ElementTree, xml.etree.ElementPath, and
441 xml.etree.ElementInclude, from ElementTree 1.2.6.
442
Martin v. Löwis307021f2005-11-27 16:59:04 +0000443- Patch #1162825: Support non-ASCII characters in IDLE window titles.
444
Georg Brandl1f663572005-11-26 16:50:44 +0000445- Bug #1365984: urllib now opens "data:" URLs again.
446
Brett Cannonad07ff22005-11-23 02:15:50 +0000447- Patch #1314396: prevent deadlock for threading.Thread.join() when an exception
448 is raised within the method itself on a previous call (e.g., passing in an
449 illegal argument)
450
Brett Cannon5d0bf942005-11-02 23:04:26 +0000451- Bug #1340337: change time.strptime() to always return ValueError when there
452 is an error in the format string.
453
Georg Brandle8f24432005-10-03 14:16:44 +0000454- Patch #754022: Greatly enhanced webbrowser.py (by Oleg Broytmann).
455
Walter Dörwalda05834e2005-10-09 19:38:21 +0000456- Bug #729103: pydoc.py: Fix docother() method to accept additional
Georg Brandl8b813db2005-10-01 16:32:31 +0000457 "parent" argument.
458
Georg Brandlaa935172005-09-29 20:49:16 +0000459- Patch #1300515: xdrlib.py: Fix pack_fstring() to really use null bytes
460 for padding.
461
Georg Brandl80ba8e82005-09-29 20:16:07 +0000462- Bug #1296004: httplib.py: Limit maximal amount of data read from the
463 socket to avoid a MemoryError on Windows.
464
Matthias Klosef3f231f2005-09-20 07:02:49 +0000465- Patch #1166948: locale.py: Prefer LC_ALL, LC_CTYPE and LANG over LANGUAGE
466 to get the correct encoding.
467
468- Patch #1166938: locale.py: Parse LANGUAGE as a colon separated list of
469 languages.
470
Martin v. Löwis4ed67382005-09-18 08:34:39 +0000471- Patch #1268314: Cache lines in StreamReader.readlines for performance.
472
Brett Cannona783d062005-09-15 02:34:56 +0000473- Bug #1290505: Fix clearing the regex cache for time.strptime().
474
Martin v. Löwis5dbdc592005-08-27 10:07:56 +0000475- Bug #1167128: Fix size of a symlink in a tarfile to be 0.
476
Georg Brandl5a650a22005-08-26 08:51:34 +0000477- Patch #810023: Fix off-by-one bug in urllib.urlretrieve reporthook
478 functionality.
479
Martin v. Löwis8b595142005-08-25 11:03:38 +0000480- Bug #1163178: Make IDNA return an empty string when the input is empty.
481
Georg Brandl532efab2005-08-24 22:34:21 +0000482- Patch #848017: Make Cookie more RFC-compliant. Use CRLF as default output
483 separator and do not output trailing semicola.
484
Georg Brandlb9256022005-08-24 18:46:39 +0000485- Patch #1062060: urllib.urlretrieve() now raises a new exception, named
486 ContentTooShortException, when the actually downloaded size does not
487 match the Content-Length header.
488
Martin v. Löwis0a5d4a22005-08-24 14:55:22 +0000489- Bug #1121494: distutils.dir_utils.mkpath now accepts Unicode strings.
490
Martin v. Löwis56066d22005-08-24 07:38:12 +0000491- Bug #1178484: Return complete lines from codec stream readers
492 even if there is an exception in later lines, resulting in
Walter Dörwalda05834e2005-10-09 19:38:21 +0000493 correct line numbers for decoding errors in source code.
Martin v. Löwis56066d22005-08-24 07:38:12 +0000494
Georg Brandl6d2b3462005-08-24 07:36:17 +0000495- Bug #1192315: Disallow negative arguments to clear() in pdb.
496
Martin v. Löwisb813c532005-08-07 20:51:04 +0000497- Patch #827386: Support absolute source paths in msvccompiler.py.
498
Georg Brandl649f8e72005-08-03 07:30:12 +0000499- Patch #1105730: Apply the new implementation of commonprefix in posixpath
500 to ntpath, macpath, os2emxpath and riscospath.
501
Guido van Rossum755149f2005-07-27 00:00:44 +0000502- Fix a problem in Tkinter introduced by SF patch #869468: delete bogus
503 __hasattr__ and __delattr__ methods on class Tk that were breaking
504 Tkdnd.
505
Georg Brandl5dbda752005-07-17 20:27:41 +0000506- Bug #1015140: disambiguated the term "article id" in nntplib docs and
507 docstrings to either "article number" or "message id".
508
Georg Brandla4a8b822005-07-15 09:13:21 +0000509- Bug #1238170: threading.Thread.__init__ no longer has "kwargs={}" as a
510 parameter, but uses the usual "kwargs=None".
511
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000512- textwrap now processes text chunks at O(n) speed instead of O(n**2).
Raymond Hettinger8bfa8932005-07-15 06:53:35 +0000513 Patch #1209527 (Contributed by Connelly).
514
Georg Brandl5c5fe2f2005-07-14 06:40:47 +0000515- urllib2 has now an attribute 'httpresponses' mapping from HTTP status code
516 to W3C name (404 -> 'Not Found'). RFE #1216944.
517
Georg Brandl9e43acf2005-07-04 17:16:07 +0000518- Bug #1177468: Don't cache the /dev/urandom file descriptor for os.urandom,
519 as this can cause problems with apps closing all file descriptors.
520
Georg Brandl5284b532005-06-26 22:54:58 +0000521- Bug #839151: Fix an attempt to access sys.argv in the warnings module
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000522 it can be missing in embedded interpreters
Georg Brandl5284b532005-06-26 22:54:58 +0000523
Georg Brandl2f210b62005-06-26 22:09:06 +0000524- Bug #1155638: Fix a bug which affected HTTP 0.9 responses in httplib.
525
Georg Brandlfbff1bc2005-06-26 21:36:25 +0000526- Bug #1100201: Cross-site scripting was possible on BaseHTTPServer via
527 error messages.
528
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000529- Bug #1108948: Cookie.py produced invalid JavaScript code.
530
Raymond Hettingerda99d1c2005-06-21 07:43:58 +0000531- The tokenize module now detects and reports indentation errors.
532 Bug #1224621.
533
Raymond Hettinger68c04532005-06-10 11:05:19 +0000534- The tokenize module has a new untokenize() function to support a full
535 roundtrip from lexed tokens back to Python sourcecode. In addition,
536 the generate_tokens() function now accepts a callable argument that
537 terminates by raising StopIteration.
538
Georg Brandl9166e1a2005-06-04 09:20:03 +0000539- Bug #1196315: fix weakref.WeakValueDictionary constructor.
540
Georg Brandl268e61c2005-06-03 14:28:50 +0000541- Bug #1213894: os.path.realpath didn't resolve symlinks that were the first
542 component of the path.
543
Skip Montanaro174dd222005-05-14 20:54:16 +0000544- Patch #1120353: The xmlrpclib module provides better, more transparent,
545 support for datetime.{datetime,date,time} objects. With use_datetime set
546 to True, applications shouldn't have to fiddle with the DateTime wrapper
547 class at all.
548
Martin v. Löwis55f1bb82005-03-21 20:56:35 +0000549- distutils.commands.upload was added to support uploading distribution
550 files to PyPI.
551
Walter Dörwalda6e8a4a2005-03-31 13:57:38 +0000552- distutils.commands.register now encodes the data as UTF-8 before posting
553 them to PyPI.
554
Raymond Hettinger267b8682005-03-27 10:47:39 +0000555- decimal operator and comparison methods now return NotImplemented
556 instead of raising a TypeError when interacting with other types. This
557 allows other classes to implement __radd__ style methods and have them
558 work as expected.
559
Raymond Hettingerbea3f6f2005-03-15 04:59:17 +0000560- Bug #1163325: Decimal infinities failed to hash. Attempting to
561 hash a NaN raised an InvalidOperation instead of a TypeError.
562
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000563- Patch #918101: Add tarfile open mode r|* for auto-detection of the
Martin v. Löwis78be7df2005-03-05 12:47:42 +0000564 stream compression; add, for symmetry reasons, r:* as a synonym of r.
565
Martin v. Löwis00a73e72005-03-04 19:40:34 +0000566- Patch #1043890: Add extractall method to tarfile.
567
Martin v. Löwisc72dd382005-03-04 13:50:17 +0000568- Patch #1075887: Don't require MSVC in distutils if there is nothing
569 to build.
570
Martin v. Löwis637431b2005-03-03 23:12:42 +0000571- Patch #1103407: Properly deal with tarfile iterators when untarring
572 symbolic links on Windows.
573
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000574- Patch #645894: Use getrusage for computing the time consumption in
Martin v. Löwisa4dac402005-03-03 11:39:45 +0000575 profile.py if available.
576
Martin v. Löwisdf37c8c2005-03-03 11:08:03 +0000577- Patch #1046831: Use get_python_version where appropriate in sysconfig.py.
578
Martin v. Löwisc5574e82005-03-03 10:57:37 +0000579- Patch #1117454: Remove code to special-case cookies without values
580 in LWPCookieJar.
581
Martin v. Löwis4ea3ead2005-03-03 10:48:12 +0000582- Patch #1117339: Add cookielib special name tests.
583
Martin v. Löwise869eb12005-03-03 09:46:07 +0000584- Patch #1112812: Make bsddb/__init__.py more friendly for modulefinder.
585
Martin v. Löwisf2a8d632005-03-03 08:35:22 +0000586- Patch #1110248: SYNC_FLUSH the zlib buffer for GZipFile.flush.
587
Martin v. Löwisdf241532005-03-03 08:17:42 +0000588- Patch #1107973: Allow to iterate over the lines of a tarfile.ExFileObject.
589
Martin v. Löwis8ed338a2005-03-03 08:12:27 +0000590- Patch #1104111: Alter setup.py --help and --help-commands.
591
Martin v. Löwis4afe1542005-03-01 08:09:28 +0000592- Patch #1121234: Properly cleanup _exit and tkerror commands.
593
Martin v. Löwisc2a0ac22005-02-24 20:22:10 +0000594- Patch #1049151: xdrlib now unpacks booleans as True or False.
595
Raymond Hettingerbab41432005-02-05 01:31:19 +0000596- Fixed bug in a NameError bug in cookielib. Patch #1116583.
597
Guido van Rossumd0641422005-02-03 15:01:24 +0000598- Applied a security fix to SimpleXMLRPCserver (PSF-2005-001). This
599 disables recursive traversal through instance attributes, which can
600 be exploited in various ways.
601
Tim Peterse3547fd2005-12-16 23:13:57 +0000602- Bug #1222790: in SimpleXMLRPCServer, set the reuse-address and close-on-exec
Andrew M. Kuchling3a976052005-12-04 15:07:41 +0000603 flags on the HTTP listening socket.
604
Andrew M. Kuchlinge63fde72005-12-04 15:36:57 +0000605- Bug #792570: SimpleXMLRPCServer had problems if the request grew too large.
606 Fixed by reading the HTTP body in chunks instead of one big socket.read().
607
Tim Peterse3547fd2005-12-16 23:13:57 +0000608- Patches #893642, #1039083: add allow_none, encoding arguments to constructors of
Andrew M. Kuchling10a16de2005-12-04 16:34:40 +0000609 SimpleXMLRPCServer and CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler.
610
Martin v. Löwis1d11de62005-01-29 13:29:23 +0000611- Bug #1110478: Revert os.environ.update to do putenv again.
612
Thomas Hellerd6c6e222005-01-20 19:20:16 +0000613- Bug #1103844: fix distutils.install.dump_dirs() with negated options.
614
Martin v. Löwis22b457e2005-01-16 08:40:58 +0000615- os.{SEEK_SET, SEEK_CUR, SEEK_END} have been added for convenience.
616
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000617- Enhancements to the csv module:
618
619 + Dialects are now validated by the underlying C code, better
Georg Brandl7eb4b7d2005-07-22 21:49:32 +0000620 reflecting its capabilities, and improving its compliance with
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000621 PEP 305.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000622 + Dialect parameter parsing has been re-implemented to improve error
623 reporting.
624 + quotechar=None and quoting=QUOTE_NONE now work the way PEP 305
625 dictates.
626 + the parser now removes the escapechar prefix from escaped characters.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000627 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the writer now tests for numeric
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000628 types, rather than any object than can be represented as a numeric.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000629 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the reader now casts unquoted fields
630 to floats.
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000631 + reader now allows \r characters to be quoted (previously it only allowed
632 \n to be quoted).
Andrew McNamarac89f2842005-01-12 07:44:42 +0000633 + writer doublequote handling improved.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000634 + Dialect classes passed to the module are no longer instantiated by
635 the module before being parsed (the former validation scheme required
636 this, but the mechanism was unreliable).
637 + The dialect registry now contains instances of the internal
638 C-coded dialect type, rather than references to python objects.
639 + the internal c-coded dialect type is now immutable.
640 + register_dialect now accepts the same keyword dialect specifications
641 as the reader and writer, allowing the user to register dialects
642 without first creating a dialect class.
643 + a configurable limit to the size of parsed fields has been added -
644 previously, an unmatched quote character could result in the entire
645 file being read into the field buffer before an error was reported.
Andrew McNamara31d88962005-01-12 03:45:10 +0000646 + A new module method csv.field_size_limit() has been added that sets
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000647 the parser field size limit (returning the former limit). The initial
648 limit is 128kB.
Andrew McNamara7f2053e2005-01-12 11:17:16 +0000649 + A line_num attribute has been added to the reader object, which tracks
650 the number of lines read from the source iterator. This is not
651 the same as the number of records returned, as records can span
652 multiple lines.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000653 + reader and writer objects were not being registered with the cyclic-GC.
654 This has been fixed.
655
Brett Cannone6539c42005-01-08 02:43:53 +0000656- _DummyThread objects in the threading module now delete self.__block that is
657 inherited from _Thread since it uses up a lock allocated by 'thread'. The
658 lock primitives tend to be limited in number and thus should not be wasted on
659 a _DummyThread object. Fixes bug #1089632.
660
Raymond Hettinger97db05d2005-01-07 08:15:41 +0000661- The imghdr module now detects Exif files.
662
Raymond Hettinger6065d322004-12-20 23:51:53 +0000663- StringIO.truncate() now correctly adjusts the size attribute.
664 (Bug #951915).
665
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000666- locale.py now uses an updated locale alias table (built using
667 Tools/i18n/makelocalealias.py, a tool to parse the X11 locale
668 alias file); the encoding lookup was enhanced to use Python's
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000669 encoding alias table.
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000670
Raymond Hettinger3557f422004-12-07 12:02:02 +0000671- moved deprecated modules to Lib/lib-old: whrandom, tzparse, statcache.
672
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000673- the pickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
674 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
675
Brett Cannon84667c02004-12-07 03:25:18 +0000676- optparse now optionally imports gettext. This allows its use in setup.py.
677
Raymond Hettinger3489cad2004-12-05 05:20:42 +0000678- the pickle module no longer uses the deprecated bin parameter.
679
Raymond Hettinger1bc82f82004-12-05 03:58:17 +0000680- the shelve module no longer uses the deprecated binary parameter.
681
Raymond Hettinger6c92d762004-12-05 03:28:00 +0000682- the pstats module no longer uses the deprecated ignore() method.
683
Raymond Hettingerf3fa9462004-12-05 01:58:09 +0000684- the filecmp module no longer uses the deprecated use_statcache argument.
685
Raymond Hettinger664347b2004-12-04 21:21:53 +0000686- unittest.TestCase.run() and unittest.TestSuite.run() can now be successfully
687 extended or overridden by subclasses. Formerly, the subclassed method would
688 be ignored by the rest of the module. (Bug #1078905).
689
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000690- heapq.nsmallest() and heapq.nlargest() now support key= arguments with
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000691 the same meaning as in list.sort().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000692
Walter Dörwald36733692004-12-22 12:50:50 +0000693- Bug #1076985: ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` now calls ``read()`` only
694 once when a size argument is given. This prevents a buffer overflow in the
695 tokenizer with very long source lines.
696
Barry Warsaw538561e2006-01-01 21:48:54 +0000697- Bug #1083110: ``zlib.decompress.flush()`` would segfault if called
698 immediately after creating the object, without any intervening
699 ``.decompress()`` calls.
Andrew M. Kuchling3b585b32004-12-28 20:10:48 +0000700
Skip Montanaro05885812005-01-16 20:48:27 +0000701- The reconvert.quote function can now emit triple-quoted strings. The
702 reconvert module now has some simple documentation.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000703
Walter Dörwaldaf3b39a2005-02-18 13:22:43 +0000704- ``UserString.MutableString`` now supports negative indices in
705 ``__setitem__`` and ``__delitem__``
706
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000707- Bug #1149508: ``textwrap`` now handles hyphenated numbers (eg. "2004-03-05")
708 correctly.
709
Walter Dörwaldbc8e6422005-04-21 21:32:03 +0000710- Partial fixes for SF bugs #1163244 and #1175396: If a chunk read by
711 ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` has a trailing "\r", read one more
712 character even if the user has passed a size parameter to get a proper
713 line ending. Remove the special handling of a "\r\n" that has been split
714 between two lines.
715
Walter Dörwalda47d1c02005-08-30 10:23:14 +0000716- Bug #1251300: On UCS-4 builds the "unicode-internal" codec will now complain
717 about illegal code points. The codec now supports PEP 293 style error
718 handlers.
719
Walter Dörwald78a78b02005-09-01 12:04:29 +0000720- Bug #1235646: ``codecs.StreamRecoder.next()`` now reencodes the data it reads
Walter Dörwaldc5238b82005-09-01 11:56:53 +0000721 from the input stream, so that the output is a byte string in the correct
722 encoding instead of a unicode string.
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000723
Gustavo Niemeyer6fa0c5a2005-09-14 08:54:39 +0000724- Bug #1202493: Fixing SRE parser to handle '{}' as perl does, rather than
725 considering it exactly like a '*'.
726
Walter Dörwald007f8df2005-10-09 19:42:27 +0000727- Bug #1245379: Add "unicode-1-1-utf-7" as an alias for "utf-7" to
728 ``encodings.aliases``.
Gustavo Niemeyer6fa0c5a2005-09-14 08:54:39 +0000729
Walter Dörwald09f0dd52005-11-21 19:10:07 +0000730- ` uu.encode()`` and ``uu.decode()`` now support unicode filenames.
731
Gustavo Niemeyer548148812006-01-31 18:34:13 +0000732- Patch #1413711: Certain patterns of differences were making difflib
733 touch the recursion limit.
734
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000735Build
736-----
737
Martin v. Löwis86d66262006-02-17 08:40:11 +0000738- Patch #1432345: Make python compile on DragonFly.
739
Martin v. Löwis856bf9a2006-02-14 20:42:55 +0000740- Build support for Win64-AMD64 was added.
741
Martin v. Löwisa55e55e2006-02-11 15:55:14 +0000742- Patch #1428494: Prefer linking against ncursesw over ncurses library.
743
Martin v. Löwisfd9a72a2006-01-08 10:07:33 +0000744- Patch #881820: look for openpty and forkpty also in libbsd.
745
Martin v. Löwis64c33dd2006-01-03 07:42:14 +0000746- The sources of zlib are now part of the Python distribution (zlib 1.2.3).
747 The zlib module is now builtin on Windows.
748
Martin v. Löwisd5845ec2005-12-30 12:31:38 +0000749- Use -xcode=pic32 for CCSHARED on Solaris with SunPro.
750
Martin v. Löwis147fbe52005-08-07 21:09:30 +0000751- Bug #1189330: configure did not correctly determine the necessary
752 value of LINKCC if python was built with GCC 4.0.
753
Trent Mick8321b422005-07-26 02:29:21 +0000754- Upgrade Windows build to zlib 1.2.3 which eliminates a potential security
755 vulnerability in zlib 1.2.1 and 1.2.2.
756
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000757- EXTRA_CFLAGS has been introduced as an environment variable to hold compiler
758 flags that change binary compatibility. Changes were also made to
759 distutils.sysconfig to also use the environment variable when used during
Martin v. Löwisd7c795e2005-04-25 07:14:03 +0000760 compilation of the interpreter and of C extensions through distutils.
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000761
Bob Ippolitoed233462005-03-29 13:47:59 +0000762- SF patch 1171735: Darwin 8's headers are anal about POSIX compliance,
763 and linking has changed (prebinding is now deprecated, and libcc_dynamic
764 no longer exists). This configure patch makes things right.
765
Martin v. Löwise2713be2005-03-08 15:03:08 +0000766- Bug #1158607: Build with --disable-unicode again.
767
Brett Cannon46d96232005-02-16 00:07:19 +0000768- spwdmodule.c is built only if either HAVE_GETSPNAM or HAVE_HAVE_GETSPENT is
769 defined. Discovered as a result of not being able to build on OS X.
770
Brett Cannon516592f2004-12-07 00:42:59 +0000771- setup.py now uses the directories specified in LDFLAGS using the -L option
772 and in CPPFLAGS using the -I option for adding library and include
773 directories, respectively, for compiling extension modules against. This has
774 led to the core being compiled using the values in CPPFLAGS. It also removes
775 the need for the special-casing of both DarwinPorts and Fink for darwin since
776 the proper directories can be specified in LDFLAGS (``-L/sw/lib`` for Fink,
777 ``-L/opt/local/lib`` for DarwinPorts) and CPPFLAGS (``-I/sw/include`` for
778 Fink, ``-I/opt/local/include`` for DarwinPorts).
779
Brett Cannon43802422005-02-10 20:48:03 +0000780- Test in configure.in that checks for tzset no longer dependent on tm->tm_zone
781 to exist in the struct (not required by either ISO C nor the UNIX 2 spec).
782 Tests for sanity in tzname when HAVE_TZNAME defined were also defined.
783 Closes bug #1096244. Thanks Gregory Bond.
784
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000785C API
786-----
787
Raymond Hettingerbeb31012005-08-16 03:47:52 +0000788- Added a C API for set and frozenset objects.
789
Raymond Hettinger66517482004-12-03 11:45:13 +0000790- Removed PyRange_New().
791
Walter Dörwaldd1c1e102005-10-06 20:29:57 +0000792- Patch #1313939: PyUnicode_DecodeCharmap() accepts a unicode string as the
793 mapping argument now. This string is used as a mapping table. Byte values
794 greater than the length of the string and 0xFFFE are treated as undefined
795 mappings.
796
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000797
798Tests
799-----
800
Martin v. Löwis4d394df2005-01-23 09:19:22 +0000801- In test_os, st_?time is now truncated before comparing it with ST_?TIME.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000802
Hye-Shik Changaaa2f1d2005-12-10 17:44:27 +0000803- Patch #1276356: New resource "urlfetch" is implemented. This enables
804 even impatient people to run tests that require remote files.
805
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000806
807Documentation
808-------------
809
Georg Brandl8cb30772006-01-20 09:34:29 +0000810- Bug #1402224: Add warning to dl docs about crashes.
811
Georg Brandla3a93ae2006-01-20 09:14:36 +0000812- Bug #1396471: Document that Windows' ftell() can return invalid
813 values for text files with UNIX-style line endings.
814
Georg Brandl32252422005-09-14 20:42:00 +0000815- Bug #1274828: Document os.path.splitunc().
816
Georg Brandl79c122f2005-08-24 07:31:33 +0000817- Bug #1190204: Clarify which directories are searched by site.py.
818
Georg Brandl6f2bbd32005-08-24 07:26:55 +0000819- Bug #1193849: Clarify os.path.expanduser() documentation.
820
Georg Brandlf13c4ba2005-08-02 10:28:08 +0000821- Bug #1243192: re.UNICODE and re.LOCALE affect \d, \D, \s and \S.
822
Georg Brandl150db732005-07-18 08:53:17 +0000823- Bug #755617: Document the effects of os.chown() on Windows.
824
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000825- Patch #1180012: The documentation for modulefinder is now in the library reference.
826
827- Patch #1213031: Document that os.chown() accepts argument values of -1.
828
829- Bug #1190563: Document os.waitpid() return value with WNOHANG flag.
830
831- Bug #1175022: Correct the example code for property().
832
Georg Brandl40c71652005-06-25 21:08:46 +0000833- Document the IterableUserDict class in the UserDict module.
834 Closes bug #1166582.
835
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000836- Remove all latent references for "Macintosh" that referred to semantics for
837 Mac OS 9 and change to reflect the state for OS X.
838 Closes patch #1095802. Thanks Jack Jansen.
839
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000840Mac
841---
842
843
Hye-Shik Chang4e422812005-07-17 02:36:59 +0000844New platforms
845-------------
846
847- FreeBSD 7 support is added.
848
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000849
850Tools/Demos
851-----------
852
Georg Brandl56897312005-08-24 18:32:30 +0000853- Added two new files to Tools/scripts: pysource.py, which recursively
854 finds Python source files, and findnocoding.py, which finds Python
855 source files that need an encoding declaration.
856 Patch #784089, credits to Oleg Broytmann.
857
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000858- Bug #1072853: pindent.py used an uninitialized variable.
859
Martin v. Löwisab9ec162005-04-09 10:53:34 +0000860- Patch #1177597: Correct Complex.__init__.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000861
Barry Warsaw538561e2006-01-01 21:48:54 +0000862- Fixed a display glitch in Pynche, which could cause the right arrow to
863 wiggle over by a pixel.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000864
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000865What's New in Python 2.4 final?
866===============================
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000867
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000868*Release date: 30-NOV-2004*
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000869
870Core and builtins
871-----------------
872
873- Bug 875692: Improve signal handling, especially when using threads, by
874 forcing an early re-execution of PyEval_EvalFrame() "periodic" code when
875 things_to_do is not cleared by Py_MakePendingCalls().
876
877
Anthony Baxter4277ed82004-11-30 11:53:10 +0000878What's New in Python 2.4 (release candidate 1)
879==============================================
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000880
Anthony Baxter5cc727a2004-11-18 12:32:27 +0000881*Release date: 18-NOV-2004*
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000882
883Core and builtins
884-----------------
885
Tim Petersfb1ffb02004-11-08 04:30:21 +0000886- Bug 1061968: Fixes in 2.4a3 to address thread bug 1010677 reintroduced
887 the years-old thread shutdown race bug 225673. Numeric history lesson
888 aside, all bugs in all three reports are fixed now.
889
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000890
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000891Library
892-------
893
894- Bug 1052242: If exceptions are raised by an atexit handler function an
895 attempt is made to execute the remaining handlers. The last exception
896 raised is re-raised.
897
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000898- ``doctest``'s new support for adding ``pdb.set_trace()`` calls to
899 doctests was broken in a dramatic but shallow way. Fixed.
900
Tim Petersbbc0d442004-11-13 16:18:32 +0000901- Bug 1065388: ``calendar``'s ``day_name``, ``day_abbr``, ``month_name``,
902 and ``month_abbr`` attributes emulate sequences of locale-correct
903 spellings of month and day names. Because the locale can change at
904 any time, the correct spelling is recomputed whenever one of these is
905 indexed. In the worst case, the index may be a slice object, so these
906 recomputed every day or month name each time they were indexed. This is
907 much slower than necessary in the usual case, when the index is just an
908 integer. In that case, only the single spelling needed is recomputed
909 now; and, when the index is a slice object, only the spellings needed
910 by the slice are recomputed now.
911
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000912- Patch 1061679: Added ``__all__`` to pickletools.py.
Tim Peters90cf2122004-11-06 23:45:48 +0000913
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000914Build
915-----
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000916
Brett Cannon7d28e962004-11-07 01:19:00 +0000917- Bug 1034277 / Patch 1035255: Remove compilation of core against CoreServices
918 and CoreFoundation on OS X. Involved removing PyMac_GetAppletScriptFile()
919 which has no known users. Thanks Bob Ippolito.
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000920
921C API
922-----
923
Raymond Hettinger39e92ea2004-11-18 09:41:45 +0000924- The PyRange_New() function is deprecated.
925
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000926
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000927What's New in Python 2.4 beta 2?
928================================
929
Anthony Baxter9f41f3a2004-11-03 06:21:37 +0000930*Release date: 03-NOV-2004*
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000931
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000932License
933-------
934
935The Python Software Foundation changed the license under which Python
936is released, to remove Python version numbers. There were no other
937changes to the license. So, for example, wherever the license for
938Python 2.3 said "Python 2.3", the new license says "Python". The
939intent is to make it possible to refer to the PSF license in a more
940durable way. For example, some people say they're confused by that
941the Open Source Initiative's entry for the Python Software Foundation
942License::
943
944 http://www.opensource.org/licenses/PythonSoftFoundation.php
945
946says "Python 2.1.1" all over it, wondering whether it applies only
947to Python 2.1.1.
948
949The official name of the new license is the Python Software Foundation
950License Version 2.
951
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000952Core and builtins
953-----------------
954
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +0000955- Bug #1055820 Cyclic garbage collection was not protecting against that
956 calling a live weakref to a piece of cyclic trash could resurrect an
957 insane mutation of the trash if any Python code ran during gc (via
958 running a dead object's __del__ method, running another callback on a
959 weakref to a dead object, or via any Python code run in any other thread
960 that managed to obtain the GIL while a __del__ or callback was running
961 in the thread doing gc). The most likely symptom was "impossible"
Andrew M. Kuchlingb2a739d2005-11-22 15:14:44 +0000962 ``AttributeError`` exceptions, appearing seemingly at random, on weakly
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +0000963 referenced objects. The cure was to clear all weakrefs to unreachable
964 objects before allowing any callbacks to run.
965
Raymond Hettinger561fbf12004-10-26 01:52:37 +0000966- Bug #1054139 _PyString_Resize() now invalidates its cached hash value.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000967
968Extension Modules
969-----------------
970
Raymond Hettinger9047c8f2004-10-24 00:10:06 +0000971- Bug #1048870: the compiler now generates distinct code objects for
972 functions with identical bodies. This was producing confusing
973 traceback messages which pointed to the function where the code
974 object was first defined rather than the function being executed.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000975
976Library
977-------
978
Barry Warsaw8c72eae2004-11-01 03:52:43 +0000979- Patch #1056967 changes the semantics of Template.safe_substitute() so that
980 no ValueError is raised on an 'invalid' match group. Now the delimiter is
981 returned.
982
Raymond Hettinger2ef7e6c2004-10-24 00:32:24 +0000983- Bug #1052503 pdb.runcall() was not passing along keyword arguments.
984
Raymond Hettingerc64aab82004-10-20 08:21:57 +0000985- Bug #902037: XML.sax.saxutils.prepare_input_source() now combines relative
986 paths with a base path before checking os.path.isfile().
987
Raymond Hettingere54e7262004-10-20 07:17:16 +0000988- The whichdb module can now be run from the command line.
989
Brett Cannon8abcc5d2004-10-18 01:37:57 +0000990- Bug #1045381: time.strptime() can now infer the date using %U or %W (week of
991 the year) when the day of the week and year are also specified.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000992
Andrew M. Kuchling0d19bae2004-10-19 19:54:41 +0000993- Bug #1048816: fix bug in Ctrl-K at start of line in curses.textpad.Textbox
994
Andrew M. Kuchling66e80ba2004-10-20 11:56:15 +0000995- Bug #1017553: fix bug in tarfile.filemode()
996
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000997- Patch #737473: fix bug that old source code is shown in tracebacks even if
Hye-Shik Chang182ac852004-10-26 09:16:42 +0000998 the source code is updated and reloaded.
999
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +00001000Build
1001-----
1002
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +00001003- Patch #1044395: --enable-shared is allowed in FreeBSD also.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +00001004
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001005What's New in Python 2.4 beta 1?
1006================================
1007
Anthony Baxter6a587c12004-10-15 08:07:21 +00001008*Release date: 15-OCT-2004*
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001009
1010Core and builtins
1011-----------------
1012
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +00001013- Patch #975056: Restartable signals were not correctly disabled on
Anthony Baxtere4f8a482004-10-13 14:55:56 +00001014 BSD systems. Consistently use PyOS_setsig() instead of signal().
1015
Tim Peters263091e2004-10-10 01:58:44 +00001016- The internal portable implementation of thread-local storage (TLS), used
1017 by the ``PyGILState_Ensure()``/``PyGILState_Release()`` API, was not
1018 thread-correct. This could lead to a variety of problems, up to and
1019 including segfaults. See bug 1041645 for an example.
1020
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +00001021- Added a command line option, -m module, which searches sys.path for the
1022 module and then runs it. (Contributed by Nick Coghlan.)
1023
Raymond Hettinger2c31a052004-09-22 18:44:21 +00001024- The bytecode optimizer now folds tuples of constants into a single
1025 constant.
1026
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +00001027- SF bug #513866: Float/long comparison anomaly. Prior to 2.4b1, when
1028 an integer was compared to a float, the integer was coerced to a float.
1029 That could yield spurious overflow errors (if the integer was very
1030 large), and to anomalies such as
1031 ``long(1e200)+1 == 1e200 == long(1e200)-1``. Coercion to float is no
1032 longer performed, and cases like ``long(1e200)-1 < 1e200``,
1033 ``long(1e200)+1 > 1e200`` and ``(1 << 20000) > 1e200`` are computed
1034 correctly now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001035
1036Extension modules
1037-----------------
1038
Tim Peterscf8997f2004-10-01 02:13:16 +00001039- ``collections.deque`` objects didn't play quite right with garbage
1040 collection, which could lead to a segfault in a release build, or
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +00001041 an assert failure in a debug build. Also, added overflow checks,
1042 better detection of mutation during iteration, and shielded deque
1043 comparisons from unusual subclass overrides of the __iter__() method.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001044
1045Library
1046-------
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +00001047
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +00001048- Patch 1046644: distutils build_ext grew two new options - --swig for
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +00001049 specifying the swig executable to use, and --swig-opts to specify
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +00001050 options to pass to swig. --swig-opts="-c++" is the new way to spell
1051 --swig-cpp.
1052
Anthony Baxter22dcf662004-10-13 15:54:17 +00001053- Patch 983206: distutils now obeys environment variable LDSHARED, if
1054 it is set.
1055
Andrew M. Kuchling518d3932004-10-12 15:32:10 +00001056- Added Peter Astrand's subprocess.py module. See PEP 324 for details.
Fredrik Lundh5b3687d2004-10-12 15:26:28 +00001057
Brett Cannon4f35c712004-10-06 02:11:37 +00001058- time.strptime() now properly escapes timezones and all other locale-specific
1059 strings for regex-specific symbols. Was breaking under Japanese Windows when
1060 the timezone was specified as "Tokyo (standard time)".
1061 Closes bug #1039270.
1062
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +00001063- Updates for the email package:
Brett Cannon06a30b02004-10-22 06:22:54 +00001064
Barry Warsaw418de1f2004-10-11 14:32:47 +00001065 + email.Utils.formatdate() grew a 'usegmt' argument for HTTP support.
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +00001066 + All deprecated APIs that in email 2.x issued warnings have been removed:
1067 _encoder argument to the MIMEText constructor, Message.add_payload(),
1068 Utils.dump_address_pair(), Utils.decode(), Utils.encode()
1069 + New deprecations: Generator.__call__(), Message.get_type(),
1070 Message.get_main_type(), Message.get_subtype(), the 'strict' argument to
1071 the Parser constructor. These will be removed in email 3.1.
1072 + Support for Python earlier than 2.3 has been removed (see PEP 291).
1073 + All defect classes have been renamed to end in 'Defect'.
1074 + Some FeedParser fixes; also a MultipartInvariantViolationDefect will be
1075 added to messages that claim to be multipart but really aren't.
1076 + Updates to documentation.
1077
Raymond Hettinger596ba4d2004-09-24 03:41:05 +00001078- re's findall() and finditer() functions now take an optional flags argument
1079 just like the compile(), search(), and match() functions. Also, documented
1080 the previously existing start and stop parameters for the findall() and
1081 finditer() methods of regular expression objects.
1082
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +00001083- rfc822 Messages now support iterating over the headers.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001084
Martin v. Löwisf3c56112004-09-18 09:08:52 +00001085- The (undocumented) tarfile.Tarfile.membernames has been removed;
1086 applications should use the getmember function.
1087
Martin v. Löwis39a31782004-09-18 09:03:49 +00001088- httplib now offers symbolic constants for the HTTP status codes.
1089
Tim Peters528ca532004-09-16 01:30:50 +00001090- SF bug #1028306: Trying to compare a ``datetime.date`` to a
1091 ``datetime.datetime`` mistakenly compared only the year, month and day.
1092 Now it acts like a mixed-type comparison: ``False`` for ``==``,
1093 ``True`` for ``!=``, and raises ``TypeError`` for other comparison
1094 operators. Because datetime is a subclass of date, comparing only the
1095 base class (date) members can still be done, if that's desired, by
1096 forcing using of the approprate date method; e.g.,
1097 ``a_date.__eq__(a_datetime)`` is true if and only if the year, month
1098 and day members of ``a_date`` and ``a_datetime`` are equal.
1099
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001100- bdist_rpm now supports command line options --force-arch,
1101 {pre,post}-install, {pre,post}-uninstall, and
Martin v. Löwis23c48a12004-09-10 06:32:54 +00001102 {prep,build,install,clean,verify}-script.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001103
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +00001104- SF patch #998993: The UTF-8 and the UTF-16 stateful decoders now support
1105 decoding incomplete input (when the input stream is temporarily exhausted).
1106 ``codecs.StreamReader`` now implements buffering, which enables proper
1107 readline support for the UTF-16 decoders. ``codecs.StreamReader.read()``
1108 has a new argument ``chars`` which specifies the number of characters to
1109 return. ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` and
1110 ``codecs.StreamReader.readlines()`` have a new argument ``keepends``.
1111 Trailing "\n"s will be stripped from the lines if ``keepends`` is false.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001112
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +00001113- The documentation for doctest is greatly expanded, and now covers all
1114 the new public features (of which there are many).
1115
Walter Dörwald5011d0c2004-09-13 08:53:15 +00001116- ``doctest.master`` was put back in, and ``doctest.testmod()`` once again
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001117 updates it. This isn't good, because every ``testmod()`` call
1118 contributes to bloating the "hidden" state of ``doctest.master``, but
1119 some old code apparently relies on it. For now, all we can do is
1120 encourage people to stitch doctests together via doctest's unittest
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +00001121 integration features instead.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001122
Skip Montanaro82d0eec2004-09-14 17:58:31 +00001123- httplib now handles ipv6 address/port pairs.
1124
David Goodger68a1abd2004-10-03 15:40:25 +00001125- SF bug #1017864: ConfigParser now correctly handles default keys,
1126 processing them with ``ConfigParser.optionxform`` when supplied,
1127 consistent with the handling of config file entries and runtime-set
1128 options.
1129
David Goodger1cbf2062004-10-03 15:55:09 +00001130- SF bug #997050: Document, test, & check for non-string values in
1131 ConfigParser. Moved the new string-only restriction added in
1132 rev. 1.65 to the SafeConfigParser class, leaving existing
1133 ConfigParser & RawConfigParser behavior alone, and documented the
1134 conditions under which non-string values work.
1135
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001136Build
1137-----
1138
Brett Cannonbfef8692004-09-28 04:08:11 +00001139- Building on darwin now includes /opt/local/include and /opt/local/lib for
1140 building extension modules. This is so as to include software installed as
1141 a DarwinPorts port <http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/>
1142
Tim Peters862f0592004-09-23 19:11:32 +00001143- pyport.h now defines a Py_IS_NAN macro. It works as-is when the
1144 platform C computes true for ``x != x`` if and only if X is a NaN.
1145 Other platforms can override the default definition with a platform-
1146 specific spelling in that platform's pyconfig.h. You can also override
1147 pyport.h's default Py_IS_INFINITY definition now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001148
1149C API
1150-----
1151
Tim Peters7f468f22004-10-11 02:40:51 +00001152- SF patch 1044089: New function ``PyEval_ThreadsInitialized()`` returns
1153 non-zero if PyEval_InitThreads() has been called.
1154
1155- The undocumented and unused extern int ``_PyThread_Started`` was removed.
1156
Tim Peters84705582004-10-10 02:47:33 +00001157- The C API calls ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
1158 are two of the very few advertised as being safe to call without holding
1159 the GIL. However, this wasn't true in a debug build, as bug 1041645
1160 demonstrated. In a debug build, Python redirects the ``PyMem`` family
1161 of calls to Python's small-object allocator, to get the benefit of
1162 its extra debugging capabilities. But Python's small-object allocator
1163 isn't threadsafe, relying on the GIL to avoid the expense of doing its
1164 own locking. ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
1165 call the platform ``malloc()`` directly now, regardless of build type.
1166
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +00001167- PyLong_AsUnsignedLong[Mask] now support int objects as well.
1168
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +00001169- SF patch #998993: ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF8Stateful`` and
1170 ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF16Stateful`` have been added, which implement stateful
1171 decoding.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001172
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001173Tests
1174-----
1175
1176- test__locale ported to unittest
1177
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001178Mac
1179---
1180
Just van Rossumdd3c8372004-10-03 16:27:09 +00001181- ``plistlib`` now supports non-dict root objects. There is also a new
1182 interface for reading and writing plist files: ``readPlist(pathOrFile)``
1183 and ``writePlist(rootObject, pathOrFile)``
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001184
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001185Tools/Demos
1186-----------
1187
Tim Peters130e37f2004-10-03 19:03:19 +00001188- The text file comparison scripts ``ndiff.py`` and ``diff.py`` now
1189 read the input files in universal-newline mode. This spares them
1190 from consuming a great deal of time to deduce the useless result that,
1191 e.g., a file with Windows line ends and a file with Linux line ends
1192 have no lines in common.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001193
1194
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001195What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
1196=================================
1197
Anthony Baxtere13943a2004-09-02 16:37:15 +00001198*Release date: 02-SEP-2004*
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001199
1200Core and builtins
1201-----------------
1202
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001203- SF patch #1007189: ``from ... import ...`` statements now allow the name
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001204 list to be surrounded by parentheses.
1205
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +00001206- Some speedups for long arithmetic, thanks to Trevor Perrin. Gradeschool
1207 multiplication was sped a little by optimizing the C code. Gradeschool
1208 squaring was sped by about a factor of 2, by exploiting that about half
1209 the digit products are duplicates in a square. Because exponentiation
1210 uses squaring often, this also speeds long power. For example, the time
1211 to compute 17**1000000 dropped from about 14 seconds to 9 on my box due
1212 to this much. The cutoff for Karatsuba multiplication was raised,
1213 since gradeschool multiplication got quicker, and the cutoff was
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +00001214 aggressively small regardless. The exponentiation algorithm was switched
1215 from right-to-left to left-to-right, which is more efficient for small
1216 bases. In addition, if the exponent is large, the algorithm now does
1217 5 bits (instead of 1 bit) at a time. That cut the time to compute
1218 17**1000000 on my box in half again, down to about 4.5 seconds.
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +00001219
Tim Petersc8854432004-08-25 02:14:08 +00001220- OverflowWarning is no longer generated. PEP 237 scheduled this to
1221 occur in Python 2.3, but since OverflowWarning was disabled by default,
1222 nobody realized it was still being generated. On the chance that user
1223 code is still using them, the Python builtin OverflowWarning, and
1224 corresponding C API PyExc_OverflowWarning, will exist until Python 2.5.
1225
Martin v. Löwis336e85f2004-08-19 11:31:58 +00001226- Py_InitializeEx has been added.
1227
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +00001228- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
1229 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
1230
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +00001231- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
1232 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
1233 modified the list.
1234
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +00001235- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
1236 functions is now writable.
1237
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +00001238- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
1239 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
1240 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
1241 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
1242
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +00001243- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
1244 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
1245 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
1246 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
1247 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +00001248
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +00001249- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
1250 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
1251
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001252Extension modules
1253-----------------
1254
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +00001255- difflib now supports HTML side-by-side diff.
1256
Martin v. Löwisdc3883f2004-08-29 15:46:35 +00001257- os.urandom has been added for systems that support sources of random
1258 data.
1259
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +00001260- Patch 1012740: truncate() on a writeable cStringIO now resets the
1261 position to the end of the stream. This is consistent with the original
1262 StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was
1263 supposed to have been truncated away.
1264
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +00001265- Added socket.socketpair().
1266
Dave Cole3203efb2004-08-26 00:37:31 +00001267- Added CurrentByteIndex, CurrentColumnNumber, CurrentLineNumber
1268 members to xml.parsers.expat.XMLParser object.
1269
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001270- The mpz, rotor, and xreadlines modules, all deprecated in earlier
Andrew M. Kuchling00873432004-08-31 13:50:43 +00001271 versions of Python, have now been removed.
1272
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001273Library
1274-------
1275
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +00001276- Patch #934356: if a module defines __all__, believe that rather than using
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001277 heuristics for filtering out imported names.
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +00001278
Johannes Gijsbersae882f72004-08-30 10:19:56 +00001279- Patch #941486: added os.path.lexists(), which returns True for broken
1280 symlinks, unlike os.path.exists().
1281
Raymond Hettinger356a4592004-08-30 06:14:31 +00001282- the random module now uses os.urandom() for seeding if it is available.
1283 Added a new generator based on os.urandom().
1284
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +00001285- difflib and diff.py can now generate HTML.
1286
Martin v. Löwiscae9e672004-08-25 13:04:53 +00001287- bdist_rpm now includes version and release in the BuildRoot, and
1288 replaces - by ``_`` in version and release.
Martin v. Löwiscf525242004-08-25 13:00:34 +00001289
Martin v. Löwis9f5c0c42004-08-25 11:37:43 +00001290- distutils build/build_scripts now has an -e option to specify the
1291 path to the Python interpreter for installed scripts.
1292
Barry Warsaw8bee7612004-08-25 02:22:30 +00001293- PEP 292 classes Template and SafeTemplate are added to the string module.
1294
Martin v. Löwis75b9da42004-08-18 13:57:44 +00001295- tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
1296
Martin v. Löwisdeacce22004-08-18 12:46:26 +00001297- HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
1298
Johannes Gijsbersc473c992004-08-18 12:40:31 +00001299- Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
1300 Percivall.
1301
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +00001302- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
1303 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
1304
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +00001305- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
1306 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
1307 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +00001308 than creating a new one.
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +00001309
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001310- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
1311 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
1312 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
1313 and exponent.
1314
1315- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
1316
1317- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
Georg Brandl08c02db2005-07-22 18:39:19 +00001318 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatibility and atexit
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001319 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
1320
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001321- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
1322 to the readline module.
1323
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +00001324- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001325 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
1326 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +00001327
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +00001328- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
1329 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
1330 contains symlinks.
1331
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +00001332- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
1333 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
1334
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +00001335- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
1336 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
1337 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1338
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +00001339- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
1340 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
1341 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
1342 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
1343 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
1344 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
1345 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
1346 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
1347 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
1348 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
1349 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
1350 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
1351 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
1352
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +00001353- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
1354
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001355Tools/Demos
1356-----------
1357
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001358- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
1359 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
1360
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +00001361- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
1362
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001363Build
1364-----
1365
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +00001366- Backward incompatibility: longintrepr.h now triggers a compile-time
1367 error if SHIFT (the number of bits in a Python long "digit") isn't
1368 divisible by 5. This new requirement allows simple code for the new
1369 5-bits-at-a-time long_pow() implementation. If necessary, the
1370 restriction could be removed (by complicating long_pow(), or by
1371 falling back to the 1-bit-at-a-time algorithm), but there are no
1372 plans to do so.
1373
Brett Cannoncc8a4f62004-08-26 01:44:07 +00001374- bug #991962: When building with --disable-toolbox-glue on Darwin no
1375 attempt to build Mac-specific modules occurs.
1376
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +00001377- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
1378 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
1379
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001380- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
1381 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
1382
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +00001383- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
1384 GNU/k*BSD systems.
1385
Hye-Shik Chang3ba5bfc2004-08-19 17:52:37 +00001386- bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings
1387 found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64.
1388
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001389C API
1390-----
1391
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001392..
1393
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001394Documentation
1395-------------
1396
Neal Norwitz5268c392004-08-21 15:13:52 +00001397- patch #1005936, bug #1009373: fix index entries which contain
1398 an underscore when viewed with Acrobat.
1399
1400- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if
1401 it contains symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment
1402 since 1992, but is now in the library reference as well.
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +00001403
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001404New platforms
1405-------------
1406
Hye-Shik Changf64700a2004-08-18 15:13:41 +00001407- FreeBSD 6 is now supported.
1408
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001409Tests
1410-----
1411
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001412..
1413
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001414Windows
1415-------
1416
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +00001417- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
1418 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
1419 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
1420 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
1421 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
1422 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
1423 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
1424 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
1425 the problem.
1426
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001427Mac
1428---
1429
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001430..
1431
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001432
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001433What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
1434=================================
1435
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +00001436*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001437
1438Core and builtins
1439-----------------
1440
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +00001441- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
1442 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
1443 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
1444 sensitive code.
1445
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001446- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001447 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so::
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001448
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001449 @staticmethod
1450 def foo(bar):
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001451
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +00001452 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001453
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001454- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
1455 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
1456 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
1457 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
1458 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
1459 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
1460 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
1461 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
1462 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
1463 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
1464 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
1465
1466 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
1467 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
1468 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
1469 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
1470 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
1471 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
1472 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
1473
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +00001474- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
1475 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
1476
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +00001477- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001478 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +00001479
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001480- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001481 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001482 which was missing for no apparent reason.
1483
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001484- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001485 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
1486 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
1487
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001488- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
1489 types that support garbage collection.
1490
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +00001491- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
1492
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +00001493- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
1494 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
1495 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
1496 Jython.
1497
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001498- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
1499
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +00001500- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
1501 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
1502
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +00001503- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
1504 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
1505 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +00001506
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +00001507- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
1508 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
1509 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
1510
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001511Extension modules
1512-----------------
1513
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +00001514- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
1515
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001516Library
1517-------
1518
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +00001519- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
1520 TIS-620
1521
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +00001522- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
1523 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
1524 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
1525 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
1526 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
1527 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
1528 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
1529 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
1530 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
1531 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
1532
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +00001533- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
1534
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +00001535- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
1536 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
1537 same as when the argument is omitted).
1538 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
1539
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +00001540- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
1541
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +00001542- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
1543 schemes are offered.
1544
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +00001545- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
1546
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +00001547- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
1548 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
1549 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
1550
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +00001551- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
1552
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +00001553- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
1554 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
1555
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +00001556- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
1557 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
1558 when dummy_threading is being used.
1559
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +00001560- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
1561 from a tarfile.
1562
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001563- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001564 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001565
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +00001566- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
1567 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
1568 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
1569 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
1570
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +00001571- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
1572 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
1573
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +00001574- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
1575 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
1576 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
1577 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
1578 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
1579 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
1580 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
1581 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
1582 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
1583 by some other method in progress).
1584
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001585- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
1586 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
1587 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +00001588
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +00001589- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
1590
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +00001591- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
1592 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
1593 AM Kuchling.
1594
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +00001595- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
1596 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
1597 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
1598
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +00001599- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
1600 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
1601 instead of unsigned.
1602
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001603- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +00001604 no longer part of the public API.
1605
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +00001606- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
1607 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
1608 string methods of the same name).
1609
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001610- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +00001611 SF patch 945642.
1612
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001613- doctest unittest integration improvements:
1614
1615 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
1616
1617 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
1618 DocTestSuites.
1619
1620- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
1621 that provide thread-local data.
1622
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001623- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
1624 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
1625
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001626- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
1627
1628- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
1629 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
1630 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
1631
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001632- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
1633
1634 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
1635 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
1636 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001637
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001638 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
1639 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
1640 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
1641 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
1642
1643 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
1644 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
1645
1646 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
1647 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
1648 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
1649 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
1650
1651 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
1652 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
1653 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
1654 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
1655 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
1656
1657 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
1658 wrapping help output.
1659
1660 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
1661 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
1662 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001663
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001664C API
1665-----
1666
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001667- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
1668 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
1669 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
1670 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
1671 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
1672 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
1673 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
1674 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
1675 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
1676 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
1677 its visible semantics have not changed.
1678
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001679- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
1680 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
1681
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001682Documentation
1683-------------
1684
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001685- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001686
1687 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +00001688 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001689
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +00001690 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001691
1692 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
1693
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001694- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001695
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001696Tests
1697-----
1698
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001699- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +00001700 platforms that use the Makefile.
1701
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001702- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
1703 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
1704 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
1705
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001706
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001707What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
1708=================================
1709
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +00001710*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001711
1712Core and builtins
1713-----------------
1714
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +00001715- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
1716 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
1717 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
1718 objects now (one object instead of three).
1719
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +00001720- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
1721 Windows DLLs.
1722
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +00001723- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
1724 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +00001725
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +00001726- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
1727 a new .pyc magic.
1728
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +00001729- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
1730 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
1731 be there.
1732
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +00001733- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
1734 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
1735 the LC_NUMERIC category.
1736
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +00001737- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
1738 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
1739 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
1740
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +00001741- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
1742
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +00001743- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
1744 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
1745 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +00001746
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +00001747- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
1748 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
1749
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +00001750- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
1751
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001752- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001753 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001754
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +00001755- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
1756
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +00001757- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
1758
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +00001759- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
1760 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
1761
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +00001762- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
1763 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
1764 Fixes bug #858016 .
1765
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +00001766- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
1767 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
1768 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
1769
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +00001770- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
1771 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
1772 improves their performance (about 35%).
1773
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +00001774- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
1775 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
1776 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
1777
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +00001778- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
1779 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
1780 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
1781 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
1782
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001783- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
1784 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
Walter Dörwald09515af2005-03-18 10:28:24 +00001785 list comprehensions, and the list constructor (when the input iterable
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001786 length is not known).
1787
1788- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
1789 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +00001790 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
1791 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001792 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
1793
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +00001794- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
1795 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
1796
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +00001797- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
1798 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
1799 keyword arguments.
1800
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +00001801- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
1802 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
1803 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
1804
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +00001805- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
1806 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
1807 cases.
1808
1809- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
1810 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
1811 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
1812 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
1813 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
1814 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
1815 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
1816 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
1817 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
1818 a release build.
1819
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +00001820- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
1821 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
1822
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001823- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001824 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001825
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +00001826- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
1827 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
1828 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
1829 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
1830 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
1831 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
1832 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
1833 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
1834 destroyed.
1835
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +00001836- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
1837 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
1838 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
1839 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
1840 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
1841 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
1842 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
1843 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
1844
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +00001845- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
1846 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
1847 character other than a space.
1848
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +00001849- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
1850 by the function object or by the method object, the function
1851 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
1852 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
1853 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
1854 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
1855 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
1856 attributes with the same name.
1857
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001858- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
1859 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
1860 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
1861 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
1862 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
1863 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
1864 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
1865 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
1866 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
1867 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
1868 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
1869 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
1870 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
1871 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +00001872
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +00001873- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
1874 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
1875 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
1876 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
1877 This has been repaired.
1878
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001879- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
1880
1881- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
1882
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +00001883- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
1884 over a sequence.
1885
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001886- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001887 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001888
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +00001889- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
1890
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +00001891- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
1892 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
1893 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
1894 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
1895 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
1896 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
1897 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
1898 records with equal keys is unchanged).
1899
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +00001900- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
1901 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
1902 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
1903
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +00001904- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
1905 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
1906 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
1907 freelist.
1908
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +00001909- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
1910 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
1911
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +00001912- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
1913 number.
1914
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +00001915- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
1916 a TypeError exception.
1917
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +00001918- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
1919 820195.
1920
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +00001921- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
1922 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
1923 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
1924
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001925- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001926 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
1927 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +00001928
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +00001929- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
1930 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
1931 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
1932
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001933- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
1934 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001935 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001936
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001937- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +00001938 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
1939 the first call.
1940
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001941
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001942Extension modules
1943-----------------
1944
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +00001945- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
1946 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
1947
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001948- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
1949 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
1950 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
1951 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
1952 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
1953 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
1954 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +00001955
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +00001956- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
1957
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +00001958- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
1959
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +00001960- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
1961 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
1962
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +00001963- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
1964 fewer false positives.
1965
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +00001966- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
1967 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
1968
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001969- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +00001970 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
1971
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +00001972- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001973 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +00001974 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
Raymond Hettinger6ab78cd2004-08-29 07:50:43 +00001975 Also, array.array() and array.extend() now accept any iterable argument
1976 for repeated appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +00001977
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +00001978- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
1979 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
1980 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
1981 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
1982
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +00001983- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
1984 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
1985 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
1986 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
1987 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
1988 #897625.
1989
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +00001990- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
1991 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
1992
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +00001993- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
1994 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
1995 and pops on either side of the deque.
1996
1997- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
1998 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
1999
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +00002000- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
2001 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
2002 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
2003 other functions that expect a function argument.
2004
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +00002005- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
2006
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00002007- os.getsid was added.
2008
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +00002009- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
2010 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
2011 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
2012
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +00002013- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
2014
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +00002015- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
2016
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +00002017- readline.clear_history was added.
2018
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +00002019- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
2020
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +00002021- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
2022
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +00002023- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
2024
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +00002025- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
2026
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +00002027- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
2028
2029- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
2030
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +00002031- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
2032
2033- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
2034
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00002035- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
2036 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
2037 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
2038
2039- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
2040 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
2041 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
2042 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
2043 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
2044 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
2045 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
2046
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +00002047- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
2048 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
2049 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
2050 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00002051
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00002052- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00002053 iterators from a single iterable.
2054
2055- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
2056 of raising a TypeError exception.
2057
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +00002058- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
2059 as parameter.
2060
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002061Library
2062-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00002063
Armin Rigoa871ef22006-02-08 12:53:56 +00002064- Added a new module: cProfile, a C profiler with the same interface as the
2065 profile module. cProfile avoids some of the drawbacks of the hotshot
2066 profiler and provides a bit more information than the other two profilers.
2067 Based on "lsprof" (patch #1212837).
2068
Georg Brandlf0de6a12005-08-22 18:02:59 +00002069- Bug #1266283: The new function "lexists" is now in os.path.__all__.
2070
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +00002071- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
2072 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
2073 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002074
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +00002075- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
2076 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
2077 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +00002078
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +00002079- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +00002080
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +00002081- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
2082 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +00002083
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +00002084- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
2085 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
2086
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00002087- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
2088
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00002089- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00002090 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00002091
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00002092- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00002093 that generate a -debuginfo.rpm
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00002094
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +00002095- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
2096
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +00002097- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
2098 on cygwin and mingw32.
2099
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +00002100- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
2101
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +00002102- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
2103 module.
2104
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +00002105- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
2106 installation scheme for all platforms.
2107
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00002108- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +00002109 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00002110
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00002111- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
2112 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
2113 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
2114
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +00002115- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
2116 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
2117 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
2118
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +00002119- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
2120
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +00002121- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
2122
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +00002123- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
2124 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
2125
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +00002126- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
2127 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
2128 type pattern with the same value exists.
2129
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +00002130- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
2131 when run from the command prompt).
2132
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00002133- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
2134 not taken into consideration when caching value.
2135
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +00002136- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
2137 default sort).
2138
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +00002139- Added global runctx function to profile module
2140
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +00002141- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
2142
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +00002143- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
2144
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +00002145- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
2146
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00002147- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +00002148 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
2149 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
2150 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
2151 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
2152 accordingly.
2153
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +00002154- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
2155 decoding standards.
2156
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +00002157- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
2158 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
2159 called for all requests.
2160
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +00002161- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
2162 they are passed to the compiler.
2163
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +00002164- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
2165 indent, width and depth.
2166
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +00002167- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
2168 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
2169
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +00002170- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
2171 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
2172
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +00002173- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
2174
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +00002175- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
2176
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00002177- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
2178
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +00002179- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
2180 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
2181
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +00002182- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +00002183 for better performance.
2184
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00002185- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +00002186
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +00002187- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
2188 a string).
2189
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +00002190- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
2191
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +00002192- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
2193
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +00002194- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
2195
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +00002196- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
2197
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +00002198- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
2199 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
2200 list of fieldnames.
2201
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +00002202- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
2203 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
2204
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +00002205- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
2206
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +00002207- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
2208 empty lists.
2209
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +00002210- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
2211 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
2212 and shelves.
2213
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +00002214- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
2215 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
2216
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00002217- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +00002218 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
2219 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00002220
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +00002221- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
2222 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +00002223 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +00002224
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00002225- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +00002226 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
2227 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
2228
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00002229- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
2230 and removed in Py2.4.
2231
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +00002232- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
2233
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +00002234- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
2235
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002236Tools/Demos
2237-----------
2238
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +00002239- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
2240 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
2241
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +00002242- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
2243
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +00002244- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
2245 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
2246 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
2247 destination in situations where both files are given.
2248
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +00002249- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
2250 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
2251 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
2252 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
2253
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +00002254- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
2255
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +00002256- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
2257 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
2258 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
2259 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
2260 now.
2261
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002262- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
2263 in effect
2264
2265- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
2266 C-c C-h
2267
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +00002268- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
2269 -d option was given.
2270
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002271Build
2272-----
2273
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +00002274- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
2275 build under OS X.
2276
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +00002277- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
2278 --enable-profiling.
2279
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +00002280- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
2281 is configured --with-tsc.
2282
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +00002283- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
2284 on AMD64.
2285
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +00002286- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
2287 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
2288
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00002289- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
2290 removed.
2291
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00002292- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
2293 supported (see PEP 11).
2294
2295- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
2296
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00002297- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
2298
2299- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
2300 (see PEP 11).
2301
2302- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
2303 sizeof(char) must be 1.
2304
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002305C API
2306-----
2307
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00002308- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
2309 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
2310 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
2311
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00002312- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
2313 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
2314 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
2315 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
2316
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00002317- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
2318 generator objects.
2319
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00002320- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
2321 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00002322 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
2323 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00002324
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00002325- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
2326 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
2327
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00002328- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
2329 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
2330 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
2331 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
2332 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
2333
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00002334- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
2335 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
2336 about 10% faster.
2337
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00002338- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
2339 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
2340
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00002341- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
2342 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
2343 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
2344 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
2345
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002346Windows
2347-------
2348
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00002349- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
2350 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
2351 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
2352 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
2353
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00002354- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
2355 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
2356 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
2357
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002358
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002359What's New in Python 2.3 final?
2360===============================
2361
2362*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
2363
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002364IDLE
2365----
2366
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00002367- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
2368 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
2369 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
2370 context-menu actions.
2371
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002372- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
2373 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
2374 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
2375 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
2376 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
2377 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
2378 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
2379 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
2380 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
2381
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002382
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002383What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
2384=============================================
2385
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00002386*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002387
2388Core and builtins
2389-----------------
2390
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00002391- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002392 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00002393 comment at the end are still unsupported.
2394
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002395Extension modules
2396-----------------
2397
2398- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
2399 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
2400 than once. This has been fixed.
2401
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00002402- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
2403 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
2404 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
2405 call.
2406
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002407- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
2408
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002409Library
2410-------
2411
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002412- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
2413 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
2414
2415- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
2416 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
2417 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
2418 restored.
2419
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00002420IDLE
2421----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002422
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00002423- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002424
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002425Build
2426-----
2427
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002428- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
2429 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
2430
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002431C API
2432-----
2433
2434Windows
2435-------
2436
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00002437- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
2438 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
2439
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002440- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
2441
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002442Mac
2443---
2444
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002445- Various fixes to pimp.
2446
2447- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
2448
2449- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
2450 more problems than it solves.
2451
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002452
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002453What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
2454=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002455
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00002456*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
2457
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002458Core and builtins
2459-----------------
2460
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00002461- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
2462 by sys.setcheckinterval().
2463
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002464- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
2465 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002466 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002467
2468- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
2469 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
2470 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002471 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002472
2473- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
2474 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002475
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002476- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
2477 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
2478 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
2479
2480- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002481 770247.
2482
2483- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002484
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002485Extension modules
2486-----------------
2487
2488- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
2489 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
2490
2491- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
2492
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002493- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
2494
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00002495- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
2496 contained within the _strptime module.
2497
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002498- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
2499 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
2500
2501- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002502 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
2503
2504- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
2505 the find_class attribute, if present.
2506
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002507- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002508
2509 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
2510 (SF bug 763298).
2511
2512 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00002513 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
2514 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
2515 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002516
2517 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
2518
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002519Library
2520-------
2521
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002522- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
2523
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00002524- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
2525 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
2526 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
2527 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
2528 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
2529 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
2530 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
2531 or Tester().
2532
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002533- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
2534 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
2535 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
2536 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
2537 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
2538 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
2539 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
2540 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
2541 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00002542
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002543 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00002544
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00002545- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
2546 weren't before was an oversight.
2547
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002548- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
2549 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
2550
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00002551- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
2552 when there are no lines.
2553
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00002554- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
2555 which could occur with Tk 8.4
2556
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002557- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
2558 to child processes.
2559
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002560- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
2561
2562- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
2563
2564- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
2565 xmlrpclib.
2566
2567- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
2568 responses.
2569
2570- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
2571 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
2572
2573- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
2574 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
2575 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
2576
2577- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
2578 used as patterns.
2579
2580- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
2581 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
2582 than Tk 8.3.
2583
2584- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
2585
2586- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002587
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002588Tools/Demos
2589-----------
2590
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002591- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
2592
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00002593- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
2594
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002595- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002596
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002597Build
2598-----
2599
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002600- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
2601
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002602- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
2603
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002604- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
2605 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002606
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002607- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
2608 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
2609 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002610
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002611C API
2612-----
2613
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002614- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
2615 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
2616
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002617Windows
2618-------
2619
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002620- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
2621 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
2622 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
2623 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
2624 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
2625 Python exception ::
2626
2627 thread.error: can't start new thread
2628
2629 is raised now.
2630
2631- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
2632 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
2633 instead of from DLL teardown.
2634
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002635Mac
2636---
2637
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002638- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00002639 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002640 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
2641 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
2642 the executable in the bundle.
2643
2644- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002645
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00002646- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
2647
2648- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
2649 on Panther.
2650
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002651What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
2652================================
2653
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002654*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002655
2656Core and builtins
2657-----------------
2658
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00002659- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
2660 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
2661 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
2662 with the -i option.
2663
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00002664- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
2665 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
2666
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002667- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
2668 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
2669
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00002670- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
2671 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
2672 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
2673 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
2674 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
2675 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
2676 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
2677 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
2678 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
2679 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
2680 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
2681 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
2682 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00002683
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002684- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
2685 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
2686 embedded in a lambda expression.
2687
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00002688- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
2689 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
2690 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
2691 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
2692 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
2693
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002694- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
2695 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
2696 matches the restriction on classic classes.
2697
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00002698- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
2699 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
2700
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00002701- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
2702 It's writable again.
2703
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002704- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
2705 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
2706 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002707 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002708
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002709- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
2710 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
2711 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
2712
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002713Extension modules
2714-----------------
2715
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00002716- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
2717 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
2718
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002719- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
2720 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
2721 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
2722 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
2723
2724- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
2725 collection.
2726
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00002727- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
2728 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
2729 unique within a single program run.
2730
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00002731- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
2732 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
2733
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00002734- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
2735 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
2736
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00002737- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
2738 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00002739
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00002740- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
2741
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00002742- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
2743 Fixes SF bug #730685.
2744
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00002745- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
2746 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
2747 for many BSD-derived systems.
2748
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002749
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002750Library
2751-------
2752
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00002753- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
2754 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
2755 primary ones:
2756
2757 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
2758 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
2759 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
2760
2761 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
2762 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
2763 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
2764 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
2765 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
2766 framework features (which doctest lacks).
2767
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00002768- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
2769 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
2770 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
2771 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
2772 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
2773 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
2774 argument.
2775
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002776- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
2777 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
2778 in the archive.
2779
2780- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
2781 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
2782
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00002783- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
2784 569574).
2785
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002786- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
2787 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
2788 no more.
2789
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002790- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
2791 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
2792 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
2793 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
2794 code coverage.
2795
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002796- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
2797 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
2798 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002799 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
2800 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002801
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002802- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
2803 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
2804 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00002805 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002806
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00002807- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
2808
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00002809- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
2810 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
2811 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
2812 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
2813
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00002814- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
2815 handling.
2816
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00002817- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
2818 __doc__ of data descriptors.
2819
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00002820- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
2821 in socket.py.
2822
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00002823- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
2824
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00002825- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
2826 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
2827 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
2828 opener with proxy support.
2829
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002830- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
2831
2832- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
2833
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002834Tools/Demos
2835-----------
2836
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00002837- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
2838
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002839- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
2840
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002841- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
2842 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00002843
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00002844- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
2845 files.
2846
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002847Build
2848-----
2849
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002850- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00002851 different root directory.
2852
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002853C API
2854-----
2855
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00002856- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
2857 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
2858 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
2859 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
2860 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
2861 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
2862 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
2863 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
2864 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
2865 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
2866
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002867- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
2868 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
2869 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
2870 from Python.
2871
2872
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002873New platforms
2874-------------
2875
2876None this time.
2877
2878Tests
2879-----
2880
2881- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
2882 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
2883
2884Windows
2885-------
2886
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00002887- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
2888
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00002889- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
2890 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
2891 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
2892 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
2893 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
2894 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
2895 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
2896 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
2897 that's what it's for.
2898
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002899Mac
2900---
2901
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00002902- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
2903 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
2904 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
2905 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00002906- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
2907 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
2908- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002909
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002910SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
2911------------------------------------
2912
2913430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
2914598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
2915622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
2916661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
2917683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
2918697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
2919713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
2920724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
2921727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
2922729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
2923730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
2924731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
2925732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
2926733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
2927735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
2928740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
2929744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
2930745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
2931747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
2932749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
2933751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
2934753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
2935755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
2936757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
2937760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
2938
2939
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002940What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
2941================================
2942
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00002943*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002944
2945Core and builtins
2946-----------------
2947
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00002948- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
2949 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
2950
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00002951- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
2952 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
2953 and cannot be strings).
2954
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00002955- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
2956 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
2957 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
2958 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
2959
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00002960- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
2961 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
2962 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
2963 Python itself.
2964
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00002965- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
2966 the referenced object, if it has one.
2967
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00002968- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
2969 the thread started at
2970 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
2971
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00002972- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
2973 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
2974 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
2975 placed on a list index.
2976
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00002977- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
2978 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
2979 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
2980 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
2981
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002982- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
2983 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
2984 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
2985 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
2986 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
2987 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
2988 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
2989
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00002990- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
2991 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
2992 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
2993 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
2994 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
2995
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00002996- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
2997 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00002998
2999- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
3000 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
3001 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
3002 #693195.)
3003
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00003004- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
3005 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003006
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00003007- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00003008 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00003009 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
3010 interpreter executions, would fail.
3011
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00003012- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00003013 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00003014 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00003015
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003016Extension modules
3017-----------------
3018
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00003019- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
3020 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
3021 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
3022 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
3023
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00003024- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
3025 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
3026
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00003027- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
3028 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
3029 and Greg Chapman.)
3030
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00003031- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
3032 recursively.
3033
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00003034- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00003035 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
3036 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
3037 leaks.
3038
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00003039- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
3040
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00003041- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
3042 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
3043 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
3044 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
3045 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
3046 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
3047 #705836.
3048
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00003049- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00003050 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
3051
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00003052- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
3053 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
3054 See SF bug #692416.
3055
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00003056- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
3057 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
3058
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00003059- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
3060 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
3061 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003062
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00003063- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00003064 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
3065 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
3066
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00003067- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
3068 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
3069 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
3070 timeouts to work properly.
3071
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003072Library
3073-------
3074
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00003075- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
3076 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
3077 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
3078 future release.
3079
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00003080- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
3081 for querying platform dependent features.
3082
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00003083- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00003084
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00003085- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
3086 pickle protocol versions.
3087
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00003088- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
3089 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
3090 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
3091
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00003092- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
3093
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00003094- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
3095 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
3096 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
3097 modules.
3098
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00003099- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
3100 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
3101 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
3102
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00003103- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
3104 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
3105
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00003106- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
3107 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
3108 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
3109
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00003110- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00003111 MS Office extensions.
3112
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00003113- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
3114 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
3115
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00003116- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
3117 execution speed of expressions and statements.
3118
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003119- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
3120 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
3121 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
3122 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
3123 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
3124 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
3125
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00003126- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
3127 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
3128 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003129
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00003130- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
3131 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
3132 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
3133
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00003134- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
3135
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00003136- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
3137 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
3138 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
3139
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003140Tools/Demos
3141-----------
3142
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00003143- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
3144 See the module docstring for details.
3145
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003146Build
3147-----
3148
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00003149- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
3150 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003151
3152C API
3153-----
3154
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00003155- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
3156
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00003157- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
3158 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
3159 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
3160
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00003161- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
3162 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00003163
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00003164 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
3165 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
3166 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00003167
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00003168- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00003169 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
3170
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00003171- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
3172 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
3173 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003174
3175New platforms
3176-------------
3177
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00003178None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003179
3180Tests
3181-----
3182
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00003183- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
3184 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003185
3186Windows
3187-------
3188
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00003189- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
3190 function.
3191
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00003192- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
3193 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003194
3195Mac
3196---
3197
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00003198- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
3199 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00003200
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00003201- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
3202 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003203
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00003204- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
3205 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
3206 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00003207
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00003208- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00003209 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
3210 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00003211
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00003212- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
3213 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003214
3215
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003216What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
3217=================================
3218
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00003219*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003220
3221Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00003222-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003223
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00003224- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
3225 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
3226 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
3227
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00003228- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
3229 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
3230 (SF patch #664376.)
3231
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00003232- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
3233 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
3234 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
3235 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
3236 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
3237 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00003238 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00003239
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00003240- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
3241 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
3242 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
3243 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003244 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00003245
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00003246- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
3247 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
3248 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
3249 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
3250 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
3251 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
3252 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
3253 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
3254 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
3255 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
3256 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
3257
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00003258- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
3259 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
3260 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
3261 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
3262 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
3263 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
3264
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00003265- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
3266 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
3267
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00003268- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
3269 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
3270 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
3271 case.)
3272
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00003273- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
3274 passed as unicode strings.
3275
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00003276- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
3277 See SF bug #683467.
3278
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00003279- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
3280 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
3281
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00003282- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
3283
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00003284- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
3285
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00003286- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
3287 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
3288 arguments.
3289
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00003290- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
3291 See SF bug #667147.
3292
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00003293- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003294 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00003295 See SF bug #676155.
3296
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00003297- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00003298 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00003299 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
3300 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
3301 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
3302 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
3303 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
3304 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00003305
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003306Extension modules
3307-----------------
3308
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00003309- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
3310 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
3311 tp_as_number pointer.
3312
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00003313- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
3314 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
3315 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
3316 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
3317 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
3318
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003319- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
3320
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00003321- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
3322
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00003323- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00003324 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00003325 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
3326 patch #678531.)
3327
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00003328- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
3329 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
3330
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00003331- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
3332 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
3333
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00003334- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
3335
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00003336- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
3337 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
3338 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
3339
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003340- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
3341
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00003342- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
3343 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
3344
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003345- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003346
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003347- datetime changes:
3348
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00003349 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
3350
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00003351 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
3352 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
3353 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
3354 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
3355 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
3356 now.
3357
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003358 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003359 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
3360 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003361
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003362 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003363 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003364 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
3365 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
3366 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
3367 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003368
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00003369 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
3370 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
3371 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003372 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
3373
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00003374 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
3375 by a later example coded by Guido.
3376
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003377 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003378 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
3379 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
3380 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003381 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
3382 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
3383
3384 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
3385 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
3386 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
3387 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
3388 tzinfo subclass instance.
3389
3390 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
3391 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
3392 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
3393 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
3394 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
3395 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
3396 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
3397 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003398
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003399 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
3400 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
3401 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
3402 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
3403 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003404 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
3405
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003406 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003407
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003408 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
3409 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
3410 as a naive datetime object.
3411
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00003412 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
3413 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
3414 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
3415
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00003416 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
3417 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
3418 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
3419 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
3420 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
3421 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
3422 comparison.
3423
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003424 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
3425 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
3426 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
3427 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003428 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003429
3430 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003431
3432 and ::
3433
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003434 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
3435
3436 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
3437 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
3438 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
3439 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
3440
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00003441 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
3442 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
3443 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
3444 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
3445 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
3446
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003447 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
3448 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00003449 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
3450 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003451
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003452Library
3453-------
3454
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003455- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
3456 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
3457
3458- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
3459 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
3460 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
3461 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
3462 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
3463 See PEP 307 for details.
3464
3465- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
3466 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
3467
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00003468- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
3469 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00003470 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003471 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
3472 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00003473 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00003474
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00003475- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
3476 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
3477
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003478- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
3479 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
3480 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
3481
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00003482- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
3483
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00003484- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
3485 exception.
3486
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00003487- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
3488 class.
3489
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00003490- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
3491 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
3492 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
3493
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00003494- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
3495 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
3496
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003497- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00003498 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
3499 See SF bug #659228.
3500
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00003501- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
3502 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
3503 See SF patch #651082.
3504
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00003505- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003506
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00003507- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
3508 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
3509
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003510- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003511 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003512
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00003513- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
3514 DOS paths from other platforms.
3515
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003516Tools/Demos
3517-----------
3518
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003519- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
3520 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
3521 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
3522 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
3523 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
3524 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
3525 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
3526 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
3527 example:
3528
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00003529 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
3530 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003531
3532 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
3533
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003534
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003535Build
3536-----
3537
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003538- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
3539 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
3540 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003541 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
3542
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003543 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
3544
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00003545- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
3546 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
3547 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
3548 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
3549 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
3550 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
3551 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
3552 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
3553 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
3554
3555- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
3556 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
3557 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
3558 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
3559
3560- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
3561 from the Tools/scripts directory.
3562
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003563C API
3564-----
3565
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003566- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
3567 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00003568
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00003569- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
3570 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
3571 tp_as_number pointer.
3572
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00003573- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
3574 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
3575 (SF #681367)
3576
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00003577- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
3578 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
3579 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
3580 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00003581
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003582Tests
3583-----
3584
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00003585- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003586 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
3587 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
3588 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
3589 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
3590 pydoc.)
3591
3592- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
3593
3594- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003595
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003596Windows
3597-------
3598
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00003599- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
3600 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
3601 time).
3602
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00003603- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
3604 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
3605
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00003606- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
3607 release without strong cryptography.
3608
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003609- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003610 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003611
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003612- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
3613 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
3614
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003615Mac
3616---
3617
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003618- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
3619 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003620
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00003621- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
3622 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
3623 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003624
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003625- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
3626 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003627
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003628- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
3629 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
3630 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
3631 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003632
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003633- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00003634 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
3635 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
3636 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003637
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003638
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003639What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003640=================================
3641
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00003642*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003643
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003644Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003645--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003646
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00003647- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
3648
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003649- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
3650 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003651 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003652 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003653 a different meaning than before.
3654
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003655- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003656 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003657 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003658
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003659- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003660 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003661 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003662
3663- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
3664 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
3665 and deallocation.
3666
3667- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
3668 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
3669
3670- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
3671 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
3672 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
3673 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
3674 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
3675
3676- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
3677 now detected by the garbage collector.
3678
3679- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
3680 [SF bug 519621]
3681
3682- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
3683 identifier.
3684
3685- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
3686 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
3687 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
3688 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
3689 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
3690 [SF bug 563060]
3691
3692- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
3693 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
3694 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
3695 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
3696 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
3697
3698- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
3699 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
3700 not called. [SF bug #537450]
3701
3702- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
3703
3704- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
3705 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
3706 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
3707 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
3708 state of the slots would be lost.)
3709
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003710Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003711-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003712
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003713- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003714 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
3715 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
3716 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
3717 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003718 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
3719 Jython 2.1.
3720
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003721- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003722 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003723 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
3724 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
3725 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
3726 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
3727 these, see PEP 302.
3728
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003729- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
3730 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
3731 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
3732
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00003733- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
3734 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
3735 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
3736
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00003737- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
3738 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
3739 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
3740
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003741- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
3742 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
3743 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
3744 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
3745 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
3746 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
3747 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
3748 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
3749 releases or implementations.
3750
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003751- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003752 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
3753 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003754
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00003755- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
3756 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
3757
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003758- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
3759 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
3760 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
3761
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00003762- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
3763 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
3764
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003765- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
3766 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003767 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
3768 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003769
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00003770- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
3771 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
3772 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
3773 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
3774 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
3775
3776 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
3777 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
3778 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
3779 pattern.
3780
3781 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
3782 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
3783 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
3784 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
3785
3786 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
3787 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
3788 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
3789 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
3790 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
3791 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
3792
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00003793- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
3794 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
3795 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
3796 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
3797 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
3798 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
3799 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
3800 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00003801
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00003802- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
3803 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
3804 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
3805 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
3806 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003807 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
3808 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
3809 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
3810 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
3811 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
3812 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
3813 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003814
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003815- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
3816 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
3817
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00003818- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
3819 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
3820 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
3821 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
3822 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
3823 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
3824 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
3825 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
3826 to Zack Weinberg!
3827
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00003828- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
3829 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
3830 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
3831 type. This has been fixed now.
3832
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00003833- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
3834 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
3835 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
3836
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003837- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
3838 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
3839 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
3840 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
3841 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
3842 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
3843 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
3844 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00003845 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003846
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00003847- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
3848 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
3849 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00003850
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003851- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
3852 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
3853 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
3854 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
3855 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
3856 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
3857 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
3858 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003859 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003860 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
3861 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
3862
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00003863- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
3864 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
3865 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
3866 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
3867 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
3868 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
3869 this.)
3870
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003871- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
3872 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003873 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003874 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003875 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
3876 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00003877 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
3878 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003879
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003880- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
3881 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
3882 currently running.
3883
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00003884- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
3885 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
3886 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
3887 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
3888
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00003889- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
3890 as directory names.
3891
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00003892- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
3893 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
3894
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00003895- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
3896 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
3897
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003898- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00003899 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
3900 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003901
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00003902- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
3903 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
3904 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
3905 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
3906 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
3907
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003908- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
3909 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
3910 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
3911 removed.
3912
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00003913- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
3914 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
3915 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
3916
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00003917- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
3918 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
3919 to __debug__.
3920
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00003921- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
3922 string to the left with zeros. For example,
3923 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
3924
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00003925- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
3926 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
3927 deprecated now.
3928
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00003929- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
3930 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
3931 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00003932
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00003933- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
3934 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
3935 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
3936 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
3937 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00003938
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00003939- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
3940 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
3941
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003942- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
3943 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
3944 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003945 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003946 is backward compatible.
3947
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00003948- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
3949 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
3950 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
3951 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
3952 could access a pointer to freed memory.
3953
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00003954- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
3955 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
3956 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
3957 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
3958 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
3959 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003960
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00003961- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
3962 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
3963
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003964- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
3965 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
3966
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003967- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
3968 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
3969 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
3970 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
3971 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
3972
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00003973- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
3974 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
3975 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
3976
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003977- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00003978 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
3979
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00003980- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
3981 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
3982 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00003983
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00003984- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
3985 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
3986
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00003987- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
3988 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
3989 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
3990
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00003991- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
3992
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003993Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003994-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003995
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00003996- Added three operators to the operator module:
3997 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
3998 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
3999 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
4000
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00004001- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
4002
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00004003- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
4004 archives.
4005
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00004006- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
4007 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
4008 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
4009
4010 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
4011
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00004012- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
4013 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
4014 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00004015 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00004016
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00004017- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
4018 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
4019 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
4020 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00004021 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
4022 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
4023 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
4024 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00004025
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00004026- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
4027 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00004028
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00004029- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
4030
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00004031- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
4032 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
4033
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00004034- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
4035 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
4036 supported.
4037
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00004038- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
4039
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00004040- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
4041 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00004042
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00004043- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
4044 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
4045
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00004046- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
4047
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00004048- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
4049 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
4050
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00004051- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
4052 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
4053 functions but callable type objects.
4054
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00004055- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00004056 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00004057 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00004058
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00004059- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
4060 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00004061
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00004062- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
4063 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00004064
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00004065- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
4066 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
4067 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
4068 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
4069
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00004070- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
4071 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00004072
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00004073- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
4074 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
4075 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
4076 and __imul__.
4077
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00004078- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00004079 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
4080 is called.
4081
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00004082- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
4083 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
4084 interpreter was compiled.
4085
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00004086- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
4087 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
4088 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00004089 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00004090 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
4091 1, not 2.
4092
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00004093- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
4094 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
4095 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
4096 limit.
4097
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00004098- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
4099 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
4100 bug #623464.
4101
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00004102- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
4103 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
4104 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
4105 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
4106
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004107Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004108-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004109
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00004110- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
4111
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00004112- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
4113 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
4114 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
4115 with Python 2.3a2.
4116
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00004117- os.path exposes getctime.
4118
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004119- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004120 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004121 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004122 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004123 unit tests of floating point results.
4124
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00004125- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
4126 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
4127 has been increased.
4128
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00004129- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
4130 executed.
4131
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00004132- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
4133 postinstallation script.
4134
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00004135- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
4136 test the current module.
4137
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004138- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00004139 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
4140 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
4141 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
4142 this behavior needs to be controlled.
4143
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00004144- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00004145 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00004146 Ward's Optik package.
4147
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00004148- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
4149 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
4150 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
4151 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
4152
4153- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
4154 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00004155 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00004156
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00004157- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
4158 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
4159 shelf are binary pickles.
4160
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00004161- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
4162 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
4163
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00004164- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
4165 modules are iterators now.
4166
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00004167- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
4168 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
4169 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
4170 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
4171 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
4172 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00004173
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00004174- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
4175 with their entity value.
4176
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00004177- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
4178
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00004179- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
4180 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00004181
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00004182- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
4183 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00004184 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00004185
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00004186- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
4187 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
4188 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
4189 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
4190 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
4191 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
4192 main():
4193
4194 import locale
4195 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
4196
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00004197- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
4198 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
4199
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00004200- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
4201 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
4202 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
4203 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
4204 to the new standard.
4205
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00004206- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
4207 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
4208 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
4209 an extension to the database.
4210
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00004211- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
4212 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
4213 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
4214 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00004215 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00004216
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00004217- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00004218 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00004219
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00004220- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
4221 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
4222 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
4223 bounded integers.
4224
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00004225- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
4226 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
4227 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
4228 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
4229 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
4230 in existence.
4231
4232 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
4233 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
4234 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
4235 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
4236 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
4237 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
4238
4239 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
4240 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
4241 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
4242 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
4243
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00004244- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
4245 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
4246 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
4247
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00004248- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
4249
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00004250- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
4251 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
4252 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
4253 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
4254
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00004255- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
4256 argument.
4257
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00004258- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
4259 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
4260 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
4261 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
4262 [SF patch 560794].
4263
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00004264- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
4265 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
4266 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00004267 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
4268 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
4269 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00004270
4271- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
4272 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00004273
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00004274- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
4275 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
4276 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
4277 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00004278
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00004279- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
4280 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
4281 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
4282 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
4283 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
4284
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00004285- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00004286
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00004287- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
4288
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00004289- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
4290 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
4291 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
4292 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
4293 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
4294 identical to None.
4295
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00004296- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
4297 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
4298 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
4299 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
4300 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
4301 results now.
4302
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00004303- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
4304 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
4305
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00004306- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
4307 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
4308 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
4309 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
4310 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
4311 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
4312 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
4313 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
4314
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00004315- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
4316
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00004317- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
4318 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
4319
4320- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
4321 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
4322 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
4323 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
4324 and other systems.
4325
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00004326- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
4327 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
4328 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
4329 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 +00004330 work well with these.
4331
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00004332- compileall now supports quiet operation.
4333
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004334- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00004335 connections.
4336
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00004337- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
4338 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
4339 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
4340
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00004341- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
4342 sets
4343
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00004344- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
4345 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
4346 name.
4347
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00004348- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
4349 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
4350 passed in.
4351
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004352- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00004353 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00004354 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
4355 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00004356
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00004357- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
4358
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00004359- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
4360
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00004361- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
4362 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
4363 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
4364
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00004365- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
4366 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
4367 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
4368 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00004369 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00004370
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004371- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00004372 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004373 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00004374
4375- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
4376 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
4377 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
4378
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004379- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00004380 the value of its expression argument.
4381
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00004382- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
4383 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
4384 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
4385
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00004386- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
4387 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
4388 skipstone browser was included.
4389
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00004390- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
4391 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
4392
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004393Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004394-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004395
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00004396- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
4397 names in addition to accepting file names.
4398
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00004399- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
4400 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
4401 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
4402 still used and useful.)
4403
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00004404- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
4405 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
4406 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
4407 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00004408
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00004409- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
4410 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
4411 the generated binary.
4412
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004413Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004414-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004415
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00004416- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
4417
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00004418- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
4419 except in the hands of experts.
4420
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00004421- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00004422 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
4423 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
4424 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00004425
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00004426- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
4427 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
4428 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
4429 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
4430 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
4431 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
4432 builds.
4433
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00004434- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
4435 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
4436 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
4437 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
4438 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
4439 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
4440 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
4441 new type.
4442
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00004443- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00004444
4445 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
4446 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
4447 positive infinities.
4448
4449 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
4450 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
4451 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
4452 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
4453 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
4454 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
4455 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
4456
4457 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
4458
4459 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
4460
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00004461- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
4462 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
4463 size of the executable.
4464
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00004465- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
4466 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
4467 configure script. On other platforms, remove
4468 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00004469
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00004470- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
4471
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00004472- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
4473 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
4474 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00004475
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00004476- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
4477 well as Unix.
4478
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00004479- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
4480 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
4481 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
4482 modules in the README file for details.
4483
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004484C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004485-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004486
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004487- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
4488 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004489 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00004490 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004491 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004492
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004493- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
4494 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
4495 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
4496 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
4497 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
4498 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004499 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004500 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
4501 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
4502 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
4503 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
4504 aligned.)
4505
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00004506- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
4507 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
4508 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
4509
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00004510- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
4511 level.
4512
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00004513- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
4514 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
4515 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
4516 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
4517 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
4518
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00004519- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
4520 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
4521 code.
4522
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00004523- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
4524 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
4525 adjusting for negative indices.
4526
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00004527- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
4528 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
4529 object.
4530
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00004531- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
4532 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
4533 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
4534
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004535- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
4536 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00004537
4538- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
4539
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00004540- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
4541 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
4542 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
4543 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
4544
4545- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
4546
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00004547- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00004548
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004549- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00004550 without going through the buffer API.
4551
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004552- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00004553
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00004554- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
4555 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
4556 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
4557 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
4558
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004559- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
4560 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
4561
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004562- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00004563 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
4564
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004565New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004566-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004567
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00004568- OpenVMS is now supported.
4569
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00004570- AtheOS is now supported.
4571
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00004572- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
4573
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00004574- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
4575
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004576Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004577-----
4578
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00004579- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
4580 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
4581 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004582
4583Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004584-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004585
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004586- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
4587 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
4588 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
4589 bugs.
4590 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004591 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00004592 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
4593 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004594 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00004595
4596- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00004597 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004598
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00004599- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
4600 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
4601
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004602- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
4603 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004604 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004605 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
4606
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00004607- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
4608 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
4609 use files" uninstall option).
4610
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00004611- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
4612
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004613- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
4614 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
4615
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004616- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
4617 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
4618 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
4619
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004620- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
4621 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
4622 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
4623 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
4624 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004625 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
4626 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
4627 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004628
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004629- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004630 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004631 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
4632 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
4633 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
4634 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
4635 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
4636 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
4637 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
4638 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
4639 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
4640 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
4641 work around.
4642
4643- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
4644 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
4645 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
4646 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
4647 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
4648 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
4649 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
4650 specified with O_CREAT too).
4651
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004652Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004653----
4654
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004655- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004656
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00004657- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
4658 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
4659 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
4660
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004661- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
4662 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
4663 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
4664
4665- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
4666 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
4667 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
4668 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
4669 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
4670 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
4671 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
4672 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00004673
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00004674- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
4675 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
4676 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004677
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004678- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
4679 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
4680 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
4681 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
4682 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004683
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004684- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
4685 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
4686 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004687
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004688- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
4689 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004690
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004691- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
4692 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
4693 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
4694 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
4695 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004696
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004697- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
4698 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
4699 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
4700
4701- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
4702 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
4703 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004704
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004705- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
4706 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
4707 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
4708 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004709 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004710
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004711- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
4712 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004713
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004714- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
4715 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00004716
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004717- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00004718 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004719 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
4720 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004721
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00004722
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004723What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004724===============================
4725
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004726*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
4727
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004728Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004729--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004730
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004731- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
4732 with a custom metaclass.
4733
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004734Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004735-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004736
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004737- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
4738 are proxies.
4739
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004740Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004741-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004742
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004743- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
4744 very short strings.
4745
4746- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
4747 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
4748 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
4749 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
4750 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
4751
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004752Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004753-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004754
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004755- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
4756 close or delete time).
4757
4758- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
4759 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
4760
4761- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
4762
4763- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004764 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004765
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004766Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004767-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004768
4769Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004770-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004771
4772C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004773-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004774
4775New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004776-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004777
4778Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004779-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004780
4781Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004782-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004783
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004784- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
4785
4786- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
4787 instances are deleted at process exit time.
4788
4789- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
4790 deleted at process exit time.
4791
4792- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
4793 in backslash.
4794
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004795Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004796----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004797
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004798- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
4799 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
4800 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
4801
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004802
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00004803What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004804===========================
4805
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004806*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
4807
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004808Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004809--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004810
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004811- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
4812 been extensively updated. See
4813
4814 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
4815
4816 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
4817
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00004818- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
4819 deleted!
4820
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00004821- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
4822 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
4823 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
4824 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
4825 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
4826
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004827- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
4828
4829 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
4830 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
4831
4832 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
4833 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
4834 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
4835 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
4836 supported anyway.
4837
4838 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
4839 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
4840
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00004841- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
4842 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
4843 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
4844 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
4845 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004846
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00004847- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
4848 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
4849 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
4850
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004851Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004852-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004853
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004854- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
4855 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
4856 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
4857 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
4858 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
4859 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00004860 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
4861 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
4862 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
4863 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004864
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00004865- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
4866 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
4867 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
4868
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004869Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004870-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004871
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004872- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
4873
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004874Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004875-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004876
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00004877- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
4878 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
4879 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
4880 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
4881 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
4882 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
4883
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00004884- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
4885
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00004886- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
4887
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00004888- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
4889
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004890- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
4891 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
4892 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
4893
4894- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
4895
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004896Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004897-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004898
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004899- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
4900 off a search on Google.
4901
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004902Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004903-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004904
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004905- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
4906 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
4907 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
4908 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
4909 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
4910 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
4911 other platforms should do likewise.
4912
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00004913- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
4914 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
4915 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
4916
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004917C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004918-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004919
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004920- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
4921 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
4922 producing key-value pairs.
4923
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004924- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004925 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004926 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
4927 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
4928 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
4929 previously went unchallenged.
4930
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004931New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004932-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004933
4934Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004935-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004936
4937Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004938-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004939
4940Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004941----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004942
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00004943- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
4944 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004945
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004946- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
4947 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
4948 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
4949 home.
4950
4951
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004952What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004953===========================
4954
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004955*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
4956
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004957Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004958--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004959
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004960- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
4961 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004962
4963 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004964 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004965
4966 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
4967 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004968 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004969 This needs to be documented.
4970
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00004971- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
4972 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
4973
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00004974- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
4975 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
4976 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
4977
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00004978- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
4979 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
4980
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004981- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
4982 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
4983 class forbids it).
4984
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00004985- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
4986 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
4987 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
4988
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004989- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
4990
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004991Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004992-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004993
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004994- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
4995 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004996 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004997
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004998- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
4999 (like 1 + '').
5000
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005001Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005002-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005003
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00005004- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
5005 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
5006 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
5007 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005008 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00005009 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
5010
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00005011- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
5012 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
5013 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
5014 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
5015
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00005016- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
5017 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00005018 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
5019 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
5020 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00005021
5022- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
5023 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00005024
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00005025- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
5026 bytes on its input.
5027
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005028Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005029-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005030
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00005031- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00005032 convenience function.
5033
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00005034- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
5035 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
5036 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005037 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
5038 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
5039 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
5040 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
5041 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
5042 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00005043
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00005044- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
5045 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
5046 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
5047 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
5048
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00005049- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
5050 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
5051 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
5052
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00005053- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
5054 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
5055 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
5056 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
5057
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005058- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
5059 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005060 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005061 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
5062 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
5063 new -l and -e options.
5064
5065- statcache is now deprecated.
5066
5067- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
5068 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005069 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005070 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
5071 time properly taken into account.
5072
5073- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
5074 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
5075 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
5076 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
5077
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005078Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005079-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005080
5081Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005082-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005083
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005084- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
5085 is built with libdb3 if available.
5086
5087- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
5088
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005089C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005090-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005091
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00005092- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
5093 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
5094 PySequence_Size().
5095
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005096- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
5097
5098- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
5099 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
5100 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
5101
5102- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
5103 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
5104
5105- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
5106 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
5107
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005108New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005109-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005110
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00005111- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
5112 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
5113
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00005114- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
5115 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
5116
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00005117- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
5118
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005119Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005120-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005121
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00005122- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
5123 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
5124
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005125Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005126-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005127
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005128Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005129----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005130
5131- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
5132 removed completely in the next release.
5133
5134- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
5135 OSX.
5136
5137- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
5138 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
5139
5140- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
5141
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005142
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005143What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005144===========================
5145
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005146*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
5147
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005148Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005149--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005150
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00005151- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00005152 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00005153 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00005154 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
5155 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00005156 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
5157 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00005158 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
5159 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00005160
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00005161- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
5162 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
5163
5164- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
5165 class methods, static methods, and properties.
5166
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005167Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005168-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005169
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00005170- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
5171 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
5172 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
5173 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
5174 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
5175 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
5176 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
5177 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
5178
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005179- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
5180 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
5181 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
5182 example).
5183
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00005184- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00005185 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005186 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005187 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00005188
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00005189- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
5190 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
5191 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00005192 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00005193
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005194- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
5195 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
5196 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
5197 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
5198 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
5199 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
5200
5201 isinstance(x, (A, B))
5202
5203 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
5204
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005205Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005206-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005207
5208- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
5209
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00005210- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
5211
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00005212- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
5213 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00005214
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00005215- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
5216 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
5217 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
5218 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
5219 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
5220 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00005221 attributes.
5222
5223- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
5224 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
5225 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00005226
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005227- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
5228 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
5229 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005230
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00005231- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
5232 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
5233 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005234 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
5235 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
5236
5237- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
5238 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00005239
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005240Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005241-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00005242
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00005243- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
5244 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
5245
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00005246- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
5247 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
5248 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
5249 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
5250
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00005251- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
5252 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
5253 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
5254 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
5255
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00005256 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
5257 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
5258 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
5259 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
5260 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
5261 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
5262 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
5263 without losing information).
5264
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00005265- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00005266 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
5267 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
5268 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
5269 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
5270 module).
5271
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00005272 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00005273 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
5274 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
5275 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
5276 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00005277
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00005278- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00005279 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
5280 encoding.
5281
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00005282- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
5283 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
5284
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005285- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005286 to allow saving the message body to a file.
5287
5288- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
5289 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
5290 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
5291 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
5292
5293- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
5294
5295- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
5296 ON, and OFF.
5297
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00005298- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
5299 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
5300
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00005301Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005302-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00005303
5304- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
5305 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
5306 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005307
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005308- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
5309 been added: -X and -E.
5310
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005311Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005312-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005313
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005314- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
5315 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
5316
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005317C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005318-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005319
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00005320- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
5321 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
5322 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
5323 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
5324 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
5325
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00005326- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
5327 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
5328 as long) arguments.
5329
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00005330- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
5331 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
5332 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
5333 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
5334 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
5335 report any bugs or strange behavior).
5336
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00005337- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
5338 input.
5339
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005340New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005341-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005342
5343Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005344-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005345
5346Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005347-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005348
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00005349- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
5350 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
5351 is created for .py and .pyw files.
5352
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005353- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
5354 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
5355 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005356 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005357
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005358 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
5359 # (SIGINT) behavior.
5360 import signal
5361 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005362
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005363 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005364 while 1:
5365 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005366 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005367 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
5368 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
5369 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
5370 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005371
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005372
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005373What's New in Python 2.2a4?
5374===========================
5375
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005376*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
5377
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005378Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005379--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005380
5381- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
5382 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
5383 documentation for all operations on list objects.
5384
5385- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
5386 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
5387 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
5388 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
5389 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
5390 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
5391 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005392
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00005393- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005394 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00005395 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
5396 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
5397 associate a docstring with a property.
5398
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005399- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
5400 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
5401 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
5402 other built-in object types.
5403
5404- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
5405 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
5406 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
5407 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
5408 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
5409
5410- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
5411 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
5412
5413- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
5414 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005415 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005416 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
5417 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
5418 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
5419 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
5420 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
5421
5422- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
5423 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
5424 class.
5425
5426- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
5427 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
5428 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
5429 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
5430
5431- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
5432 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
5433 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
5434 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
5435
5436- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
5437 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
5438
5439- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
5440 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
5441 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
5442 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
5443 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005444 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005445 with the same value as s.
5446
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00005447- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
5448
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005449Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005450----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005451
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00005452- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
5453
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00005454- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
5455 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
5456 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
5457 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
5458 objects.
5459
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005460- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
5461 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00005462 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
5463 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
5464
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005465- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
5466 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
5467 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
5468
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005469Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005470-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005471
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00005472- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
5473 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
5474 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
5475 by the instances.
5476
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00005477- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
5478 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
5479 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
5480
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005481- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
5482 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
5483 before the entire comparison is complete.
5484
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00005485- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
5486 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
5487 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
5488
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00005489- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
5490 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
5491 getwriter().
5492
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005493- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
5494 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
5495
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00005496- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005497 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
5498 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
5499
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00005500- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
5501 iterable object.
5502
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005503- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
5504 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005505
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005506- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
5507 authentication.
5508
5509- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
5510 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005511
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005512- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00005513 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
5514 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
5515 a sample driver.)
5516
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005517Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005518-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005519
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005520- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
5521 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
5522 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
5523 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
5524 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
5525 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
5526 kernel has large file support.
5527
5528- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
5529 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
5530 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
5531 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
5532 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
5533
5534- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
5535 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
5536 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
5537
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005538C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005539-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005540
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005541- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
5542 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
5543
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005544New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005545-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005546
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005547- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
5548 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
5549
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005550Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005551-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005552
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005553- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
5554 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
5555 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
5556 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
5557 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
5558
5559- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
5560 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
5561 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
5562 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
5563
5564- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
5565 especially in regard to reporting errors.
5566
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005567Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005568-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005569
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005570- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005571 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
5572 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005573
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005574
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005575What's New in Python 2.2a3?
5576===========================
5577
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005578*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
5579
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005580Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005581----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005582
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005583- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
5584 big to represent as a C double.
5585
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00005586- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
5587 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
5588 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
5589 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
5590 restriction).
5591
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00005592- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
5593 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
5594 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
5595 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
5596 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
5597
5598 >>> dir([])
5599 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
5600 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
5601 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
5602 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
5603 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
5604 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
5605 'reverse', 'sort']
5606
5607 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
5608
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005609- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005610 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
5611 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
5612 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
5613 OverflowError exception.
5614
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00005615- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005616 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005617 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
5618 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
5619 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
5620 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
5621 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00005622 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005623 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
5624 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
5625
5626 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
5627 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
5628 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
5629 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005630
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005631- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005632 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
5633 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
5634 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
5635 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
5636 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
5637 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
5638 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
5639 once it is created.
5640
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00005641- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
5642 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
5643 (key, value) pairs.
5644
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005645- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005646 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
5647 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
5648
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00005649- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
5650 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
5651 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
5652 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
5653 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005654
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005655- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005656 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
5657 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
5658
5659 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
5660
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005661- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00005662 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
5663
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005664Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005665-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005666
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005667- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00005668 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
5669 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005670
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00005671- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
5672 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
5673 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
5674 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
5675 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
5676 in this area anymore).
5677
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00005678- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
5679 threading.Timer.
5680
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00005681- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
5682 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
5683
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005684- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005685 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
5686
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005687- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00005688 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
5689 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
5690 converted to Python longs.
5691
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005692- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005693 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
5694
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00005695- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
5696 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
5697 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
5698
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005699Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005700-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005701
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005702- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
5703 division operators as per PEP 238.
5704
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005705Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005706-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005707
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005708- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
5709 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
5710 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
5711 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
5712
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005713C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005714-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005715
5716- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005717
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005718- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
5719 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005720 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005721
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005722 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
5723 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005724 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005725 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005726
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005727- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005728 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
5729 module:
5730
5731 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005732
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005733 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
5734 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005735
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005736 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
5737 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005738
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005739 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
5740
5741 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
5742
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005743- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005744 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
5745 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
5746 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005747
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005748New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005749-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005750
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00005751- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
5752 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
5753 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
5754 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
5755 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005756
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005757Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005758-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005759
5760Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005761-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005762
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005763- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
5764 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
5765 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
5766 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00005767 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
5768 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
5769 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
5770 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
5771 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005772
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005773- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00005774 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
5775
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005776
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005777What's New in Python 2.2a2?
5778===========================
5779
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005780*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
5781
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005782Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005783-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005784
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00005785- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
5786 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
5787
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005788- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
5789 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
5790 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005791
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00005792- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
5793 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
5794 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
5795 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005796
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005797- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
5798
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005799- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005800
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005801Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005802-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005803
5804- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00005805 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005806 the module docstring for details.
5807
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005808Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005809-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005810
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005811- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005812 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
5813 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
5814 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005815
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005816- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
5817 Nick Mathewson.
5818
5819Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005820----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005821
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005822- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
5823 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
5824 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
5825 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
5826 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
5827 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
5828 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
5829 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
5830
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00005831- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
5832 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
5833 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
5834 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
5835
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00005836- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
5837 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
5838 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
5839 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
5840 come a long way).
5841
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005842- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
5843 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
5844 write filters for these warnings).
5845
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00005846- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
5847 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
5848 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
5849 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
5850 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
5851
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00005852- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
5853 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
5854 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
5855 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
5856 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
5857 older distribution.
5858
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005859Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005860-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005861
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005862- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
5863 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005864 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005865
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005866- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
5867 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
5868 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
5869
5870- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
5871
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005872- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
5873
5874- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
5875
5876- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
5877
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005878- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005879
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00005880- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
5881
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005882New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005883-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005884
5885C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005886-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005887
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005888- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
5889 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
5890 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
5891 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
5892 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
5893 against buffer overruns.
5894
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005895- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005896 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
5897 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005898 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
5899 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
5900 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
5901
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005902- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
5903 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
5904 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
5905 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
5906 deprecated.
5907
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005908Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005909-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005910
5911- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
5912 relevant is found.
5913
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005914
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005915What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005916===========================
5917
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005918*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
5919
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005920Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005921----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005922
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005923- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
5924 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
5925 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
5926 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
5927 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
5928 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
5929 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
5930 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005931 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005932 repaired.
5933
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005934- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00005935 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005936 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
5937 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
5938 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
5939 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
5940 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
5941 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
5942 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
5943 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
5944
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00005945- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
5946 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
5947 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
5948 leading BMO character).
5949
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005950- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
5951 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
5952 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
5953
5954 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
5955 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
5956 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005957
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005958 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
5959 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
5960 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
5961 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
5962 for various simple to use conversions.
5963
5964 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
5965 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
5966
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005967 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5968 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
5969 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
5970 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
5971 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5972 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
5973 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5974 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
5975 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5976 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
5977 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5978 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
5979 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5980 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
5981 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005982
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005983- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
5984 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
5985 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005986 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005987 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005988
5989 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005990 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
5991 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
5992 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
5993 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
5994 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005995 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
5996 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005997
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005998 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
5999 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
6000 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00006001 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00006002
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00006003- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
6004 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
6005 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
6006 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
6007 floating arithmetic,
6008
6009 x = 9007199254740992.0
6010 print long(x)
6011
6012 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
6013 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
6014 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
6015 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
6016 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
6017 functions are of good quality).
6018
6019 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
6020 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
6021 algorithms to break.
6022
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00006023- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
6024 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
6025 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
6026 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
6027 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
6028 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
6029 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
6030 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
6031 order.
6032
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00006033- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
6034 operation along the most common code paths.
6035
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00006036- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
6037 the same as dict.has_key(x).
6038
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00006039- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
6040 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
6041 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
6042 {}.update(UserDict())
6043
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00006044- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
6045 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
6046 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
6047 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
6048 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
6049 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
6050 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
6051 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
6052
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00006053- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00006054 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006055
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00006056 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00006057 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
6058 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00006059 join() method of strings
6060 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00006061 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
6062 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006063 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00006064 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00006065
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00006066- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
6067 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
6068
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00006069- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
6070 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
6071
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00006072- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
6073 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
6074 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
6075 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
6076
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00006077- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
6078 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00006079 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00006080 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
6081 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00006082
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00006083- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
6084
6085
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006086Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006087-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006088
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00006089- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00006090 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00006091 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
6092 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
6093
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00006094- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
6095 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
6096
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00006097- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
6098 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
6099 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
6100 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
6101
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00006102- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
6103 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
6104 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
6105
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00006106- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
6107
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00006108- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
6109
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00006110- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
6111 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
6112 that are still imported into string.py).
6113
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006114- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
6115
6116- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
6117 Now it does.
6118
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00006119- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
6120
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00006121- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
6122 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
6123 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
6124 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
6125 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00006126 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
6127 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00006128
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00006129- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
6130 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
6131 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
6132 'help(object)'.
6133
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006134Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006135-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006136
6137- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00006138 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006139 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
6140 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
6141
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00006142- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00006143 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
6144 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006145
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00006146C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006147-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00006148
6149- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
6150 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006151
6152----
6153
6154**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**