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			24224 lines
		
	
	
	
		
			923 KiB
		
	
	
	
		
			Text
		
	
	
	
	
	
| Python History
 | |
| --------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| This file contains the release messages for previous Python releases.
 | |
| As you read on you go back to the dark ages of Python's history.
 | |
| (Note: news about 2.5c2 and later 2.5 releases is in the Misc/NEWS
 | |
| file of the release25-maint branch.)
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| ======================================================================
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| What's New in Python 3.2?
 | |
| =========================
 | |
| 
 | |
| *Release date: 20-Feb-2011*
 | |
| 
 | |
| Core and Builtins
 | |
| -----------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #11249: Fix potential crashes when using the limited API.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Build
 | |
| -----
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #11222: Fix non-framework shared library build on Mac OS X.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #11184: Fix large-file support on AIX.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #941346: Fix broken shared library build on AIX.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Documentation
 | |
| -------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #10709: Add updated AIX notes in Misc/README.AIX.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| What's New in Python 3.2 Release Candidate 3?
 | |
| =============================================
 | |
| 
 | |
| *Release date: 13-Feb-2011*
 | |
| 
 | |
| Core and Builtins
 | |
| -----------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #11134: Add missing fields to typeslots.h.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #11135: Remove redundant doc field from PyType_Spec.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #11067: Add PyType_GetFlags, to support PyUnicode_Check in the limited
 | |
|   ABI.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #11118: Fix bogus export of None in python3.dll.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Library
 | |
| -------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #11116: any error during addition of a message to a mailbox now causes a
 | |
|   rollback, instead of leaving the mailbox partially modified.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #11132: Fix passing of "optimize" parameter when recursing in
 | |
|   compileall.compile_dir().
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #11110: Fix a potential decref of a NULL in sqlite3.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #8275: Fix passing of callback arguments with ctypes under Win64.  Patch
 | |
|   by Stan Mihai.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Build
 | |
| -----
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #11079: The /Applications/Python x.x folder created by the Mac OS X
 | |
|   installers now includes a link to the installed documentation and no longer
 | |
|   includes an Extras directory.  The Tools directory is now installed in the
 | |
|   framework under share/doc.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #11121: Fix building with --enable-shared.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Tests
 | |
| -----
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #10971: test_zipimport_support is once again compatible with the refleak
 | |
|   hunter feature of test.regrtest.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| What's New in Python 3.2 Release Candidate 2?
 | |
| =============================================
 | |
| 
 | |
| *Release date: 30-Jan-2011*
 | |
| 
 | |
| Core and Builtins
 | |
| -----------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #10451: memoryview objects could allow to mutate a readable buffer.
 | |
|   Initial patch by Ross Lagerwall.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Library
 | |
| -------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #9124: mailbox now accepts binary input and reads and writes mailbox
 | |
|   files in binary mode, using the email package's binary support to parse
 | |
|   arbitrary email messages.  StringIO and text file input is deprecated,
 | |
|   and string input fails early if non-ASCII characters are used, where
 | |
|   previously it would fail when the email was processed in a later step.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #10845: Mitigate the incompatibility between the multiprocessing
 | |
|   module on Windows and the use of package, zipfile or directory execution
 | |
|   by special casing main modules that actually *are* called __main__.py.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #11045: Protect logging call against None argument.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #11052: Correct IDLE menu accelerators on Mac OS X for Save
 | |
|   commands.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #11053: Fix IDLE "Syntax Error" windows to behave as in 2.x,
 | |
|   preventing a confusing hung appearance on OS X with the windows
 | |
|   obscured.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #10940: Workaround an IDLE hang on Mac OS X 10.6 when using the
 | |
|   menu accelerators for Open Module, Go to Line, and New Indent Width.
 | |
|   The accelerators still work but no longer appear in the menu items.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #10989: Fix a crash on SSLContext.load_verify_locations(None, True).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #11020: Command-line pyclbr was broken because of missing 2-to-3
 | |
|   conversion.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #11019: Fixed BytesGenerator so that it correctly handles a Message
 | |
|   with a None body.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #11014: Make 'filter' argument in tarfile.Tarfile.add() into a
 | |
|   keyword-only argument.  The preceding positional argument was deprecated,
 | |
|   so it made no sense to add filter as a positional argument.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #11004: Repaired edge case in deque.count().
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #10974: IDLE no longer crashes if its recent files list includes files
 | |
|   with non-ASCII characters in their path names.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Have hashlib.algorithms_available and hashlib.algorithms_guaranteed both
 | |
|   return sets instead of one returning a tuple and the other a frozenset.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #10987: Fix the recursion limit handling in the _pickle module.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #10983: Fix several bugs making tunnel requests in http.client.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #10955: zipimport uses ASCII encoding instead of cp437 to decode
 | |
|   filenames, at bootstrap, if the codec registry is not ready yet. It is still
 | |
|   possible to have non-ASCII filenames using the Unicode flag (UTF-8 encoding)
 | |
|   for all file entries in the ZIP file.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #10949: Improved robustness of rotating file handlers.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #10955: Fix a potential crash when trying to mmap() a file past its
 | |
|   length.  Initial patch by Ross Lagerwall.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #10898: Allow compiling the posix module when the C library defines
 | |
|   a symbol named FSTAT.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #10980: the HTTP server now encodes headers with iso-8859-1 (latin1)
 | |
|   encoding.  This is the preferred encoding of PEP 3333 and the base encoding
 | |
|   of HTTP 1.1.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - To match the behaviour of HTTP server, the HTTP client library now also
 | |
|   encodes headers with iso-8859-1 (latin1) encoding.  It was already doing
 | |
|   that for incoming headers which makes this behaviour now consistent in
 | |
|   both incoming and outgoing direction.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #9509: argparse now properly handles IOErrors raised by
 | |
|   argparse.FileType.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #10961: The new pydoc server now better handles exceptions raised
 | |
|   during request handling.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #10680: Fix mutually exclusive arguments for argument groups in
 | |
|   argparse.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Build
 | |
| -----
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #11054: Allow Mac OS X installer builds to again work on 10.5 with
 | |
|   the system-provided Python.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| What's New in Python 3.2 Release Candidate 1
 | |
| ============================================
 | |
| 
 | |
| *Release date: 16-Jan-2011*
 | |
| 
 | |
| Core and Builtins
 | |
| -----------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #10889: range indexing and slicing now works correctly on ranges with
 | |
|   a length that exceeds sys.maxsize.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #10892: Don't segfault when trying to delete __abstractmethods__ from a
 | |
|   class.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #8020: Avoid a crash where the small objects allocator would read
 | |
|   non-Python managed memory while it is being modified by another thread.  Patch
 | |
|   by Matt Bandy.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #10841: On Windows, set the binary mode on stdin, stdout, stderr and all
 | |
|   io.FileIO objects (to not translate newlines, \r\n <=> \n).  The Python parser
 | |
|   translates newlines (\r\n => \n).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Remove buffer API from stable ABI for now, see #10181.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #8651: PyArg_Parse*() functions raise an OverflowError if the file
 | |
|   doesn't have PY_SSIZE_T_CLEAN define and the size doesn't fit in an int
 | |
|   (length bigger than 2^31-1 bytes).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #9015, #9611: FileIO.readinto(), FileIO.write(), os.write() and
 | |
|   stdprinter.write() clamp the length to INT_MAX on Windows.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #8278: On Windows and with a NTFS filesystem, os.stat() and os.utime()
 | |
|   can now handle dates after 2038.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #10780: PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
 | |
|   PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename() decode the filename from the
 | |
|   filesystem encoding instead of UTF-8.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #10779: PyErr_WarnExplicit() decodes the filename from the filesystem
 | |
|   encoding instead of UTF-8.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Add sys.flags attribute for the new -q command-line option.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #11506: Trying to assign to a bytes literal should result in a
 | |
|   SyntaxError.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Library
 | |
| -------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #10916: mmap should not segfault when a file is mapped using 0 as length
 | |
|   and a non-zero offset, and an attempt to read past the end of file is made
 | |
|   (IndexError is raised instead).  Patch by Ross Lagerwall.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #10154, #10090: change the normalization of UTF-8 to "UTF-8" instead
 | |
|   of "UTF8" in the locale module as the latter is not supported MacOSX and OpenBSD.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #10907: Warn OS X 10.6 IDLE users to use ActiveState Tcl/Tk 8.5, rather
 | |
|   than the currently problematic Apple-supplied one, when running with the
 | |
|   64-/32-bit installer variant.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #4953: cgi.FieldStorage and cgi.parse() parse the request as bytes, not
 | |
|   as unicode, and accept binary files. Add encoding and errors attributes to
 | |
|   cgi.FieldStorage. Patch written by Pierre Quentel (with many inputs by Glenn
 | |
|   Linderman).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Add encoding and errors arguments to urllib.parse_qs() and urllib.parse_qsl().
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #10899: No function type annotations in the standard library.  Removed
 | |
|   function type annotations from _pyio.py.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #10875: Update Regular Expression HOWTO; patch by 'SilentGhost'.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #10872: The repr() of TextIOWrapper objects now includes the mode
 | |
|   if available.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #10869: Fixed bug where ast.increment_lineno modified the root node
 | |
|   twice.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #5871: email.header.Header.encode now raises an error if any
 | |
|   continuation line in the formatted value has no leading white space and looks
 | |
|   like a header.  Since Generator uses Header to format all headers, this check
 | |
|   is made for all headers in any serialized message at serialization time.  This
 | |
|   provides protection against header injection attacks.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #10859: Make ``contextlib.GeneratorContextManager`` officially
 | |
|   private by renaming it to ``_GeneratorContextManager``.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #10042: Fixed the total_ordering decorator to handle cross-type
 | |
|   comparisons that could lead to infinite recursion.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #10686: the email package now :rfc:`2047`\ -encodes headers with
 | |
|   non-ASCII bytes (parsed by a BytesParser) when doing conversion to 7bit-clean
 | |
|   presentation, instead of replacing them with ?s.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - email.header.Header was incorrectly encoding folding whitespace when
 | |
|   rfc2047-encoding header values with embedded newlines, leaving them without
 | |
|   folding whitespace.  It now uses the continuation_ws, as it does for
 | |
|   continuation lines that it creates itself.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #1777412, #10827: Changed the rules for 2-digit years. The
 | |
|   time.asctime(), time.ctime() and time.strftime() functions will now format
 | |
|   any year when ``time.accept2dyear`` is False and will accept years >= 1000
 | |
|   otherwise. ``time.mktime`` and ``time.strftime`` now accept full range
 | |
|   supported by the OS. With Visual Studio or on Solaris, the year is limited to
 | |
|   the range [1; 9999]. Conversion of 2-digit years to 4-digit is deprecated.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #7858: Raise an error properly when os.utime() fails under Windows
 | |
|   on an existing file.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #3839: wsgiref should not override a Content-Length header set by
 | |
|   the application.  Initial patch by Clovis Fabricio.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #10492: bdb.Bdb.run() only traces the execution of the code, not the
 | |
|   compilation (if the input is a string).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #7995: When calling accept() on a socket with a timeout, the returned
 | |
|   socket is now always blocking, regardless of the operating system.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #10756: atexit normalizes the exception before displaying it. Patch by
 | |
|   Andreas Stührk.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #10790: email.header.Header.append's charset logic now works correctly
 | |
|   for charsets whose output codec is different from its input codec.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #10819: SocketIO.name property returns -1 when its closed, instead of
 | |
|   raising a ValueError, to fix repr().
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #8650: zlib.compress() and zlib.decompress() raise an OverflowError if
 | |
|   the input buffer length doesn't fit into an unsigned int (length bigger than
 | |
|   2^32-1 bytes).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #6643: Reinitialize locks held within the threading module after fork to
 | |
|   avoid a potential rare deadlock or crash on some platforms.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #10806, issue #9905: Fix subprocess pipes when some of the standard file
 | |
|   descriptors (0, 1, 2) are closed in the parent process.  Initial patch by Ross
 | |
|   Lagerwall.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - `unittest.TestCase` can be instantiated without a method name; for simpler
 | |
|   exploration from the interactive interpreter.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #10798: Reject supporting concurrent.futures if the system has too
 | |
|   few POSIX semaphores.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #10807: Remove base64, bz2, hex, quopri, rot13, uu and zlib codecs from
 | |
|   the codec aliases. They are still accessible via codecs.lookup().
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #10801: In zipfile, support different encodings for the header and the
 | |
|   filenames.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #6285: IDLE no longer crashes on missing help file; patch by Scott
 | |
|   David Daniels.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Fix collections.OrderedDict.setdefault() so that it works in subclasses that
 | |
|   define __missing__().
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #10786: unittest.TextTestRunner default stream no longer bound at import
 | |
|   time. `sys.stderr` now looked up at instantiation time.  Fix contributed by
 | |
|   Mark Roddy.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #10753: Characters ';', '=' and ',' in the PATH_INFO environment variable
 | |
|   won't be quoted when the URI is constructed by the wsgiref.util's request_uri
 | |
|   method. According to RFC 3986, these characters can be a part of params in
 | |
|   PATH component of URI and need not be quoted.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #10738: Fix webbrowser.Opera.raise_opts.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #9824: SimpleCookie now encodes , and ; in values to cater to how
 | |
|   browsers actually parse cookies.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #9333: os.symlink now available regardless of user privileges.  The
 | |
|   function now raises OSError on Windows >=6.0 when the user is unable to create
 | |
|   symbolic links. XP and 2003 still raise NotImplementedError.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #10783: struct.pack() no longer implicitly encodes unicode to UTF-8.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #10730: Add SVG mime types to mimetypes module.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #10768: Make the Tkinter ScrolledText widget work again.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #10777: Fix "dictionary changed size during iteration" bug in
 | |
|   ElementTree register_namespace().
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #10626: test_logging now preserves logger disabled states.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #10774: test_logging now removes temp files created during tests.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #5258/#10642: if site.py encounters a .pth file that generates an error,
 | |
|   it now prints the filename, line number, and traceback to stderr and skips
 | |
|   the rest of that individual file, instead of stopping processing entirely.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #10763: subprocess.communicate() closes stdout and stderr if both are
 | |
|   pipes (bug specific to Windows).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #1693546: fix email.message RFC 2231 parameter encoding to be in better
 | |
|   compliance (no "s around encoded values).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Improved the diff message in the unittest module's assertCountEqual().
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #1155362: email.utils.parsedate_tz now handles a missing space before
 | |
|   the '-' of a timezone field as well as before a '+'.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #4871: The zipfile module now gives a more useful error message if
 | |
|   an attempt is made to use a string to specify the archive password.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #10750: The ``raw`` attribute of buffered IO objects is now read-only.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Deprecated assertDictContainsSubset() in the unittest module.
 | |
| 
 | |
| C-API
 | |
| -----
 | |
| 
 | |
| - PyObject_CallMethod now passes along any underlying AttributeError from
 | |
|   PyObject_GetAttr, instead of replacing it with something less informative
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #10913: Deprecate misleading functions PyEval_AcquireLock() and
 | |
|   PyEval_ReleaseLock().  The thread-state aware APIs should be used instead.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #10333: Remove ancient GC API, which has been deprecated since Python
 | |
|   2.2.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Build
 | |
| -----
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #10843: Update third-party library versions used in OS X 32-bit
 | |
|   installer builds: bzip2 1.0.6, readline 6.1.2, SQLite 3.7.4 (with FTS3/FTS4
 | |
|   and RTREE enabled), and ncursesw 5.5 (wide-char support enabled).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #10820: Fix OS X framework installs to support version-specific
 | |
|   scripts (#10679).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #7716: Under Solaris, don't assume existence of /usr/xpg4/bin/grep in
 | |
|   the configure script but use $GREP instead.  Patch by Fabian Groffen.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #10475: Don't hardcode compilers for LDSHARED/LDCXXSHARED on NetBSD
 | |
|   and DragonFly BSD.  Patch by Nicolas Joly.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #10679: The "idle", "pydoc" and "2to3" scripts are now installed with
 | |
|   a version-specific suffix on "make altinstall".
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #10655: Fix the build on PowerPC on Linux with GCC when building with
 | |
|   timestamp profiling (--with-tsc): the preprocessor test for the PowerPC
 | |
|   support now looks for "__powerpc__" as well as "__ppc__": the latter seems to
 | |
|   only be present on OS X; the former is the correct one for Linux with GCC.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #1099: Fix the build on MacOSX when building a framework with pydebug
 | |
|   using GCC 4.0.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Tools/Demos
 | |
| -----------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #10843: Install the Tools directory on OS X in the applications Extras
 | |
|   (/Applications/Python 3.n/Extras/) where the Demo directory had previous been
 | |
|   installed.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #7962: The Demo directory is gone.  Most of the old and unmaintained
 | |
|   demos have been removed, others integrated in documentation or a new
 | |
|   Tools/demo subdirectory.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #10502: Addition of the unittestgui tool. Originally by Steve Purcell.
 | |
|   Updated for test discovery by Mark Roddy and Python 3 compatibility by Brian
 | |
|   Curtin.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Tests
 | |
| -----
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #11910: Fix test_heapq to skip the C tests when _heapq is missing.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Fix test_startfile to wait for child process to terminate before finishing.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #10822: Fix test_posix:test_getgroups failure under Solaris.  Patch
 | |
|   by Ross Lagerwall.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Make the --coverage flag work for test.regrtest.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #1677694: Refactor and improve test_timeout.  Original patch by
 | |
|   Björn Lindqvist.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #5485: Add tests for the UseForeignDTD method of expat parser objects.
 | |
|   Patch by Jean-Paul Calderone and Sandro Tosi.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #6293: Have regrtest.py echo back sys.flags.  This is done by default in
 | |
|   whole runs and enabled selectively using ``--header`` when running an explicit
 | |
|   list of tests.  Original patch by Collin Winter.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| What's New in Python 3.2 Beta 2?
 | |
| ================================
 | |
| 
 | |
| *Release date: 19-Dec-2010*
 | |
| 
 | |
| Core and Builtins
 | |
| -----------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #8844: Regular and recursive lock acquisitions can now be interrupted
 | |
|   by signals on platforms using pthreads.  Patch by Reid Kleckner.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #4236: PyModule_Create2 now checks the import machinery directly
 | |
|   rather than the Py_IsInitialized flag, avoiding a Fatal Python
 | |
|   error in certain circumstances when an import is done in __del__.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #5587: add a repr to dict_proxy objects.  Patch by David Stanek and
 | |
|   Daniel Urban.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Library
 | |
| -------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #3243:  Support iterable bodies in httplib. Patch Contributions by
 | |
|   Xuanji Li and Chris AtLee.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #10611: SystemExit exception will no longer kill a unittest run.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #9857: It is now possible to skip a test in a setUp, tearDown or clean
 | |
|   up function.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #10573: use actual/expected consistently in unittest methods.
 | |
|   The order of the args of assertCountEqual is also changed.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #9286: email.utils.parseaddr no longer concatenates blank-separated
 | |
|   words in the local part of email addresses, thereby preserving the input.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #6791: Limit header line length (to 65535 bytes) in http.client
 | |
|   and http.server, to avoid denial of services from the other party.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #10404: Use ctl-button-1 on OSX for the context menu in Idle.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #9907: Fix tab handling on OSX when using editline by calling
 | |
|   rl_initialize first, then setting our custom defaults, then reading .editrc.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #4188: Avoid creating dummy thread objects when logging operations
 | |
|   from the threading module (with the internal verbose flag activated).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #10711: Remove HTTP 0.9 support from http.client.  The ``strict``
 | |
|   parameter to HTTPConnection and friends is deprecated.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #9721: Fix the behavior of urljoin when the relative url starts with a
 | |
|   ';' character. Patch by Wes Chow.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #10714: Limit length of incoming request in http.server to 65536 bytes
 | |
|   for security reasons.  Initial patch by Ross Lagerwall.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #9558: Fix distutils.command.build_ext with VS 8.0.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #10667: Fast path for collections.Counter().
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #10695: passing the port as a string value to telnetlib no longer
 | |
|   causes debug mode to fail.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #1078919: add_header now automatically RFC2231 encodes parameters
 | |
|   that contain non-ascii values.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #10188 (partial resolution): tempfile.TemporaryDirectory emits
 | |
|   a warning on sys.stderr rather than throwing a misleading exception
 | |
|   if cleanup fails due to nulling out of modules during shutdown.
 | |
|   Also avoids an AttributeError when mkdtemp call fails and issues
 | |
|   a ResourceWarning on implicit cleanup via __del__.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #10107: Warn about unsaved files in IDLE on OSX.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #7213: subprocess.Popen's default for close_fds has been changed.
 | |
|   It is now True in most cases other than on Windows when input, output or
 | |
|   error handles are provided.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #6559: subprocess.Popen has a new pass_fds parameter (actually
 | |
|   added in 3.2beta1) to allow specifying a specific list of file descriptors
 | |
|   to keep open in the child process.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #1731717: Fixed the problem where subprocess.wait() could cause an
 | |
|   OSError exception when The OS had been told to ignore SIGCLD in our process
 | |
|   or otherwise not wait for exiting child processes.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Tests
 | |
| -----
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #775964: test_grp now skips YP/NIS entries instead of failing when
 | |
|   encountering them.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Tools/Demos
 | |
| -----------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #6075: IDLE on Mac OS X now works with both Carbon AquaTk and
 | |
|   Cocoa AquaTk.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #10710: ``Misc/setuid-prog.c`` is removed from the source tree.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #10706: Remove outdated script runtests.sh.  Either ``make test``
 | |
|   or ``python -m test`` should be used instead.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Build
 | |
| -----
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The Windows build now uses Tcl/Tk 8.5.9 and sqlite3 3.7.4.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #9234: argparse supports alias names for subparsers.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| What's New in Python 3.2 Beta 1?
 | |
| ================================
 | |
| 
 | |
| *Release date: 05-Dec-2010*
 | |
| 
 | |
| Core and Builtins
 | |
| -----------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #10630: Return dict views from the dict proxy keys()/values()/items()
 | |
|   methods.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #10596: Fix float.__mod__ to have the same behaviour as float.__divmod__
 | |
|   with respect to signed zeros.  -4.0 % 4.0 should be 0.0, not -0.0.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #1772833: Add the -q command-line option to suppress copyright and
 | |
|   version output in interactive mode.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Provide an *optimize* parameter in the built-in compile() function.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Fixed several corner case issues on Windows in os.stat/os.lstat related to
 | |
|   reparse points.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - PEP 384 (Defining a Stable ABI) is implemented.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #2690: Range objects support negative indices and slicing.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #9915: Speed up sorting with a key.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #8685: Speed up set difference ``a - b`` when source set ``a`` is much
 | |
|   larger than operand ``b``.  Patch by Andrew Bennetts.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #10518: Bring back the callable() builtin.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #7094: Added alternate formatting (specified by '#') to ``__format__``
 | |
|   method of float, complex, and Decimal. This allows more precise control over
 | |
|   when decimal points are displayed.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #10474: range.count() should return integers.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #1574217: isinstance now catches only AttributeError, rather than
 | |
|   masking all errors.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Library
 | |
| -------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - logging: added "handler of last resort". See http://bit.ly/last-resort-handler
 | |
| 
 | |
| - test.support: Added TestHandler and Matcher classes for better support of
 | |
|   assertions about logging.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #4391: Use proper plural forms in argparse.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #10601: sys.displayhook uses 'backslashreplace' error handler on
 | |
|   UnicodeEncodeError.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Add the "display" and "undisplay" pdb commands.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #7245: Add a SIGINT handler in pdb that allows to break a program again
 | |
|   after a "continue" command.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Add the "interact" pdb command.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #7905: Actually respect the keyencoding parameter to shelve.Shelf.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #1569291: Speed up array.repeat().
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Provide an interface to set the optimization level of compilation in
 | |
|   py_compile, compileall and zipfile.PyZipFile.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #7904: Changes to urllib.parse.urlsplit to handle schemes as defined by
 | |
|   RFC3986. Anything before :// is considered a scheme and is followed by an
 | |
|   authority (or netloc) and by '/' led path, which is optional.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #6045: dbm.gnu databases now support get() and setdefault() methods.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #10620: `python -m unittest` can accept file paths instead of module
 | |
|   names for running specific tests.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #9424: Deprecate the `unittest.TestCase` methods `assertEquals`,
 | |
|   `assertNotEquals`, `assertAlmostEquals`, `assertNotAlmostEquals` and `assert_`
 | |
|   and replace them with the correct methods in the Python test suite.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #10272: The ssl module now raises socket.timeout instead of a generic
 | |
|   SSLError on socket timeouts.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #10528: Allow translators to reorder placeholders in localizable
 | |
|   messages from argparse.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #10497: Fix incorrect use of gettext in argparse.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #10478: Reentrant calls inside buffered IO objects (for example by
 | |
|   way of a signal handler) now raise a RuntimeError instead of freezing the
 | |
|   current process.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - logging: Added getLogRecordFactory/setLogRecordFactory with docs and tests.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #10549: Fix pydoc traceback when text-documenting certain classes.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #2001: New HTML server with enhanced Web page features.  Patch by Ron
 | |
|   Adam.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #10360: In WeakSet, do not raise TypeErrors when testing for membership
 | |
|   of non-weakrefable objects.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #940286: pydoc.Helper.help() ignores input/output init parameters.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #1745035: Add a command size and data size limit to smtpd.py, to prevent
 | |
|   DoS attacks.  Patch by Savio Sena.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #4925: Add filename to error message when executable can't be found in
 | |
|   subprocess.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #10391: Don't dereference invalid memory in error messages in the ast
 | |
|   module.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #10027: st_nlink was not being set on Windows calls to os.stat or
 | |
|   os.lstat. Patch by Hirokazu Yamamoto.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #9333: Expose os.symlink only when the SeCreateSymbolicLinkPrivilege is
 | |
|   held by the user's account, i.e., when the function can actually be used.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #8879: Add os.link support for Windows.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #7911: ``unittest.TestCase.longMessage`` defaults to True for improved
 | |
|   failure messages by default. Patch by Mark Roddy.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #1486713: HTMLParser now has an optional tolerant mode where it tries to
 | |
|   guess at the correct parsing of invalid html.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #10554: Add context manager support to subprocess.Popen objects.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #8989: email.utils.make_msgid now has a domain parameter that can
 | |
|   override the domain name used in the generated msgid.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #9299: Add exist_ok parameter to os.makedirs to suppress the 'File
 | |
|   exists' exception when a target directory already exists with the specified
 | |
|   mode. Patch by Ray Allen.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #9573: os.fork() now works correctly when triggered as a side effect of
 | |
|   a module import.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #10464: netrc now correctly handles lines with embedded '#' characters.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Added itertools.accumulate().
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #4113: Added custom ``__repr__`` method to ``functools.partial``.
 | |
|   Original patch by Daniel Urban.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #10273: Rename `assertRegexpMatches` and `assertRaisesRegexp` to
 | |
|   `assertRegex` and `assertRaisesRegex`.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #10535: Enable silenced warnings in unittest by default.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #9873: The URL parsing functions in urllib.parse now accept ASCII byte
 | |
|   sequences as input in addition to character strings.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #10586: The statistics API for the new functools.lru_cache has been
 | |
|   changed to a single cache_info() method returning a named tuple.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #10323: itertools.islice() now consumes the minimum number of inputs
 | |
|   before stopping.  Formerly, the final state of the underlying iterator was
 | |
|   undefined.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #10565: The collections.Iterator ABC now checks for both __iter__ and
 | |
|   __next__.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #10242: Fixed implementation of unittest.ItemsEqual and gave it a new
 | |
|   more informative name, unittest.CountEqual.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #10561: In pdb, clear the breakpoints by the breakpoint number.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #2986: difflib.SequenceMatcher gets a new parameter, autojunk, which can
 | |
|   be set to False to turn off the previously undocumented 'popularity'
 | |
|   heuristic. Patch by Terry Reedy and Eli Bendersky.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #10534: in difflib, expose bjunk and bpopular sets; deprecate
 | |
|   undocumented and now redundant isbjunk and isbpopular methods.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #9846: zipfile is now correctly closing underlying file objects.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #10459: Update CJK character names to Unicode 6.0.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #4493: urllib.request adds '/' in front of path components which does not
 | |
|   start with '/. Common behavior exhibited by browsers and other clients.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #6378: idle.bat now runs with the appropriate Python version rather than
 | |
|   the system default. Patch by Sridhar Ratnakumar.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #10470: 'python -m unittest' will now run test discovery by default,
 | |
|   when no extra arguments have been provided.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #3709: BaseHTTPRequestHandler will buffer the headers and write to
 | |
|   output stream only when end_headers is invoked. This is a speedup and an
 | |
|   internal optimization.  Patch by Andrew Shaaf.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #10220: Added inspect.getgeneratorstate. Initial patch by Rodolpho
 | |
|   Eckhardt.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #10453: compileall now uses argparse instead of getopt, and thus
 | |
|   provides clean output when called with '-h'.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #8078: Add constants for higher baud rates in the termios module.  Patch
 | |
|   by Rodolpho Eckhardt.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #10407: Fix two NameErrors in distutils.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #10371: Deprecated undocumented functions in the trace module.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #10467: Fix BytesIO.readinto() after seeking into a position after the
 | |
|   end of the file.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - configparser: 100% test coverage.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #10499: configparser supports pluggable interpolation handlers. The
 | |
|   default classic interpolation handler is called BasicInterpolation. Another
 | |
|   interpolation handler added (ExtendedInterpolation) which supports the syntax
 | |
|   used by zc.buildout (e.g. interpolation between sections).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - configparser: the SafeConfigParser class has been renamed to ConfigParser.
 | |
|   The legacy ConfigParser class has been removed but its interpolation mechanism
 | |
|   is still available as LegacyInterpolation.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - configparser: Usage of RawConfigParser is now discouraged for new projects
 | |
|   in favor of ConfigParser(interpolation=None).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #1682942: configparser supports alternative option/value delimiters.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #5412: configparser supports mapping protocol access.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #9411: configparser supports specifying encoding for read operations.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #9421: configparser's getint(), getfloat() and getboolean() methods
 | |
|   accept vars and default arguments just like get() does.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #9452: configparser supports reading from strings and dictionaries
 | |
|   (thanks to the mapping protocol API, the latter can be used to copy data
 | |
|   between parsers).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - configparser: accepted INI file structure is now customizable, including
 | |
|   comment prefixes, name of the DEFAULT section, empty lines in multiline
 | |
|   values, and indentation.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #10326: unittest.TestCase instances can be pickled.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #9926: Wrapped TestSuite subclass does not get __call__ executed.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #9920: Skip tests for cmath.atan and cmath.atanh applied to complex
 | |
|   zeros on systems where the log1p function fails to respect the sign of zero.
 | |
|   This fixes a test failure on AIX.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #9732: Addition of getattr_static to the inspect module.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #10446: Module documentation generated by pydoc now links to a
 | |
|   version-specific online reference manual.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Make the 'No module named' exception message from importlib consistent.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #10443: Add the SSLContext.set_default_verify_paths() method.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #10440: Support RUSAGE_THREAD as a constant in the resource module.
 | |
|   Patch by Robert Collins.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #10429: IMAP.starttls() stored the capabilities as bytes objects, rather
 | |
|   than strings.
 | |
| 
 | |
| C-API
 | |
| -----
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #10557: Added a new API function, PyUnicode_TransformDecimalToASCII(),
 | |
|   which transforms non-ASCII decimal digits in a Unicode string to their ASCII
 | |
|   equivalents.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #9518: Extend the PyModuleDef_HEAD_INIT macro to explicitly
 | |
|   zero-initialize all fields, fixing compiler warnings seen when building
 | |
|   extension modules with gcc with "-Wmissing-field-initializers" (implied by
 | |
|   "-W").
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #10255: Fix reference leak in Py_InitializeEx().  Patch by Neil
 | |
|   Schemenauer.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - structseq.h is now included in Python.h.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Loosen PyArg_ValidateKeywordArguments to allow dict subclasses.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Tests
 | |
| -----
 | |
| 
 | |
| - regrtest.py once again ensures the test directory is removed from sys.path
 | |
|   when it is invoked directly as the __main__ module.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - `python -m test` can be used to run the test suite as well as `python -m
 | |
|   test.regrtest`.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Do not fail test_socket when the IP address of the local hostname cannot be
 | |
|   looked up.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #8886: Use context managers throughout test_zipfile. Patch by Eric
 | |
|   Carstensen.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Build
 | |
| -----
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #10325: Fix two issues in the fallback definitions for PY_ULLONG_MAX and
 | |
|   PY_LLONG_MAX that made them unsuitable for use in preprocessor conditionals.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Documentation
 | |
| -------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #10299: List the built-in functions in a table in functions.rst.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| What's New in Python 3.2 Alpha 4?
 | |
| =================================
 | |
| 
 | |
| *Release date: 13-Nov-2010*
 | |
| 
 | |
| Core and Builtins
 | |
| -----------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #10372: Import the warnings module only after the IO library is
 | |
|   initialized, so as to avoid bootstrap issues with the '-W' option.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #10293: Remove obsolete field in the PyMemoryView structure, unused
 | |
|   undocumented value PyBUF_SHADOW, and strangely-looking code in
 | |
|   PyMemoryView_GetContiguous.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #6081: Add str.format_map(), similar to ``str.format(**mapping)``.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - If FileIO.__init__ fails, close the file descriptor.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #10221: dict.pop(k) now has a key error message that includes the
 | |
|   missing key (same message d[k] returns for missing keys).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #5437: A preallocated MemoryError instance should not keep traceback
 | |
|   data (including local variables caught in the stack trace) alive infinitely.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #10186: Fix the SyntaxError caret when the offset is equal to the length
 | |
|   of the offending line.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #10089: Add support for arbitrary -X options on the command line.  They
 | |
|   can be retrieved through a new attribute ``sys._xoptions``.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #4388: On Mac OS X, decode command line arguments from UTF-8, instead of
 | |
|   the locale encoding.  If the LANG (and LC_ALL and LC_CTYPE) environment
 | |
|   variable is not set, the locale encoding is ISO-8859-1, whereas most programs
 | |
|   (including Python) expect UTF-8.  Python already uses UTF-8 for the filesystem
 | |
|   encoding and to encode command line arguments on this OS.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #9713, #10114: Parser functions (e.g. PyParser_ASTFromFile) expect
 | |
|   filenames encoded to the filesystem encoding with the surrogateescape error
 | |
|   handler (to support undecodable bytes), instead of UTF-8 in strict mode.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #9997: Don't let the name "top" have special significance in scope
 | |
|   resolution.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #9862: Compensate for broken PIPE_BUF in AIX by hard coding its value as
 | |
|   the default 512 when compiling on AIX.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Use locale encoding instead of UTF-8 to encode and decode filenames if
 | |
|   Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding is not set.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #10095: fp_setreadl() doesn't reopen the file, instead reuse the file
 | |
|   descriptor.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #9418: Moved private string methods ``_formatter_parser`` and
 | |
|   ``_formatter_field_name_split`` into a new ``_string`` module.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #9992: Remove PYTHONFSENCODING environment variable.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Library
 | |
| -------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #12943: python -m tokenize support has been added to tokenize.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #10465: fix broken delegating of attributes by gzip._PaddedFile.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #10356: Decimal.__hash__(-1) should return -2.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #1553375: logging: Added stack_info kwarg to display stack information.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #5111: IPv6 Host in the Header is wrapped inside [ ]. Patch by Chandru.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Fix Fraction.__hash__ so that Fraction.__hash__(-1) is -2.  (See also issue
 | |
|   #10356.)
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #4471: Add the IMAP.starttls() method to enable encryption on standard
 | |
|   IMAP4 connections.  Original patch by Lorenzo M. Catucci.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #1466065: Add 'validate' option to base64.b64decode to raise an error if
 | |
|   there are non-base64 alphabet characters in the input.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #10386: Add __all__ to token module; this simplifies importing in
 | |
|   tokenize module and prevents leaking of private names through ``import *``.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #4471: Properly shutdown socket in IMAP.shutdown().  Patch by Lorenzo
 | |
|   M. Catucci.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Fix IMAP.login() to work properly.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #9244: multiprocessing pool worker processes could terminate
 | |
|   unexpectedly if the return value of a task could not be pickled.  Only the
 | |
|   ``repr`` of such errors are now sent back, wrapped in an
 | |
|   ``MaybeEncodingError`` exception.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #9244: The ``apply_async()`` and ``map_async()`` methods of
 | |
|   ``multiprocessing.Pool`` now accepts a ``error_callback`` argument.  This can
 | |
|   be a callback with the signature ``callback(exc)``, which will be called if
 | |
|   the target raises an exception.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #10022: The dictionary returned by the ``getpeercert()`` method of SSL
 | |
|   sockets now has additional items such as ``issuer`` and ``notBefore``.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - ``usenetrc`` is now false by default for NNTP objects.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #1926: Add support for NNTP over SSL on port 563, as well as STARTTLS.
 | |
|   Patch by Andrew Vant.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #10335: Add tokenize.open(), detect the file encoding using
 | |
|   tokenize.detect_encoding() and open it in read only mode.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #10321: Add support for binary data to smtplib.SMTP.sendmail, and a new
 | |
|   method send_message to send an email.message.Message object.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #6011: sysconfig and distutils.sysconfig use the surrogateescape error
 | |
|   handler to parse the Makefile file.  Avoid a UnicodeDecodeError if the source
 | |
|   code directory name contains a non-ASCII character and the locale encoding is
 | |
|   ASCII.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #10329: The trace module writes reports using the input Python script
 | |
|   encoding, instead of the locale encoding.  Patch written by Alexander
 | |
|   Belopolsky.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #10126: Fix distutils' test_build when Python was built with
 | |
|   --enable-shared.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #9281: Prevent race condition with mkdir in distutils.  Patch by
 | |
|   Arfrever.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #10229: Fix caching error in gettext.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #10252: Close file objects in a timely manner in distutils code and
 | |
|   tests.  Patch by Brian Brazil, completed by Éric Araujo.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #10180: Pickling file objects is now explicitly forbidden, since
 | |
|   unpickling them produced nonsensical results.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #10311: The signal module now restores errno before returning from its
 | |
|   low-level signal handler.  Patch by Hallvard B Furuseth.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #10282: Add a ``nntp_implementation`` attribute to NNTP objects.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #10283: Add a ``group_pattern`` argument to NNTP.list().
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #10155: Add IISCGIHandler to wsgiref.handlers to support IIS CGI
 | |
|   environment better, and to correct unicode environment values for WSGI 1.0.1.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #10281: nntplib now returns None for absent fields in the OVER/XOVER
 | |
|   response, instead of raising an exception.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - wsgiref now implements and validates PEP 3333, rather than an experimental
 | |
|   extension of PEP 333.  (Note: earlier versions of Python 3.x may have
 | |
|   incorrectly validated some non-compliant applications as WSGI compliant; if
 | |
|   your app validates with Python <3.2b1+, but not on this version, it is likely
 | |
|   the case that your app was not compliant.)
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #10280: NNTP.nntp_version should reflect the highest version advertised
 | |
|   by the server.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #10184: Touch directories only once when extracting a tarfile.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #10199: New package, ``turtledemo`` now contains selected demo scripts
 | |
|   that were formerly found under Demo/turtle.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #10265: Close file objects explicitly in sunau.  Patch by Brian Brazil.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #10266: uu.decode didn't close in_file explicitly when it was given as a
 | |
|   filename.  Patch by Brian Brazil.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #10110: Queue objects didn't recognize full queues when the maxsize
 | |
|   parameter had been reduced.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #10160: Speed up operator.attrgetter.  Patch by Christos Georgiou.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - logging: Added style option to basicConfig() to allow %, {} or $-formatting.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #5729: json.dumps() now supports using a string such as '\t' for
 | |
|   pretty-printing multilevel objects.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #10253: FileIO leaks a file descriptor when trying to open a file for
 | |
|   append that isn't seekable.  Patch by Brian Brazil.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Support context manager protocol for file-like objects returned by mailbox
 | |
|   ``get_file()`` methods.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #10246: uu.encode didn't close file objects explicitly when filenames
 | |
|   were given to it.  Patch by Brian Brazil.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #10198: fix duplicate header written to wave files when writeframes() is
 | |
|   called without data.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Close file objects in modulefinder in a timely manner.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Close a io.TextIOWrapper object in email.parser in a timely manner.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Close a file object in distutils.sysconfig in a timely manner.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Close a file object in pkgutil in a timely manner.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #10233: Close file objects in a timely manner in the tarfile module and
 | |
|   its test suite.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #10093: ResourceWarnings are now issued when files and sockets are
 | |
|   deallocated without explicit closing.  These warnings are silenced by default,
 | |
|   except in pydebug mode.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - tarfile.py: Add support for all missing variants of the GNU sparse extensions
 | |
|   and create files with holes when extracting sparse members.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #10218: Return timeout status from ``Condition.wait`` in threading.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #7351: Add ``zipfile.BadZipFile`` spelling of the exception name and
 | |
|   deprecate the old name ``zipfile.BadZipfile``.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #5027: The standard ``xml`` namespace is now understood by
 | |
|   xml.sax.saxutils.XMLGenerator as being bound to
 | |
|   http://www.w3.org/XML/1998/namespace.  Patch by Troy J. Farrell.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #5975: Add csv.unix_dialect class.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #7761: telnetlib.interact failures on Windows fixed.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - logging: Added style option to Formatter to allow %, {} or $-formatting.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #5178: Added tempfile.TemporaryDirectory class that can be used as a
 | |
|   context manager.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #1349106: Generator (and BytesGenerator) flatten method and Header
 | |
|   encode method now support a 'linesep' argument.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #5639: Add a *server_hostname* argument to ``SSLContext.wrap_socket`` in
 | |
|   order to support the TLS SNI extension.  ``HTTPSConnection`` and ``urlopen()``
 | |
|   also use this argument, so that HTTPS virtual hosts are now supported.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #10166: Avoid recursion in pstats Stats.add() for many stats items.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #10163: Skip unreadable registry keys during mimetypes initialization.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - logging: Made StreamHandler terminator configurable.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - logging: Allowed filters to be just callables.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - logging: Added tests for _logRecordClass changes.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #10092: Properly reset locale in calendar.Locale*Calendar classes.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - logging: Added _logRecordClass, getLogRecordClass, setLogRecordClass to
 | |
|   increase flexibility of LogRecord creation.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #5117: Case normalization was needed on ntpath.relpath().  Also fixed
 | |
|   root directory issue on posixpath.relpath().  (Ported working fixes from
 | |
|   ntpath.)
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #1343: xml.sax.saxutils.XMLGenerator now has an option
 | |
|   short_empty_elements to direct it to use self-closing tags when appropriate.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #9807 (part 1): Expose the ABI flags in sys.abiflags.  Add --abiflags
 | |
|   switch to python-config for command line access.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #6098: Don't claim DOM level 3 conformance in minidom.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #5762: Fix AttributeError raised by ``xml.dom.minidom`` when an empty
 | |
|   XML namespace attribute is encountered.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #2830: Add the ``html.escape()`` function, which quotes all problematic
 | |
|   characters by default.  Deprecate ``cgi.escape()``.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #9409: Fix the regex to match all kind of filenames, for interactive
 | |
|   debugging in doctests.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #9183: ``datetime.timezone(datetime.timedelta(0))`` will now return the
 | |
|   same instance as ``datetime.timezone.utc``.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #7523: Add SOCK_CLOEXEC and SOCK_NONBLOCK to the socket module, where
 | |
|   supported by the system.  Patch by Nikita Vetoshkin.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #10063: file:// scheme will stop accessing remote hosts via ftp
 | |
|   protocol. file:// urls had fallback to access remote hosts via ftp. This was
 | |
|   not correct, change is made to raise a URLError when a remote host is tried to
 | |
|   access via file:// scheme.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #1710703: Write structures for an empty ZIP archive when a ZipFile is
 | |
|   created in modes 'a' or 'w' and then closed without adding any files. Raise
 | |
|   BadZipfile (rather than IOError) when opening small non-ZIP files.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #10041: The signature of optional arguments in socket.makefile() didn't
 | |
|   match that of io.open(), and they also didn't get forwarded properly to
 | |
|   TextIOWrapper in text mode.  Patch by Kai Zhu.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #9003: http.client.HTTPSConnection, urllib.request.HTTPSHandler and
 | |
|   urllib.request.urlopen now take optional arguments to allow for server
 | |
|   certificate checking, as recommended in public uses of HTTPS.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #6612: Fix site and sysconfig to catch os.getcwd() error, eg. if the
 | |
|   current directory was deleted. Patch written by W. Trevor King.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #3873: Speed up unpickling from file objects that have a peek() method.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #10075: Add a session_stats() method to SSLContext objects.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #9948: Fixed problem of losing filename case information.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Extension Modules
 | |
| -----------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #5109: array.array constructor will now use fast code when
 | |
|   initial data is provided in an array object with correct type.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #6317: Now winsound.PlaySound only accepts unicode.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #6317: Now winsound.PlaySound can accept non ascii filename.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #9377: Use Unicode API for gethostname on Windows.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #10143: Update "os.pathconf" values.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #6518: Support context manager protcol for ossaudiodev types.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #678250: Make mmap flush a noop on ACCESS_READ and ACCESS_COPY.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #9054: Fix a crash occurring when using the pyexpat module with expat
 | |
|   version 2.0.1.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #5355: Provide mappings from Expat error numbers to string descriptions
 | |
|   and backwards, in order to actually make it possible to analyze error codes
 | |
|   provided by ExpatError.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The Unicode database was updated to 6.0.0.
 | |
| 
 | |
| C-API
 | |
| -----
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #10288: The deprecated family of "char"-handling macros
 | |
|   (ISLOWER()/ISUPPER()/etc) have now been removed: use Py_ISLOWER() etc instead.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #9778: Hash values are now always the size of pointers. A new Py_hash_t
 | |
|   type has been introduced.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Tools/Demos
 | |
| -----------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #10117: Tools/scripts/reindent.py now accepts source files that use
 | |
|   encoding other than ASCII or UTF-8.  Source encoding is preserved when
 | |
|   reindented code is written to a file.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #7287: Demo/imputil/knee.py was removed.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Tests
 | |
| -----
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #3699: Fix test_bigaddrspace and extend it to test bytestrings as well
 | |
|   as unicode strings.  Initial patch by Sandro Tosi.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #10294: Remove dead code form test_unicode_file.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #10123: Don't use non-ascii filenames in test_doctest tests. Add a new
 | |
|   test specific to unicode (non-ascii name and filename).
 | |
| 
 | |
| Build
 | |
| -----
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #10268: Add a --enable-loadable-sqlite-extensions option to configure.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #8852: Allow the socket module to build on OpenSolaris.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Drop -OPT:Olimit compiler option.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #10094: Use versioned .so files on GNU/kfreeBSD and the GNU Hurd.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Accept Oracle Berkeley DB 5.0 and 5.1 as backend for the dbm extension.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #7473: avoid link errors when building a framework with a different set
 | |
|   of architectures than the one that is currently installed.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| What's New in Python 3.2 Alpha 3?
 | |
| =================================
 | |
| 
 | |
| *Release date: 09-Oct-2010*
 | |
| 
 | |
| Core and Builtins
 | |
| -----------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #10068: Global objects which have reference cycles with their module's
 | |
|   dict are now cleared again. This causes issue #7140 to appear again.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #9738: Document PyErr_SetString() and PyErr_SetFromErrnoWithFilename()
 | |
|   encodings.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - ast.literal_eval() can now handle negative numbers.  It is also a little more
 | |
|   liberal in what it accepts without compromising the safety of the evaluation.
 | |
|   For example, 3j+4 and 3+4+5 are both accepted.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #10006: type.__abstractmethods__ now raises an AttributeError.  As a
 | |
|   result metaclasses can now be ABCs (see #9533).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #8670: ctypes.c_wchar supports non-BMP characters with 32 bits wchar_t.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #8670: PyUnicode_AsWideChar() and PyUnicode_AsWideCharString() replace
 | |
|   UTF-16 surrogate pairs by single non-BMP characters for 16 bits Py_UNICODE and
 | |
|   32 bits wchar_t (eg. Linux in narrow build).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #10003: Allow handling of SIGBREAK on Windows. Fixes a regression
 | |
|   introduced by issue #9324.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #9979: Create function PyUnicode_AsWideCharString().
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #7397: Mention that importlib.import_module() is probably what someone
 | |
|   really wants to be using in __import__'s docstring.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #8521: Allow CreateKeyEx, OpenKeyEx, and DeleteKeyEx functions of winreg
 | |
|   to use named arguments.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #9930: Remove bogus subtype check that was causing (e.g.)
 | |
|   float.__rdiv__(2.0, 3) to return NotImplemented instead of the expected 1.5.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #9808: Implement os.getlogin for Windows. Patch by Jon Anglin.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #9901: Destroying the GIL in Py_Finalize() can fail if some other
 | |
|   threads are still running.  Instead, reinitialize the GIL on a second call to
 | |
|   Py_Initialize().
 | |
| 
 | |
| - All SyntaxErrors now have a column offset and therefore a caret when the error
 | |
|   is printed.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #9252: PyImport_Import no longer uses a fromlist hack to return the
 | |
|   module that was imported, but instead gets the module from sys.modules.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #9213: The range type_items now provides index() and count() methods, to
 | |
|   conform to the Sequence ABC.  Patch by Daniel Urban and Daniel Stutzbach.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #7994: Issue a PendingDeprecationWarning if object.__format__ is called
 | |
|   with a non-empty format string.  This is an effort to future-proof user
 | |
|   code. If a derived class does not currently implement __format__ but later
 | |
|   adds its own __format__, it would most likely break user code that had
 | |
|   supplied a format string.  This will be changed to a DeprecationWaring in
 | |
|   Python 3.3 and it will be an error in Python 3.4.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #9828: Destroy the GIL in Py_Finalize(), so that it gets properly
 | |
|   re-created on a subsequent call to Py_Initialize().  The problem (a crash)
 | |
|   wouldn't appear in 3.1 or 2.7 where the GIL's structure is more trivial.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #9210: Configure option --with-wctype-functions was removed.  Using the
 | |
|   functions from the libc caused the methods .upper() and lower() to become
 | |
|   locale aware and created subtly wrong results.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #9738: PyUnicode_FromFormat() and PyErr_Format() raise an error on a
 | |
|   non-ASCII byte in the format string.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #4617: Previously it was illegal to delete a name from the local
 | |
|   namespace if it occurs as a free variable in a nested block.  This limitation
 | |
|   of the compiler has been lifted, and a new opcode introduced (DELETE_DEREF).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #9804: ascii() now always represents unicode surrogate pairs as a single
 | |
|   ``\UXXXXXXXX``, regardless of whether the character is printable or not.
 | |
|   Also, the "backslashreplace" error handler now joins surrogate pairs into a
 | |
|   single character on UCS-2 builds.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #9757: memoryview objects get a release() method to release the
 | |
|   underlying buffer (previously this was only done when deallocating the
 | |
|   memoryview), and gain support for the context management protocol.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #9797: pystate.c wrongly assumed that zero couldn't be a valid
 | |
|   thread-local storage key.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Library
 | |
| -------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #2236: distutils' mkpath ignored the mode parameter.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Fix typo in one sdist option (medata-check).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #9199: Fix incorrect use of distutils.cmd.Command.announce.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #1718574: Fix options that were supposed to accept arguments but did
 | |
|   not in build_clib.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #9437: Fix building C extensions with non-default LDFLAGS.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #4661: email can now parse bytes input and generate either converted
 | |
|   7bit output or bytes output.  Email version bumped to 5.1.0.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #1589: Add ssl.match_hostname(), to help implement server identity
 | |
|   verification for higher-level protocols.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #9759: GzipFile now raises ValueError when an operation is attempted
 | |
|   after the file is closed.  Patch by Jeffrey Finkelstein.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #9042: Fix interaction of custom translation classes and caching in
 | |
|   gettext.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #6706: asyncore.dispatcher now provides a handle_accepted() method
 | |
|   returning a (sock, addr) pair which is called when a connection has been
 | |
|   established with a new remote endpoint.  This is supposed to be used as a
 | |
|   replacement for old handle_accept() and avoids the user to call accept()
 | |
|   directly.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #9065: tarfile no longer uses "root" as the default for the uname and
 | |
|   gname field.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #8980: Fixed a failure in distutils.command check that was shadowed by
 | |
|   an environment that does not have docutils.  Patch by Arfrever.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #1050268: parseaddr now correctly quotes double quote and backslash
 | |
|   characters that appear inside quoted strings in email addresses.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #10004: quoprimime no longer generates a traceback when confronted with
 | |
|   invalid characters after '=' in a Q-encoded word.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #1491: BaseHTTPServer nows send a ``100 Continue`` response before
 | |
|   sending a 200 OK for the Expect: 100-continue request header.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #9360: Cleanup and improvements to the nntplib module.  The API now
 | |
|   conforms to the philosophy of bytes and unicode separation in Python 3.  A
 | |
|   test suite has also been added.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #9962: GzipFile now has the peek() method.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #9090: When a socket with a timeout fails with EWOULDBLOCK or EAGAIN,
 | |
|   retry the select() loop instead of bailing out.  This is because select() can
 | |
|   incorrectly report a socket as ready for reading (for example, if it received
 | |
|   some data with an invalid checksum).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #3612: Added new types to ctypes.wintypes. (CHAR and pointers)
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #9950: Fix socket.sendall() crash or misbehaviour when a signal is
 | |
|   received.  Now sendall() properly calls signal handlers if necessary, and
 | |
|   retries sending if these returned successfully, including on sockets with a
 | |
|   timeout.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #9947: logging: Fixed locking bug in stopListening.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #9945: logging: Fixed locking bugs in addHandler/removeHandler.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #9936: Fixed executable lines' search in the trace module.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #9790: Rework imports necessary for samefile and sameopenfile
 | |
|   in ntpath.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #9928: Properly initialize the types exported by the bz2 module.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #1675951: Allow GzipFile to work with unseekable file objects.  Patch by
 | |
|   Florian Festi.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Logging: Added QueueListener class to facilitate logging usage for
 | |
|   performance-critical threads.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #9916: Add some missing errno symbols.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #9877: Expose sysconfig.get_makefile_filename()
 | |
| 
 | |
| - logging: Added hasHandlers() method to Logger and LoggerAdapter.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #9908: Fix os.stat() on bytes paths under Windows 7.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #2643: msync() is not called anymore when deallocating an open mmap
 | |
|   object, only munmap().
 | |
| 
 | |
| - logging: Changed LoggerAdapter implementation internally, to make it easier to
 | |
|   subclass in a useful way.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - logging: hasHandlers method was added to Logger, and isEnabledFor,
 | |
|   getEffectiveLevel, hasHandlers and setLevel were added to LoggerAdapter.
 | |
|   LoggerAdapter was introduced into the unit tests for logging.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #1686: Fix string.Template when overriding the pattern attribute.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #9854: SocketIO objects now observe the RawIOBase interface in
 | |
|   non-blocking mode: they return None when an operation would block (instead of
 | |
|   raising an exception).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #1730136: Fix the comparison between a tk.font.Font and an object of
 | |
|   another kind.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #9441: logging has better coverage for rotating file handlers.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #9865: collections.OrderedDict now has a __sizeof__ method.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #9854: The default read() implementation in io.RawIOBase now handles
 | |
|   non-blocking readinto() returning None correctly.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #1552: socket.socketpair() now returns regular socket.socket objects
 | |
|   supporting the whole socket API (rather than the "raw" _socket.socket
 | |
|   objects).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #9853: Fix the signature of SSLSocket.recvfrom() and SSLSocket.sendto()
 | |
|   to match the corresponding socket methods.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #9840: Added a decorator to reprlib for wrapping __repr__ methods to make
 | |
|   them handle recursive calls within the same thread.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - logging: Enhanced HTTPHandler with secure and credentials initializers.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #767645: Set os.path.supports_unicode_filenames to True on Mac OS X.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #9837: The read() method of ZipExtFile objects (as returned by
 | |
|   ZipFile.open()) could return more bytes than requested.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #9826: OrderedDict.__repr__ can now handle self-referential values:
 | |
|   d['x'] = d.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #9825: Using __del__ in the definition of collections.OrderedDict made
 | |
|   it possible for the user to create self-referencing ordered dictionaries which
 | |
|   become permanently uncollectable GC garbage.  Reinstated the Python 3.1
 | |
|   approach of using weakref proxies so that reference cycles never get created
 | |
|   in the first place.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #9579, #9580: Fix os.confstr() for value longer than 255 bytes and
 | |
|   encode the value with filesystem encoding and surrogateescape (instead of
 | |
|   utf-8 in strict mode) . Patch written by David Watson.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #9632: Remove sys.setfilesystemencoding() function: use PYTHONFSENCODING
 | |
|   environment variable to set the filesystem encoding at Python startup.
 | |
|   sys.setfilesystemencoding() creates inconsistencies because it is unable to
 | |
|   reencode all filenames in all objects.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #9410: Various optimizations to the pickle module, leading to speedups
 | |
|   up to 4x (depending on the benchmark).  Mostly ported from Unladen Swallow;
 | |
|   initial patch by Alexandre Vassalotti.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The pprint module now supports printing OrderedDicts in their given order
 | |
|   (formerly, it would sort the keys).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Logging: Added QueueHandler class to facilitate logging usage with
 | |
|   multiprocessing.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #9707: Rewritten reference implementation of threading.local which is
 | |
|   friendlier towards reference cycles.  This change is not normally visible
 | |
|   since an optimized C implementation (_thread._local) is used instead.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #6394: os.getppid() is now supported on Windows.  Note that it will
 | |
|   still return the id of the parent process after it has exited.  This process
 | |
|   id may even have been reused by another unrelated process.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #9792: In case of connection failure, socket.create_connection() would
 | |
|   swallow the exception and raise a new one, making it impossible to fetch the
 | |
|   original errno, or to filter timeout errors.  Now the original error is
 | |
|   re-raised.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #9758: When fcntl.ioctl() was called with mutable_flag set to True, and
 | |
|   the passed buffer was exactly 1024 bytes long, the buffer wouldn't be updated
 | |
|   back after the system call.  Original patch by Brian Brazil.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Updates to the random module:
 | |
| 
 | |
|   * Document which parts of the module are guaranteed to stay the same across
 | |
|     versions and which parts are subject to change.
 | |
| 
 | |
|   * Update the seed() method to use all of the bits in a string instead of just
 | |
|     the hash value.  This makes better use of the seed value and assures the
 | |
|     seeding is platform independent.  Issue #7889.
 | |
| 
 | |
|   * Improved the random()-->integer algorithm used in choice(), shuffle(),
 | |
|     sample(), randrange(), and randint().  Formerly, it used int(n*random())
 | |
|     which has a slight bias whenever n is not a power of two.  Issue #9025.
 | |
| 
 | |
|   * Improved documentation of arguments to randrange().  Issue #9379.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - collections.OrderedDict now supports a new method for repositioning keys to
 | |
|   either end.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #9754: Similarly to assertRaises and assertRaisesRegexp, unittest test
 | |
|   cases now also have assertWarns and assertWarnsRegexp methods to check that a
 | |
|   given warning type was triggered by the code under test.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #5506: BytesIO objects now have a getbuffer() method exporting a view of
 | |
|   their contents without duplicating them.  The view is both readable and
 | |
|   writable.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #7566: Implement os.path.sameopenfile for Windows.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #9293: I/O streams now raise ``io.UnsupportedOperation`` when an
 | |
|   unsupported operation is attempted (for example, writing to a file open only
 | |
|   for reading).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - hashlib has two new constant attributes: algorithms_guaranteed and
 | |
|   algorithms_avaiable that respectively list the names of hash algorithms
 | |
|   guaranteed to exist in all Python implementations and the names of hash
 | |
|   algorithms available in the current process.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - A new package ``concurrent.futures`` as defined by PEP 3148.
 | |
| 
 | |
| C-API
 | |
| -----
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Add PyErr_SyntaxLocationEx, which supports passing a column offset.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #9834: Don't segfault in PySequence_GetSlice, PySequence_SetSlice, or
 | |
|   PySequence_DelSlice when the object doesn't have any mapping operations
 | |
|   defined.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Tools/Demos
 | |
| -----------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #9188: The gdb extension now handles correctly narrow (UCS2) as well as
 | |
|   wide (UCS4) unicode builds for both the host interpreter (embedded inside gdb)
 | |
|   and the interpreter under test.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Tests
 | |
| -----
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #9308: Added tests for importing encoded modules that do not
 | |
|   depend on specific stdlib modules being encoded in a certain way.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #1051: Add a script (Lib/test/make_ssl_certs.py) to generate the custom
 | |
|   certificate and private key files used by SSL-related certs.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #9978: Wait until subprocess completes initialization. (Win32KillTests
 | |
|   in test_os)
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #7110: regrtest now sends test failure reports and single-failure
 | |
|   tracebacks to stderr rather than stdout.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #9628: fix runtests.sh -x option so more than one test can be excluded.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #9899: Fix test_tkinter.test_font on various platforms.  Patch by Ned
 | |
|   Deily.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #9894: Do not hardcode ENOENT in test_subprocess.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #9315: Added tests for the trace module.  Patch by Eli Bendersky.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #9323: Make test.regrtest.__file__ absolute, this was not always the
 | |
|   case when running profile or trace, for example.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #9568: Fix test_urllib2_localnet on OS X 10.3.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Build
 | |
| -----
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #10062: Allow building on platforms which do not have sem_timedwait.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #10054: Some platforms provide uintptr_t in inttypes.h.  Patch by Akira
 | |
|   Kitada.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #10055: Make json C89-compliant in UCS4 mode.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #9552: Avoid unnecessary rebuild of OpenSSL. (Windows)
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #1633863: Don't ignore $CC under AIX.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #9810: Compile bzip2 source files in Python's project file directly. It
 | |
|   used to be built with bzip2's makefile.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #9848: Stopping trying to build _weakref in setup.py as it is a built-in
 | |
|   module.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #9806: python-config now has an ``--extension-suffix`` option that
 | |
|   outputs the suffix for dynamic libraries including the ABI version name
 | |
|   defined by PEP 3149.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #941346: Improve the build process under AIX and allow Python to be
 | |
|   built as a shared library.  Patch by Sébastien Sablé.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #4026: Make the fcntl extension build under AIX.  Patch by Sébastien
 | |
|   Sablé.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #9701: The MacOSX installer can patch the shell profile to ensure that
 | |
|   the "bin" directory inside the framework is on the shell's search path. This
 | |
|   feature now also supports the ZSH shell.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| What's New in Python 3.2 Alpha 2?
 | |
| =================================
 | |
| 
 | |
| *Release date: 05-Sep-2010*
 | |
| 
 | |
| Core and Builtins
 | |
| -----------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #9225: Remove the ROT_FOUR and DUP_TOPX opcode, the latter replaced by
 | |
|   the new (and simpler) DUP_TOP_TWO.  Performance isn't changed, but our
 | |
|   bytecode is a bit simplified.  Patch by Demur Rumed.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #9766: Rename poorly named variables exposed by _warnings to prevent
 | |
|   confusion with the proper variables names from 'warnings' itself.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #9212: dict_keys and dict_items now provide the isdisjoint() method, to
 | |
|   conform to the Set ABC.  Patch by Daniel Urban.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #9737: Fix a crash when trying to delete a slice or an item from a
 | |
|   memoryview object.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #9549: sys.setdefaultencoding() and PyUnicode_SetDefaultEncoding() are
 | |
|   now removed, since their effect was inexistent in 3.x (the default encoding is
 | |
|   hardcoded to utf-8 and cannot be changed).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #7415: PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now uses the new buffer API
 | |
|   properly.  Patch by Stefan Behnel.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #5553: The Py_LOCAL_INLINE macro now results in inlining on most
 | |
|   platforms.  Previously, it inlined only when using Microsoft Visual C.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #9712: Fix tokenize on identifiers that start with non-ascii names.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #9688: __basicsize__ and __itemsize__ must be accessed as Py_ssize_t.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #9684: Added a definition for SIZEOF_WCHAR_T to PC/pyconfig.h, to match
 | |
|   the pyconfig.h generated by configure on other systems.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #9666: Only catch AttributeError in hasattr(). All other exceptions that
 | |
|   occur during attribute lookup are now propagated to the caller.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #8622: Add PYTHONFSENCODING environment variable to override the
 | |
|   filesystem encoding.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #5127: The C functions that access the Unicode Database now accept and
 | |
|   return characters from the full Unicode range, even on narrow unicode builds
 | |
|   (Py_UNICODE_TOLOWER, Py_UNICODE_ISDECIMAL, and others).  A visible difference
 | |
|   in Python is that unicodedata.numeric() now returns the correct value for
 | |
|   large code points, and repr() may consider more characters as printable.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #9425: Create PyModule_GetFilenameObject() function to get the filename
 | |
|   as a unicode object, instead of a byte string. Function needed to support
 | |
|   unencodable filenames. Deprecate PyModule_GetFilename() in favor on the new
 | |
|   function.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #8063: Call _PyGILState_Init() earlier in Py_InitializeEx().
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #9612: The set object is now 64-bit clean under Windows.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #8202: sys.argv[0] is now set to '-m' instead of '-c' when searching for
 | |
|   the module file to be executed with the -m command line option.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #9599: Create PySys_FormatStdout() and PySys_FormatStderr() functions to
 | |
|   write a message formatted by PyUnicode_FromFormatV() to sys.stdout and
 | |
|   sys.stderr.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #9542: Create PyUnicode_FSDecoder() function, a ParseTuple converter:
 | |
|   decode bytes objects to unicode using PyUnicode_DecodeFSDefaultAndSize(); str
 | |
|   objects are output as-is.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #9203: Computed gotos are now enabled by default on supported compilers
 | |
|   (which are detected by the configure script).  They can still be disable
 | |
|   selectively by specifying --without-computed-gotos.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #9425: Create PyErr_WarnFormat() function, similar to PyErr_WarnEx() but
 | |
|   use PyUnicode_FromFormatV() to format the warning message.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #8530: Prevent stringlib fastsearch from reading beyond the front of an
 | |
|   array.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #5319: Print an error if flushing stdout fails at interpreter shutdown.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #9337: The str() of a float or complex number is now identical to its
 | |
|   repr().
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #9416: Fix some issues with complex formatting where the output with no
 | |
|   type specifier failed to match the str output:
 | |
| 
 | |
|     - format(complex(-0.0, 2.0), '-') omitted the real part from the output,
 | |
|     - format(complex(0.0, 2.0), '-') included a sign and parentheses.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Extension Modules
 | |
| -----------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #8013: time.asctime and time.ctime no longer call system
 | |
|   asctime and ctime functions.  The year range for time.asctime is now
 | |
|   1900 through maxint.  The range for time.ctime is the same as for
 | |
|   time.localtime.  The string produced by these functions is longer
 | |
|   than 24 characters when year is greater than 9999.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #6608: time.asctime is now checking struct tm fields its input
 | |
|   before passing it to the system asctime.  Patch by MunSic Jeong.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #8734: Avoid crash in msvcrt.get_osfhandle() when an invalid file
 | |
|   descriptor is provided.  Patch by Pascal Chambon.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #7736: Release the GIL around calls to opendir() and closedir() in the
 | |
|   posix module.  Patch by Marcin Bachry.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #4835: make PyLong_FromSocket_t() and PyLong_AsSocket_t() private to the
 | |
|   socket module, and fix the width of socket descriptors to be correctly
 | |
|   detected under 64-bit Windows.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #1027206: Support IDNA in gethostbyname, gethostbyname_ex, getaddrinfo
 | |
|   and gethostbyaddr.  getnameinfo is now restricted to numeric addresses as
 | |
|   input.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #9214: Set operations on a KeysView or ItemsView in collections now
 | |
|   correctly return a set.  Patch by Eli Bendersky.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #5737: Add Solaris-specific mnemonics in the errno module.  Patch by
 | |
|   Matthew Ahrens.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Restore GIL in nis_cat in case of error. Decode NIS data to fs encoding, using
 | |
|   the surrogate error handler.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #665761: ``functools.reduce()`` will no longer mask exceptions other
 | |
|   than ``TypeError`` raised by the iterator argument.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #9570: Use PEP 383 decoding in os.mknod and os.mkfifo.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #6915: Under Windows, os.listdir() didn't release the Global Interpreter
 | |
|   Lock around all system calls.  Original patch by Ryan Kelly.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #8524: Add a detach() method to socket objects, so as to put the socket
 | |
|   into the closed state without closing the underlying file descriptor.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #477863: Emit a ResourceWarning at shutdown if gc.garbage is not empty.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #6869: Fix a refcount problem in the _ctypes extension.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #5504: ctypes should now work with systems where mmap can't be
 | |
|   PROT_WRITE and PROT_EXEC.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #9507: Named tuple repr will now automatically display the right name in
 | |
|   a tuple subclass.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #9324: Add parameter validation to signal.signal on Windows in order to
 | |
|   prevent crashes.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #9526: Remove some outdated (int) casts that were preventing the array
 | |
|   module from working correctly with arrays of more than 2**31 elements.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Fix memory leak in ssl._ssl._test_decode_cert.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #8065: Fix memory leak in readline module (from failure to free the
 | |
|   result of history_get_history_state()).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #9450: Fix memory leak in readline.replace_history_item and
 | |
|   readline.remove_history_item for readline version >= 5.0.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #8105: Validate file descriptor passed to mmap.mmap on Windows.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #8046: Add context manager protocol support and .closed property to mmap
 | |
|   objects.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Library
 | |
| -------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #7451: Improve decoding performance of JSON objects, and reduce the
 | |
|   memory consumption of said decoded objects when they use the same strings as
 | |
|   keys.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #1100562: Fix deep-copying of objects derived from the list and dict
 | |
|   types.  Patch by Michele Orrù and Björn Lindqvist.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #9753: Fixed socket.dup, which did not always work correctly on Windows.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #9421: Made the get<type> methods consistently accept the vars and
 | |
|   default arguments on all parser classes.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #7005: Fixed output of None values for RawConfigParser.write and
 | |
|   ConfigParser.write.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #8990: array.fromstring() and array.tostring() get renamed to
 | |
|   frombytes() and tobytes(), respectively, to avoid confusion.  Furthermore,
 | |
|   array.frombytes(), array.extend() as well as the array.array() constructor now
 | |
|   accept bytearray objects.  Patch by Thomas Jollans.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #808164: Fixed socket.close to avoid references to globals, to avoid
 | |
|   issues when socket.close is called from a __del__ method.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #9706: ssl module provides a better error handling in various
 | |
|   circumstances.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #1868: Eliminate subtle timing issues in thread-local objects by getting
 | |
|   rid of the cached copy of thread-local attribute dictionary.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #1512791: In setframerate() in the wave module, non-integral frame rates
 | |
|   are rounded to the nearest integer.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #8797: urllib2 does a retry for Basic Authentication failure instead of
 | |
|   falling into recursion.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #1194222: email.utils.parsedate now returns RFC2822 compliant four
 | |
|   character years even if the message contains RFC822 two character years.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #8750: Fixed MutableSet's methods to correctly handle reflexive
 | |
|   operations on its self, namely x -= x and x ^= x.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #9129: smtpd.py is vulnerable to DoS attacks deriving from missing error
 | |
|   handling when accepting a new connection.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #9601: ftplib now provides a workaround for non-compliant
 | |
|   implementations such as IIS shipped with Windows server 2003 returning invalid
 | |
|   response codes for MKD and PWD commands.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #658749: asyncore's connect() method now correctly interprets winsock
 | |
|   errors.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #9501: Fixed logging regressions in cleanup code.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Fix functools.total_ordering() to skip methods inherited from object.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #9572: Importlib should not raise an exception if a directory it thought
 | |
|   it needed to create was done concurrently by another process.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #9617: Signals received during a low-level write operation aren't
 | |
|   ignored by the buffered IO layer anymore.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #843590: Make "macintosh" an alias to the "mac_roman" encoding.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Create os.fsdecode(): decode from the filesystem encoding with surrogateescape
 | |
|   error handler, or strict error handler on Windows.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #3488: Provide convenient shorthand functions ``gzip.compress`` and
 | |
|   ``gzip.decompress``.  Original patch by Anand B. Pillai.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #8807: poplib.POP3_SSL class now accepts a context parameter, which is a
 | |
|   ssl.SSLContext object allowing bundling SSL configuration options,
 | |
|   certificates and private keys into a single (potentially long-lived)
 | |
|   structure.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #8866: parameters passed to socket.getaddrinfo can now be specified as
 | |
|   single keyword arguments.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Address XXX comment in dis.py by having inspect.py prefer to reuse the dis.py
 | |
|   compiler flag values over defining its own.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #9147: Added dis.code_info() which is similar to show_code() but returns
 | |
|   formatted code information in a string rather than displaying on screen.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #9567: functools.update_wrapper now adds a __wrapped__ attribute
 | |
|   pointing to the original callable.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #3445: functools.update_wrapper now tolerates missing attributes on
 | |
|   wrapped callables.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #5867: Add abc.abstractclassmethod and abc.abstractstaticmethod.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #9605: posix.getlogin() decodes the username with file filesystem
 | |
|   encoding and surrogateescape error handler. Patch written by David Watson.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #9604: posix.initgroups() encodes the username using the fileystem
 | |
|   encoding and surrogateescape error handler. Patch written by David Watson.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #9603: posix.ttyname() and posix.ctermid() decode the terminal name
 | |
|   using the filesystem encoding and surrogateescape error handler. Patch written
 | |
|   by David Watson.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #7647: The posix module now has the ST_RDONLY and ST_NOSUID constants,
 | |
|   for use with the statvfs() function.  Patch by Adam Jackson.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #8688: MANIFEST files created by distutils now include a magic comment
 | |
|   indicating they are generated.  Manually maintained MANIFESTs without this
 | |
|   marker will not be overwritten or removed.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #7467: when reading a file from a ZIP archive, its CRC is checked and a
 | |
|   BadZipfile error is raised if it doesn't match (as used to be the case in
 | |
|   Python 2.5 and earlier).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #9550: a BufferedReader could issue an additional read when the original
 | |
|   read request had been satisfied, which could block indefinitely when the
 | |
|   underlying raw IO channel was e.g. a socket.  Report and original patch by
 | |
|   Jason V. Miller.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #3757: thread-local objects now support cyclic garbage collection.
 | |
|   Thread-local objects involved in reference cycles will be deallocated timely
 | |
|   by the cyclic GC, even if the underlying thread is still running.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #9452: Add read_file, read_string, and read_dict to the configparser
 | |
|   API; new source attribute to exceptions.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #6231: Fix xml.etree.ElementInclude to include the tail of the current
 | |
|   node.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #8047: Fix the xml.etree serializer to return bytes by default.  Use
 | |
|   ``encoding="unicode"`` to generate a Unicode string.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #8280: urllib2's Request method will remove fragments in the url.  This
 | |
|   is how it is supposed to work, wget and curl do the same.  Previous behavior
 | |
|   was wrong.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #6683: For SMTP logins we now try all authentication methods advertised
 | |
|   by the server.  Many servers are buggy and advertise authentication methods
 | |
|   they do not support in reality.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #8814: function annotations (the ``__annotations__`` attribute) are now
 | |
|   included in the set of attributes copied by default by functools.wraps and
 | |
|   functools.update_wrapper.  Patch by Terrence Cole.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #2944: asyncore doesn't handle connection refused correctly.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #4184: Private attributes on smtpd.SMTPChannel made public and deprecate
 | |
|   the private attributes. Add tests for smtpd module.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #3196: email header decoding is now forgiving if an RFC2047 encoded word
 | |
|   encoded in base64 is lacking padding.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #9444: Argparse now uses the first element of prefix_chars as the option
 | |
|   character for the added 'h/help' option if prefix_chars does not contain a
 | |
|   '-', instead of raising an error.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #7372: Fix pstats regression when stripping paths from profile data
 | |
|   generated with the profile module.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #9428: Fix running scripts with the profile/cProfile modules from the
 | |
|   command line.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #7781: Fix restricting stats by entry counts in the pstats interactive
 | |
|   browser.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #9209: Do not crash in the pstats interactive browser on invalid regular
 | |
|   expressions.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Update collections.OrderedDict to match the implementation in Py2.7 (based on
 | |
|   lists instead of weakly referenced Link objects).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #8397: Raise an error when attempting to mix iteration and regular reads
 | |
|   on a BZ2File object, rather than returning incorrect results.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #9448: Fix a leak of OS resources (mutexes or semaphores) when
 | |
|   re-initializing a buffered IO object by calling its ``__init__`` method.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #1713: Fix os.path.ismount(), which returned true for symbolic links
 | |
|   across devices.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #8826: Properly load old-style "expires" attribute in http.cookies.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #1690103: Fix initial namespace for code run with trace.main().
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #7395: Fix tracebacks in pstats interactive browser.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #8230: Fix Lib/test/sortperf.py.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #8620: when a cmd.Cmd() is fed input that reaches EOF without a final
 | |
|   newline, it no longer truncates the last character of the last command line.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #5146: Handle UID THREAD command correctly in imaplib.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #5147: Fix the header generated for cookie files written by
 | |
|   http.cookiejar.MozillaCookieJar.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #8198: In pydoc, output all help text to the correct stream when
 | |
|   sys.stdout is reassigned.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #7909: Do not touch paths with the special prefixes ``\\.\`` or ``\\?\``
 | |
|   in ntpath.normpath().
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #1286: Allow using fileinput.FileInput as a context manager.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Add lru_cache() decorator to the functools module.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Tools/Demos
 | |
| -----------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Fix ``Tools/scripts/checkpyc.py`` after PEP 3147.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #8867: Fix ``Tools/scripts/serve.py`` to work with files containing
 | |
|   non-ASCII content.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Tests
 | |
| -----
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #9601: Provide a test case for ftplib.parse257.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #8857: Provide a test case for socket.getaddrinfo.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #7564: Skip test_ioctl if another process is attached to /dev/tty.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #8433: Fix test_curses failure with newer versions of ncurses.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #9496: Provide a test suite for the rlcompleter module.  Patch by
 | |
|   Michele Orrù.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #8687: provide a test suite for sched.py module.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Build
 | |
| -----
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #1303434: Generate ZIP file containing all PDBs.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #9193: PEP 3149 is accepted.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #3101: Helper functions _add_one_to_index_C() and _add_one_to_index_F()
 | |
|   become _Py_add_one_to_index_C() and _Py_add_one_to_index_F(), respectively.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #9700: define HAVE_BROKEN_POSIX_SEMAPHORES under AIX 6.x.  Patch by
 | |
|   Sébastien Sablé.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Don't run pgen twice when using make -j.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| What's New in Python 3.2 Alpha 1?
 | |
| =================================
 | |
| 
 | |
| *Release date: 01-Aug-2010*
 | |
| 
 | |
| Core and Builtins
 | |
| -----------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #8991: convertbuffer() rejects discontigious buffers.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #7616: Fix copying of overlapping memoryview slices with the Intel
 | |
|   compiler.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #8413: structsequence now subclasses tuple.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #8271: during the decoding of an invalid UTF-8 byte sequence, only the
 | |
|   start byte and the continuation byte(s) are now considered invalid, instead of
 | |
|   the number of bytes specified by the start byte.  E.g.:
 | |
|   '\xf1\x80AB'.decode('utf-8', 'replace') now returns u'\ufffdAB' and replaces
 | |
|   with U+FFFD only the start byte ('\xf1') and the continuation byte ('\x80')
 | |
|   even if '\xf1' is the start byte of a 4-bytes sequence.  Previous versions
 | |
|   returned a single u'\ufffd'.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #9011: A negated imaginary literal (e.g., "-7j") now has real part -0.0
 | |
|   rather than 0.0.  So "-7j" is now exactly equivalent to "-(7j)".
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Be more specific in error messages about positional arguments.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #8949: "z" format of PyArg_Parse*() functions doesn't accept bytes
 | |
|   objects, as described in the documentation.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #6543: Write the traceback in the terminal encoding instead of utf-8.
 | |
|   Fix the encoding of the modules filename.  Patch written by Amaury Forgeot
 | |
|   d'Arc.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #9011: Remove buggy and unnecessary (in 3.x) ST->AST compilation code
 | |
|   dealing with unary minus applied to a constant.  The removed code was mutating
 | |
|   the ST, causing a second compilation to fail.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #850997: mbcs encoding (Windows only) handles errors argument: strict
 | |
|   mode raises unicode errors.  The encoder only supports "strict" and "replace"
 | |
|   error handlers, the decoder only supports "strict" and "ignore" error
 | |
|   handlers.  Patch written by Mark Hammond.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #8850: Remove "w" and "w#" formats from PyArg_Parse*() functions, use
 | |
|   "w*" format instead. Add tests for "w*" format.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #8592: PyArg_Parse*() functions raise a TypeError for "y", "u" and "Z"
 | |
|   formats if the string contains a null byte/character.  Write unit tests for
 | |
|   string formats.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #7490: To facilitate sharing of doctests between 2.x and 3.x test
 | |
|   suites, the IGNORE_EXCEPTION_DETAIL directive now also ignores the module
 | |
|   location of the raised exception.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #8969: On Windows, use mbcs codec in strict mode to encode and decode
 | |
|   filenames and enable os.fsencode().
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #9058: Remove assertions about INT_MAX in UnicodeDecodeError.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #8941: Decoding big endian UTF-32 data in UCS-2 builds could crash the
 | |
|   interpreter with characters outside the Basic Multilingual Plane (higher than
 | |
|   0x10000).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #8950: (See also issue #5080).  Py_ArgParse*() functions now raise
 | |
|   TypeError instead of giving a DeprecationWarning when a float is parsed using
 | |
|   the 'L' code (for long long).  (All other integer codes already raise
 | |
|   TypeError in this case.)
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #8922: Normalize the encoding name in PyUnicode_AsEncodedString() to
 | |
|   enable shortcuts for upper case encoding name. Add also a shortcut for
 | |
|   "iso-8859-1" in PyUnicode_AsEncodedString() and PyUnicode_Decode().
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #8838: Remove codecs.charbuffer_encode() function.  The buffer protocol
 | |
|   doesn't support "char buffer" anymore in Python 3.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #8339: Remove "t#" format of PyArg_Parse*() functions, use "s#" or "s*"
 | |
|   instead.  codecs.charbuffer_encode() now accepts modifiable buffer objects
 | |
|   like bytearray.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #8837: Remove "O?" format of PyArg_Parse*() functions.  The format is no
 | |
|   used anymore and it was never documented.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - In str.format(), raise a ValueError when indexes to arguments are too large.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #2844: Make int('42', n) consistently raise ValueError for invalid
 | |
|   integers n (including n = -909).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #8188: Introduce a new scheme for computing hashes of numbers (instances
 | |
|   of int, float, complex, decimal.Decimal and fractions.Fraction) that makes it
 | |
|   easy to maintain the invariant that hash(x) == hash(y) whenever x and y have
 | |
|   equal value.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #8748: Fix two issues with comparisons between complex and integer
 | |
|   objects.  (1) The comparison could incorrectly return True in some cases
 | |
|   (2**53+1 == complex(2**53) == 2**53), breaking transitivity of equality.
 | |
|   (2) The comparison raised an OverflowError for large integers, leading to
 | |
|   unpredictable exceptions when combining integers and complex objects in sets
 | |
|   or dicts.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #8766: Initialize _warnings module before importing the first module.
 | |
|   Fix a crash if an empty directory called "encodings" exists in sys.path.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #8589: Decode PYTHONWARNINGS environment variable with the file system
 | |
|   encoding and surrogateescape error handler instead of the locale encoding to
 | |
|   be consistent with os.environ.  Add PySys_AddWarnOptionUnicode() function.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - PyObject_Dump() encodes unicode objects to utf8 with backslashreplace (instead
 | |
|   of strict) error handler to escape surrogates.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #8715: Create PyUnicode_EncodeFSDefault() function: Encode a Unicode
 | |
|   object to Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding with the "surrogateescape" error
 | |
|   handler, and return bytes.  If Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding is not set, fall
 | |
|   back to UTF-8.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Enable shortcuts for common encodings in PyUnicode_AsEncodedString() for any
 | |
|   error handler, not only the default error handler (strict).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #8610: Load file system codec at startup, and display a fatal error on
 | |
|   failure.  Set the file system encoding to utf-8 (instead of None) if getting
 | |
|   the locale encoding failed, or if nl_langinfo(CODESET) function is missing.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - PyFile_FromFd() uses PyUnicode_DecodeFSDefault() instead of
 | |
|   PyUnicode_FromString() to support surrogates in the filename and use the right
 | |
|   encoding.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #7507: Quote "!" in pipes.quote(); it is special to some shells.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - PyUnicode_DecodeFSDefaultAndSize() uses surrogateescape error handler.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #8419: Prevent the dict constructor from accepting non-string keyword
 | |
|   arguments.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #8124: PySys_WriteStdout() and PySys_WriteStderr() don't execute
 | |
|   indirectly Python signal handlers anymore because mywrite() ignores exceptions
 | |
|   (KeyboardInterrupt).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #8092: Fix PyUnicode_EncodeUTF8() to support error handler producing
 | |
|   unicode string (eg. backslashreplace).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #8485: PyUnicode_FSConverter() doesn't accept byteearray objects
 | |
|   anymore, you have to convert your bytearray filenames to bytes.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #7332: Remove the 16KB stack-based buffer in
 | |
|   PyMarshal_ReadLastObjectFromFile, which doesn't bring any noticeable benefit
 | |
|   compared to the dynamic memory allocation fallback.  Patch by Charles-François
 | |
|   Natali.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #8417: Raise an OverflowError when an integer larger than sys.maxsize is
 | |
|   passed to bytes or bytearray.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #7301: Add environment variable $PYTHONWARNINGS.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #8329: Don't return the same lists from select.select when no fds are
 | |
|   changed.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #8259: 1L << (2**31) no longer produces an 'outrageous shift error' on
 | |
|   64-bit machines.  The shift count for either left or right shift is permitted
 | |
|   to be up to sys.maxsize.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Ensure that tokenization of identifiers is not affected by locale.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #1222585: Added LDCXXSHARED for C++ support. Patch by Arfrever.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Raise a TypeError when trying to delete a T_STRING_INPLACE struct member.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #8211: Save/restore CFLAGS around AC_PROG_CC in configure.in, in case it
 | |
|   is set.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #8226: sys.setfilesystemencoding() raises a LookupError if the encoding
 | |
|   is unknown.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #1583863: A str subclass can now override the __str__ method.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #8014: Setting a T_UINT or T_PYSSIZET attribute of an object with
 | |
|   PyMemberDefs could produce an internal error; raise TypeError instead.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #7845: Rich comparison methods on the complex type now return
 | |
|   NotImplemented rather than raising a TypeError when comparing with an
 | |
|   incompatible type; this allows user-defined classes to implement their own
 | |
|   comparisons with complex.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #3137: Don't ignore errors at startup, especially a keyboard interrupt
 | |
|   (SIGINT). If an error occurs while importing the site module, the error is
 | |
|   printed and Python exits. Initialize the GIL before importing the site module.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #7173: Generator finalization could invalidate sys.exc_info().
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #7544: Preallocate thread memory before creating the thread to avoid a
 | |
|   fatal error in low memory condition.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #7820: The parser tokenizer restores all bytes in the right if the BOM
 | |
|   check fails.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Handle errors from looking up __prepare__ correctly.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #5939: Add additional runtime checking to ensure a valid capsule in
 | |
|   Modules/_ctypes/callproc.c.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #7309: Fix unchecked attribute access when converting
 | |
|   UnicodeEncodeError, UnicodeDecodeError, and UnicodeTranslateError to strings.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #6902: Fix problem with built-in types format incorrectly with 0
 | |
|   padding.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #7988: Fix default alignment to be right aligned for complex.__format__.
 | |
|   Now it matches other numeric types.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #5988: Remove deprecated functions PyOS_ascii_formatd,
 | |
|   PyOS_ascii_strtod, and PyOS_ascii_atof.  Use PyOS_double_to_string and
 | |
|   PyOS_string_to_double instead.  See issue #5835 for the original deprecations.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #7385: Fix a crash in `MemoryView_FromObject` when `PyObject_GetBuffer`
 | |
|   fails.  Patch by Florent Xicluna.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #7788: Fix an interpreter crash produced by deleting a list slice with
 | |
|   very large step value.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #7766: Change sys.getwindowsversion() return value to a named tuple and
 | |
|   add the additional members returned in an OSVERSIONINFOEX structure.  The new
 | |
|   members are service_pack_major, service_pack_minor, suite_mask, and
 | |
|   product_type.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #7561: Operations on empty bytearrays (such as `int(bytearray())`) could
 | |
|   crash in many places because of the PyByteArray_AS_STRING() macro returning
 | |
|   NULL.  The macro now returns a statically allocated empty string instead.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #6690: Optimize the bytecode for expressions such as `x in {1, 2, 3}`,
 | |
|   where the right hand operand is a set of constants, by turning the set into a
 | |
|   frozenset and pre-building it as a constant.  The comparison operation is made
 | |
|   against the constant instead of building a new set each time it is executed (a
 | |
|   similar optimization already existed which turned a list of constants into a
 | |
|   pre-built tuple).  Patch and additional tests by Dave Malcolm.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #7622: Improve the split(), rsplit(), splitlines() and replace() methods
 | |
|   of bytes, bytearray and unicode objects by using a common implementation based
 | |
|   on stringlib's fast search.  Patch by Florent Xicluna.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #7632: Fix various str -> float conversion bugs present in 2.7 alpha 2,
 | |
|   including: (1) a serious 'wrong output' bug that could occur for long (> 40
 | |
|   digit) input strings, (2) a crash in dtoa.c that occurred in debug builds when
 | |
|   parsing certain long numeric strings corresponding to subnormal values, (3) a
 | |
|   memory leak for some values large enough to cause overflow, and (4) a number
 | |
|   of flaws that could lead to incorrectly rounded results.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The __complex__ method is now looked up on the class of instances to make it
 | |
|   consistent with other special methods.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #7462: Implement the stringlib fast search algorithm for the `rfind`,
 | |
|   `rindex`, `rsplit` and `rpartition` methods.  Patch by Florent Xicluna.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #7604: Deleting an unset slotted attribute did not raise an
 | |
|   AttributeError.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #7534: Fix handling of IEEE specials (infinities, nans, negative zero)
 | |
|   in ** operator.  The behaviour now conforms to that described in C99 Annex F.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #1811: improve accuracy and cross-platform consistency for true division
 | |
|   of integers: the result of a/b is now correctly rounded for ints a and b (at
 | |
|   least on IEEE 754 platforms), and in particular does not depend on the
 | |
|   internal representation of an int.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #6834: replace the implementation for the 'python' and 'pythonw'
 | |
|   executables on OSX.
 | |
| 
 | |
|   These executables now work properly with the arch(1) command: ``arch -ppc
 | |
|   python`` will start a universal binary version of python in PPC mode (unlike
 | |
|   previous releases).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #7466: Segmentation fault when the garbage collector is called in the
 | |
|   middle of populating a tuple.  Patch by Florent Xicluna.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #7419: setlocale() could crash the interpreter on Windows when called
 | |
|   with invalid values.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #6077: On Windows, files opened with tempfile.TemporaryFile in "wt+"
 | |
|   mode would appear truncated on the first '0x1a' byte (aka. Ctrl+Z).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #7085: Fix crash when importing some extensions in a thread on MacOSX
 | |
|   10.6.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #1757126: Fix the cyrillic-asian alias for the ptcp154 encoding.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #6970: Remove redundant calls when comparing objects that don't
 | |
|   implement the relevant rich comparison methods.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #7298: Fixes for range and reversed(range(...)).  Iteration over
 | |
|   range(a, b, c) incorrectly gave an empty iterator when a, b and c fit in C
 | |
|   long but the length of the range did not.  Also fix several cases where
 | |
|   reversed(range(a, b, c)) gave wrong results, and fix a refleak for
 | |
|   reversed(range(a, b, c)) with large arguments.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #7244: itertools.izip_longest() no longer ignores exceptions raised
 | |
|   during the formation of an output tuple.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #3297: On wide unicode builds, do not split unicode characters into
 | |
|   surrogates.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Remove length limitation when constructing a complex number from a string.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #1087418: Boost performance of bitwise operations for longs.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Support for AtheOS has been completely removed from the code base. It was
 | |
|   disabled since Python 3.0.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Support for several legacy threading libraries has been disabled. These
 | |
|   libraries are: Mach C threads, SunOS LWP, GNU pth, Irix threads. Support code
 | |
|   will be entirely removed in 3.3.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Support for OSF* has been disabled. If nobody stands up, support will be
 | |
|   removed in 3.3. See <http://bugs.python.org/issue8606>.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Peephole constant folding had missed UNARY_POSITIVE.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #1722344: threading._shutdown() is now called in Py_Finalize(), which
 | |
|   fixes the problem of some exceptions being thrown at shutdown when the
 | |
|   interpreter is killed. Patch by Adam Olsen.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #7147: Remove support for compiling Python without complex number
 | |
|   support.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #7120: logging: Removed import of multiprocessing which is causing crash
 | |
|   in GAE.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #1754094: Improve the stack depth calculation in the compiler.  There
 | |
|   should be no other effect than a small decrease in memory use.  Patch by
 | |
|   Christopher Tur Lesniewski-Laas.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #7065: Fix a crash in bytes.maketrans and bytearray.maketrans when using
 | |
|   byte values greater than 127.  Patch by Derk Drukker.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #1571184: The Unicode database contains properties for more characters.
 | |
|   The tables for code points representing numeric values, white spaces or line
 | |
|   breaks are now generated from the official Unicode Character Database files,
 | |
|   and include information from the Unihan.txt file.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #7019: Raise ValueError when unmarshalling bad long data, instead of
 | |
|   producing internally inconsistent Python longs.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #6990: Fix threading.local subclasses leaving old state around after a
 | |
|   reference cycle GC which could be recycled by new locals.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #5460: Fix an ambiguity in the grammar.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #1766304: Improve performance of membership tests on range objects.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #6713: Improve performance of integer -> string conversions.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #6846: Fix bug where bytearray.pop() returns negative integers.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #6750: A text file opened with io.open() could duplicate its output when
 | |
|   writing from multiple threads at the same time.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #6707: dir() on an uninitialized module caused a crash.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #6540: Fixed crash for bytearray.translate() with invalid parameters.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #6573: set.union() stopped processing inputs if an instance of self
 | |
|   occurred in the argument chain.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #6070: On posix platforms import no longer copies the execute bit from
 | |
|   the .py file to the .pyc file if it is set.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #1616979: Added the cp720 (Arabic DOS) encoding.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #6428: Since Python 3.0, the __bool__ method must return a bool object,
 | |
|   and not an int.  Fix the corresponding error message, and the documentation.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The deprecated PyCObject has been removed.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #6347: Include inttypes.h as well as stdint.h in pyport.h.  This fixes a
 | |
|   build failure on HP-UX: int32_t and uint32_t are defined in inttypes.h instead
 | |
|   of stdint.h on that platform.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #6373: Fixed a SystemError when encoding with the latin-1 codec and the
 | |
|   'surrogateescape' error handler, a string which contains unpaired surrogates.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #4856: Remove checks for win NT.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #6687: PyBytes_FromObject() no longer accepts an integer as its argument
 | |
|   to construct a null-initialized bytes object.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #1023290: Add from_bytes() and to_bytes() methods to integers.  These
 | |
|   methods allow the conversion of integers to bytes, and vice-versa.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #7382: Fix bug in bytes.__getnewargs__ that prevented bytes instances
 | |
|   from being copied with copy.copy(), and bytes subclasses from being pickled
 | |
|   properly.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Code objects now support weak references.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #7072: isspace(0xa0) is true on Mac OS X.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #8084: PEP 370 now conforms to system conventions for framework builds
 | |
|   on MacOS X. That is, "python setup.py install --user" will install into
 | |
|   "~/Library/Python/2.7" instead of "~/.local".
 | |
| 
 | |
| C-API
 | |
| -----
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #2443: A new macro, `Py_VA_COPY`, copies the state of the
 | |
|   variable argument list.  `Py_VA_COPY` is equivalent to C99
 | |
|   `va_copy`, but available on all python platforms.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - PySlice_GetIndicesEx now clips the step to [-PY_SSIZE_T_MAX, PY_SSIZE_T_MAX]
 | |
|   instead of [-PY_SSIZE_T_MAX-1, PY_SSIZE_T_MAX].  This makes it safe to do
 | |
|   "step = -step" when reversing a slice.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #5753: A new C API function, `PySys_SetArgvEx`, allows embedders of the
 | |
|   interpreter to set sys.argv without also modifying sys.path.  This helps fix
 | |
|   `CVE-2008-5983
 | |
|   <http://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2008-5983>`_.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Add PyArg_ValidateKeywordArguments, which checks if all keyword arguments are
 | |
|   strings in an efficient manner.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #8276: PyEval_CallObject() is now only available in macro form.  The
 | |
|   function declaration, which was kept for backwards compatibility reasons, is
 | |
|   now removed (the macro was introduced in 1997!).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #7767: New function PyLong_AsLongLongAndOverflow added, analogous to
 | |
|   PyLong_AsLongAndOverflow.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Make PyUnicode_CompareWithASCIIString return not equal if the Python string
 | |
|   has '\0' at the end.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #5080: The argument parsing functions PyArg_ParseTuple,
 | |
|   PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords, PyArg_VaParse, PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords and
 | |
|   PyArg_Parse now raise a DeprecationWarning for float arguments passed with the
 | |
|   'L' format code.  This will become a TypeError in a future version of Python,
 | |
|   to match the behaviour of the other integer format codes.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #7033: Function ``PyErr_NewExceptionWithDoc()`` added.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #7414: 'C' code wasn't being skipped properly (for keyword arguments) in
 | |
|   PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #7228: Add '%lld' and '%llu' support to PyString_FromFormat(V) and
 | |
|   PyErr_Format, on machines with HAVE_LONG_LONG defined.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #6151: Made PyDescr_COMMON conform to standard C (like PyObject_HEAD in
 | |
|   PEP 3123).  The PyDescr_TYPE and PyDescr_NAME macros should be should used for
 | |
|   accessing the d_type and d_name members of structures using PyDescr_COMMON.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #6405: Remove duplicate type declarations in descrobject.h.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The code flags for old __future__ features are now available again.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #5954: Add a PyFrame_GetLineNumber() function to replace most uses of
 | |
|   PyCode_Addr2Line().
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #5959: Add a PyCode_NewEmpty() function to create a new empty code
 | |
|   object at a specified file, function, and line number.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #1419652: Change the first argument to PyImport_AppendInittab() to
 | |
|   ``const char *`` as the string is stored beyond the call.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #2422: When compiled with the ``--with-valgrind`` option, the pymalloc
 | |
|   allocator will be automatically disabled when running under Valgrind.  This
 | |
|   gives improved memory leak detection when running under Valgrind, while taking
 | |
|   advantage of pymalloc at other times.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Library
 | |
| -------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - In pdb, when Ctrl-C is entered while defining commands for a breakpoint, the
 | |
|   old commands are restored.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - For traceback debugging, the pdb listing now also shows the locations where
 | |
|   the exception was originally (re)raised, if it differs from the last line
 | |
|   executed (e.g. in case of finally clauses).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The pdb command "source" has been added.  It displays the source code for a
 | |
|   given object, if possible.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The pdb command "longlist" has been added.  It displays the whole source code
 | |
|   for the current function.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #1503502: Make pdb.Pdb easier to subclass by putting message and error
 | |
|   output into methods.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #809887: Make the output of pdb's breakpoint deletions more consistent;
 | |
|   emit a message when a breakpoint is enabled or disabled.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #5294: Fix the behavior of pdb's "continue" command when called in the
 | |
|   top-level debugged frame.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #5727: Restore the ability to use readline when calling into pdb in
 | |
|   doctests.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #6719: In pdb, do not stop somewhere in the encodings machinery if the
 | |
|   source file to be debugged is in a non-builtin encoding.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #8048: Prevent doctests from failing when sys.displayhook has been
 | |
|   reassigned.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #8015: In pdb, do not crash when an empty line is entered as a
 | |
|   breakpoint command.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - In pdb, allow giving a line number to the "until" command.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #1437051: For pdb, allow "continue" and related commands in .pdbrc
 | |
|   files.  Also, add a command-line option "-c" that runs a command as if given
 | |
|   in .pdbrc.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #4179: In pdb, allow "list ." as a command to return to the currently
 | |
|   debugged line.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #4108: In urllib.robotparser, if there are multiple ``User-agent: *``
 | |
|   entries, consider the first one.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #6630: Allow customizing regex flags when subclassing the
 | |
|   string.Template class.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #9411: Allow specifying an encoding for config files in the configparser
 | |
|   module.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #1682942: Improvements to configparser: support alternate delimiters,
 | |
|   alternate comment prefixes and empty lines in values.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #9354: Provide getsockopt() in asyncore's file_wrapper.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #8966: ctypes: Remove implicit bytes-unicode conversion.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #9378: python -m pickle <pickle file> will now load and display the
 | |
|   first object in the pickle file.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #4770: Restrict binascii module to accept only bytes (as specified).
 | |
|   And fix the email package to encode to ASCII instead of ``raw-unicode-escape``
 | |
|   before ASCII-to-binary decoding.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #9384: ``python -m tkinter`` will now display a simple demo applet.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The default size of the re module's compiled regular expression cache has been
 | |
|   increased from 100 to 500 and the cache replacement policy has changed from
 | |
|   simply clearing the entire cache on overflow to forgetting the least recently
 | |
|   used cached compiled regular expressions.  This is a performance win for
 | |
|   applications that use a lot of regular expressions and limits the impact of
 | |
|   the performance hit anytime the cache is exceeded.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #7113: Speed up loading in configparser. Patch by Łukasz Langa.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #9032: XML-RPC client retries the request on EPIPE error.  The EPIPE
 | |
|   error occurs when the server closes the socket and the client sends a big
 | |
|   XML-RPC request.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #4629: getopt raises an error if an argument ends with "=", whereas
 | |
|   getopt doesn't accept a value (eg. --help= is rejected if getopt uses
 | |
|   ['help='] long options).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #7989: Added pure python implementation of the `datetime` module.  The C
 | |
|   module is renamed to `_datetime` and if available, overrides all classes
 | |
|   defined in datetime with fast C impementation.  Python implementation is based
 | |
|   on the original python prototype for the datetime module by Tim Peters with
 | |
|   minor modifications by the PyPy project.  The test suite now tests `datetime`
 | |
|   module with and without `_datetime` acceleration using the same test cases.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #7895: platform.mac_ver() no longer crashes after calling os.fork().
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #9323: Fixed a bug in trace.py that resulted in loosing the name of the
 | |
|   script being traced.  Patch by Eli Bendersky.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #9282: Fixed --listfuncs option of trace.py.  Thanks Eli Bendersky for
 | |
|   the patch.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #3704: http.cookiejar was not properly handling URLs with a / in the
 | |
|   parameters.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #9268: ``pickletools.dis()`` now has an optional *annotate* argument
 | |
|   which controls printing of opcode descriptions in ``dis()`` output.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #1555570: email no longer inserts extra blank lines when a \r\n combo
 | |
|   crosses an 8192 byte boundary.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #9243: Fix sndhdr module and add unit tests, contributed by James Lee.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - ``ast.literal_eval()`` now allows byte literals.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #9137: Fix issue in MutableMapping.update, which incorrectly treated
 | |
|   keyword arguments called 'self' or 'other' specially.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - ``ast.literal_eval()`` now allows set literals.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #9164: Ensure that sysconfig handles duplicate -arch flags in CFLAGS.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #7646: The fnmatch pattern cache no longer grows without bound.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #9136: Fix 'dictionary changed size during iteration' RuntimeError
 | |
|   produced when profiling the decimal module.  This was due to a dangerous
 | |
|   iteration over 'locals()' in Context.__init__.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Fix extreme speed issue in Decimal.pow when the base is an exact power of 10
 | |
|   and the exponent is tiny (for example, ``Decimal(10) **
 | |
|   Decimal('1e-999999999')``).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #9186: Fix math.log1p(-1.0) to raise ValueError, not OverflowError.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #9130: Fix validation of relative imports in parser module.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #9128: Fix validation of class decorators in parser module.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #9094: python -m pickletools will now disassemble pickle files listed in
 | |
|   the command line arguments.  See output of python -m pickletools -h for more
 | |
|   details.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #5468: urlencode to handle bytes type and other encodings in its query
 | |
|   parameter. Patch by Dan Mahn.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #7673: Fix security vulnerability (CVE-2010-2089) in the audioop module,
 | |
|   ensure that the input string length is a multiple of the frame size.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #6507: Accept source strings in dis.dis().  Original patch by Daniel
 | |
|   Urban.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #7829: Clearly document that the dis module is exposing an
 | |
|   implementation detail that is not stable between Python VMs or releases.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #6589: cleanup asyncore.socket_map in case smtpd.SMTPServer constructor
 | |
|   raises an exception.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #9110: Addition of ContextDecorator to contextlib, for creating APIs
 | |
|   that act as both context managers and decorators. contextmanager changes to
 | |
|   use ContextDecorator.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Implement importlib.abc.SourceLoader and deprecate PyLoader and PyPycLoader
 | |
|   for removal in Python 3.4.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #9064: pdb's "up" and "down" commands now accept an optional argument
 | |
|   giving the number of frames to go.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #9018: os.path.normcase() now raises a TypeError if the argument is not
 | |
|   ``str`` or ``bytes``.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #9075: In the ssl module, remove the setting of a ``debug`` flag on an
 | |
|   OpenSSL structure.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #8682: The ssl module now temporary increments the reference count of a
 | |
|   socket object got through ``PyWeakref_GetObject``, so as to avoid possible
 | |
|   deallocation while the object is still being used.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #1368368: FancyURLOpener class changed to throw an Exception on wrong
 | |
|   password instead of presenting an interactive prompt.  Older behavior can be
 | |
|   obtained by passing retry=True to http_error_xxx methods of FancyURLOpener.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #8720: Fix regression caused by fix for #4050 by making getsourcefile
 | |
|   smart enough to find source files in the linecache.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #5610: feedparser no longer eats extra characters at the end of a body
 | |
|   part if the body part ends with a ``\r\n``.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #8986: math.erfc was incorrectly raising OverflowError for values
 | |
|   between -27.3 and -30.0 on some platforms.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #8784: Set tarfile default encoding to 'utf-8' on Windows.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #8966: If a ctypes structure field is an array of c_char, convert its
 | |
|   value to bytes instead of str (as done for c_char and c_char_p).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #8188: Comparisons between Decimal and Fraction objects are now
 | |
|   permitted, returning a result based on the exact numerical values of the
 | |
|   operands.  This builds on issue #2531, which allowed Decimal-to-float
 | |
|   comparisons; all comparisons involving numeric types (bool, int, float,
 | |
|   complex, Decimal, Fraction) should now act as expected.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #8897: Fix sunau module, use bytes to write the header. Patch written by
 | |
|   Thomas Jollans.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #8899: time.struct_time now has class and attribute docstrings.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #6470: Drop UNC prefix in FixTk.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #4768: base64 encoded email body parts were incorrectly stored as binary
 | |
|   strings.  They are now correctly converted to strings.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #8833: tarfile created hard link entries with a size field != 0 by
 | |
|   mistake.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Charset.body_encode now correctly handles base64 encoding by encoding with the
 | |
|   output_charset before calling base64mime.encode.  Passes the tests from 2.x
 | |
|   issue #1368247.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #8845: sqlite3 Connection objects now have a read-only in_transaction
 | |
|   attribute that is True iff there are uncommitted changes.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #1289118: datetime.timedelta objects can now be multiplied by float and
 | |
|   divided by float and int objects.  Results are rounded to the nearest multiple
 | |
|   of timedelta.resolution with ties resolved using round-half-to-even method.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #7150: Raise OverflowError if the result of adding or subtracting
 | |
|   timedelta from date or datetime falls outside of the MINYEAR:MAXYEAR range.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #8806: add SSL contexts support to ftplib.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #4769: Fix main() function of the base64 module, use sys.stdin.buffer
 | |
|   and sys.stdout.buffer (instead of sys.stdin and sys.stdout) to use the bytes
 | |
|   API.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #8770: Now sysconfig displays information when it's called as a script.
 | |
|   Initial idea by Sridhar Ratnakumar.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #6662: Fix parsing of malformatted charref (&#bad;), patch written by
 | |
|   Fredrik Håård.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #8540: Decimal module: rename the Context._clamp attribute to
 | |
|   Context.clamp and make it public.  This is useful in creating contexts that
 | |
|   correspond to the decimal interchange formats specified in IEEE 754.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #6268: Fix seek() method of codecs.open(), don't read or write the BOM
 | |
|   twice after seek(0). Fix also reset() method of codecs, UTF-16, UTF-32 and
 | |
|   StreamWriter classes.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #3798: sys.exit(message) writes the message to sys.stderr file, instead
 | |
|   of the C file stderr, to use stderr encoding and error handler.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #8782: Add a trailing newline in linecache.updatecache to the last line
 | |
|   of files without one.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #8729: Return NotImplemented from collections.Mapping.__eq__ when
 | |
|   comparing to a non-mapping.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #8774: tabnanny uses the encoding cookie (#coding:...) to use the
 | |
|   correct encoding.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #4870: Add an `options` attribute to SSL contexts, as well as several
 | |
|   ``OP_*`` constants to the `ssl` module.  This allows to selectively disable
 | |
|   protocol versions, when used in combination with `PROTOCOL_SSLv23`.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #8759: Fixed user paths in sysconfig for posix and os2 schemes.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #8663: distutils.log emulates backslashreplace error handler. Fix
 | |
|   compilation in a non-ASCII directory if stdout encoding is ASCII (eg. if
 | |
|   stdout is not a TTY).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #8513: os.get_exec_path() supports b'PATH' key and bytes value.
 | |
|   subprocess.Popen() and os._execvpe() support bytes program name. Add
 | |
|   os.supports_bytes_environ flag: True if the native OS type of the environment
 | |
|   is bytes (eg. False on Windows).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #8633: tarfile is now able to read and write archives with "raw" binary
 | |
|   pax headers as described in POSIX.1-2008.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #1285086: Speed up urllib.parse functions: quote, quote_from_bytes,
 | |
|   unquote, unquote_to_bytes.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #8688: Distutils now recalculates MANIFEST everytime.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #8477: ssl.RAND_egd() and ssl._test_decode_cert() support str with
 | |
|   surrogates and bytes for the filename.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #8550: Add first class ``SSLContext`` objects to the ssl module.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #8681: Make the zlib module's error messages more informative when the
 | |
|   zlib itself doesn't give any detailed explanation.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The audioop module now supports sound fragments of length greater than 2**31
 | |
|   bytes on 64-bit machines, and is PY_SSIZE_T_CLEAN.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #4972: Add support for the context manager protocol to the ftplib.FTP
 | |
|   class.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #8664: In py_compile, create __pycache__ when the compiled path is
 | |
|   given.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #8514: Add os.fsencode() function (Unix only): encode a string to bytes
 | |
|   for use in the file system, environment variables or the command line.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #8571: Fix an internal error when compressing or decompressing a chunk
 | |
|   larger than 1GB with the zlib module's compressor and decompressor objects.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #8603: Support bytes environmental variables on Unix: Add os.environb
 | |
|   mapping and os.getenvb() function. os.unsetenv() encodes str argument to the
 | |
|   file system encoding with the surrogateescape error handler (instead of
 | |
|   utf8/strict) and accepts bytes. posix.environ keys and values are now bytes.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #8573: asyncore _strerror() function might throw ValueError.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #8483: asyncore.dispatcher's __getattr__ method produced confusing error
 | |
|   messages when accessing undefined class attributes because of the cheap
 | |
|   inheritance with the underlying socket object.  The cheap inheritance has been
 | |
|   deprecated.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #4265: shutil.copyfile() was leaking file descriptors when disk fills.
 | |
|   Patch by Tres Seaver.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #8390: tarfile uses surrogateescape as the default error handler
 | |
|   (instead of replace in read mode or strict in write mode).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #7755: Use an unencumbered audio file for tests.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #8621: uuid.uuid4() returned the same sequence of values in the parent
 | |
|   and any children created using ``os.fork`` on MacOS X 10.6.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #8567: Fix precedence of signals in Decimal module: when a Decimal
 | |
|   operation raises multiple signals and more than one of those signals is
 | |
|   trapped, the specification determines the order in which the signals should be
 | |
|   handled.  In many cases this order wasn't being followed, leading to the wrong
 | |
|   Python exception being raised.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #7865: The close() method of ``io`` objects should not swallow
 | |
|   exceptions raised by the implicit flush().  Also qensure that calling close()
 | |
|   several times is supported.  Patch by Pascal Chambon.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #4687: Fix accuracy of garbage collection runtimes displayed with
 | |
|   gc.DEBUG_STATS.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #8354: The siginterrupt setting is now preserved for all signals, not
 | |
|   just SIGCHLD.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #7192: webbrowser.get("firefox") now works on Mac OS X, as does
 | |
|   webbrowser.get("safari").
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #8464: tarfile no longer creates files with execute permissions set when
 | |
|   mode="w|" is used.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #7834: Fix connect() of Bluetooth L2CAP sockets with recent versions of
 | |
|   the Linux kernel.  Patch by Yaniv Aknin.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #8295: Added shutil.unpack_archive.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #6312: Fixed http HEAD request when the transfer encoding is chunked.
 | |
|   It should correctly return an empty response now.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #8546: Reject None given as the buffering argument to _pyio.open.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #8549: Fix compiling the _ssl extension under AIX.  Patch by
 | |
|   Sridhar Ratnakumar.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #6656: fix locale.format_string to handle escaped percents
 | |
|   and mappings.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #2302: Fix a race condition in SocketServer.BaseServer.shutdown, where
 | |
|   the method could block indefinitely if called just before the event loop
 | |
|   started running.  This also fixes the occasional freezes witnessed in
 | |
|   test_httpservers.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #8524: When creating an SSL socket, the timeout value of the original
 | |
|   socket wasn't retained (instead, a socket with a positive timeout would be
 | |
|   turned into a non-blocking SSL socket).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #5103: SSL handshake would ignore the socket timeout and block
 | |
|   indefinitely if the other end didn't respond.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The do_handshake() method of SSL objects now adjusts the blocking mode of the
 | |
|   SSL structure if necessary (as other methods already do).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #8391: os.execvpe() and os.getenv() supports unicode with surrogates and
 | |
|   bytes strings for environment keys and values.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #8467: Pure Python implementation of subprocess encodes the error
 | |
|   message using surrogatepass error handler to support surrogates in the
 | |
|   message.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #8468: bz2.BZ2File() accepts str with surrogates and bytes filenames.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #8451: Syslog module now uses basename(sys.argv[0]) instead of the
 | |
|   string "python" as the *ident*.  openlog() arguments are all optional and
 | |
|   keywords.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #8108: Fix the unwrap() method of SSL objects when the socket has a
 | |
|   non-infinite timeout.  Also make that method friendlier with applications
 | |
|   wanting to continue using the socket in clear-text mode, by disabling
 | |
|   OpenSSL's internal readahead.  Thanks to Darryl Miles for guidance.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #8496: make mailcap.lookup() always return a list, rather than an
 | |
|   iterator.  Patch by Gregory Nofi.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #8195: Fix a crash in sqlite Connection.create_collation() if the
 | |
|   collation name contains a surrogate character.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #8484: Load all ciphers and digest algorithms when initializing the _ssl
 | |
|   extension, such that verification of some SSL certificates doesn't fail
 | |
|   because of an "unknown algorithm".
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #6547: Added the ignore_dangling_symlinks option to shutil.copytree.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #1540112: Now allowing the choice of a copy function in shutil.copytree.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #4814: timeout parameter is now applied also for connections resulting
 | |
|   from PORT/EPRT commands.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #8463: added missing reference to bztar in shutil's documentation.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #7154: urllib.request can now detect the proxy settings on OSX 10.6 (as
 | |
|   long as the user didn't specify 'automatic proxy configuration').
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #3817: ftplib.FTP.abort() method now considers 225 a valid response code
 | |
|   as stated in RFC-959 at chapter 5.4.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #8394: _ctypes.dlopen() accepts bytes, bytearray and str with
 | |
|   surrogates.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #850728: Add a *timeout* parameter to the `acquire()` method of
 | |
|   `threading.Semaphore` objects.  Original patch by Torsten Landschoff.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #8322: Add a *ciphers* argument to SSL sockets, so as to change the
 | |
|   available cipher list.  Helps fix test_ssl with OpenSSL 1.0.0.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #8393: subprocess accepts bytes, bytearray and str with surrogates for
 | |
|   the current working directory.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #7606: XML-RPC traceback stored in X-traceback is now encoded to ASCII
 | |
|   using backslashreplace error handler.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #8412: os.system() now accepts bytes, bytearray and str with surrogates.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #2987: RFC2732 support for urlparse (IPv6 addresses). Patch by Tony
 | |
|   Locke and Hans Ulrich Niedermann.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #5277: Fix quote counting when parsing RFC 2231 encoded parameters.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #7316: The acquire() method of lock objects in the ``threading``
 | |
|   module now takes an optional timeout argument in seconds.  Timeout support
 | |
|   relies on the system threading library, so as to avoid a semi-busy wait loop.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #8383: pickle and pickletools use surrogatepass error handler when
 | |
|   encoding unicode as utf8 to support lone surrogates and stay compatible with
 | |
|   Python 2.x and 3.x.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #7585: difflib context and unified diffs now place a tab between
 | |
|   filename and date, conforming to the 'standards' they were originally designed
 | |
|   to follow.  This improves compatibility with patch tools.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #7472: Fixed typo in email.encoders module; messages using ISO-2022
 | |
|   character sets will now consistently use a Content-Transfer-Encoding of 7bit
 | |
|   rather than sometimes being marked as 8bit.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #8375: test_distutils now checks if the temporary directory are still
 | |
|   present before it cleans them.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #8374: Update the internal alias table in the ``locale`` module to
 | |
|   cover recent locale changes and additions.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #8321: Give access to OpenSSL version numbers from the `ssl` module,
 | |
|   using the new attributes `ssl.OPENSSL_VERSION`, `ssl.OPENSSL_VERSION_INFO` and
 | |
|   `ssl.OPENSSL_VERSION_NUMBER`.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Add functools.total_ordering() and functools.cmp_to_key().
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #8257: The Decimal construct now accepts a float instance directly,
 | |
|   converting that float to a Decimal of equal value:
 | |
| 
 | |
|      >>> Decimal(1.1)
 | |
|      Decimal('1.100000000000000088817841970012523233890533447265625')
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #8294: The Fraction constructor now accepts Decimal and float instances
 | |
|   directly.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #7279: Comparisons involving a Decimal signaling NaN now signal
 | |
|   InvalidOperation instead of returning False.  (Comparisons involving a quiet
 | |
|   NaN are unchanged.)  Also, Decimal quiet NaNs are now hashable; Decimal
 | |
|   signaling NaNs remain unhashable.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #2531: Comparison operations between floats and Decimal instances now
 | |
|   return a result based on the numeric values of the operands; previously they
 | |
|   returned an arbitrary result based on the relative ordering of id(float) and
 | |
|   id(Decimal).  See also issue #8188, which adds Decimal-to-Fraction
 | |
|   comparisons.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Added a subtract() method to collections.Counter().
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #8233: When run as a script, py_compile.py optionally takes a single
 | |
|   argument `-` which tells it to read files to compile from stdin.  Each line is
 | |
|   read on demand and the named file is compiled immediately.  (Original patch by
 | |
|   Piotr Ożarowski).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Backwards incompatible change: Unicode codepoints line tabulation (0x0B) and
 | |
|   form feed (0x0C) are now considered linebreaks, as specified in Unicode
 | |
|   Standard Annex #14.  See issue #7643.  http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr14/
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Comparisons using one of <, <=, >, >= between a complex instance and a
 | |
|   Fractions instance now raise TypeError instead of returning True/False.  This
 | |
|   makes Fraction <=> complex comparisons consistent with int <=> complex, float
 | |
|   <=> complex, and complex <=> complex comparisons.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #8139: ossaudiodev didn't initialize its types properly, therefore some
 | |
|   methods (such as oss_mixer_device.fileno()) were not available.  Initial patch
 | |
|   by Bertrand Janin.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #8205: Remove the "Modules" directory from sys.path when Python is
 | |
|   running from the build directory (POSIX only).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #7512: shutil.copystat() could raise an OSError when the filesystem
 | |
|   didn't support chflags() (for example ZFS under FreeBSD).  The error is now
 | |
|   silenced.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #7860: platform.uname now reports the correct 'machine' type when Python
 | |
|   is running in WOW64 mode on 64 bit Windows.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #3890, #8222: Fix recv() and recv_into() on non-blocking SSL sockets.
 | |
|   Also, enable the SSL_MODE_AUTO_RETRY flag on SSL sockets, so that blocking
 | |
|   reads and writes are always retried by OpenSSL itself.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #4282: Fix the main function of the profile module for a non-ASCII
 | |
|   script, open the file in binary mode and not in text mode with the default
 | |
|   (utf8) encoding.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #8179: Fix macpath.realpath() on a non-existing path.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #8024: Update the Unicode database to 5.2.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #8168: py_compile now handles files with utf-8 BOMS.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - ``tokenize.detect_encoding`` now returns ``'utf-8-sig'`` when a UTF-8 BOM is
 | |
|   detected.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #6716/2: Backslash-replace error output in compilall.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #4961: Inconsistent/wrong result of askyesno function in tkMessageBox
 | |
|   with Tcl/Tk-8.5.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #8140: extend compileall to compile single files.  Add -i option.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #7356: ctypes.util: Make parsing of ldconfig output independent of the
 | |
|   locale.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The internals of the subprocess module on POSIX systems have been replaced by
 | |
|   an extension module (_posixsubprocess) so that the fork()+exec() can be done
 | |
|   safely without the possibility of deadlock in multithreaded applications.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - subprocess.Popen now has restore_signals and start_new_session features.  The
 | |
|   default of restore_signals=True is a new behavior compared to earlier Python
 | |
|   versions.  This means that signals such as SIGPIPE are not ignored by default
 | |
|   in subprocesses launched by Python (Issue #1652).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #6472: The xml.etree package is updated to ElementTree 1.3.  The
 | |
|   cElementTree module is updated too.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #7774: Set sys.executable to an empty string if argv[0] has been set to
 | |
|   an non existent program name and Python is unable to retrieve the real program
 | |
|   name.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #7880: Fix sysconfig when the python executable is a symbolic link.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #6509: fix re.sub to work properly when the pattern, the string, and the
 | |
|   replacement were all bytes.  Patch by Antoine Pitrou.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The sqlite3 module was updated to pysqlite 2.6.0. This fixes several obscure
 | |
|   bugs and allows loading SQLite extensions from shared libraries.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #1054943: Fix ``unicodedata.normalize('NFC', text)`` for the Public
 | |
|   Review Issue #29 (http://unicode.org/review/pr-29.html).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #7494: fix a crash in _lsprof (cProfile) after clearing the profiler,
 | |
|   reset also the pointer to the current pointer context.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #7232: Add support for the context manager protocol to the TarFile
 | |
|   class.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #7250: Fix info leak of os.environ across multi-run uses of
 | |
|   wsgiref.handlers.CGIHandler.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #1729305: Fix doctest to handle encode error with "backslashreplace".
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #691291: codecs.open() should not convert end of lines on reading and
 | |
|   writing.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #7869: logging: improved diagnostic for format-time errors.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #7868: logging: added loggerClass attribute to Manager.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - logging: Implemented PEP 391.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #1537721: Add a writeheader() method to csv.DictWriter.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #7959: ctypes callback functions are now registered correctly with the
 | |
|   cycle garbage collector.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #5801: removed spurious empty lines in wsgiref.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #6666: fix bug in trace.py that applied the list of directories to be
 | |
|   ignored only to the first file.  Noted by Bogdan Opanchuk.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #7597: curses.use_env() can now be called before initscr().  Noted by
 | |
|   Kan-Ru Chen.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #7310: fix the __repr__ of os.environ to show the environment variables.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #7970: email.Generator.flatten now correctly flattens message/rfc822
 | |
|   messages parsed by email.Parser.HeaderParser.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #7361: Importlib was not properly checking the number of bytes in
 | |
|   bytecode file when it was less then 8 bytes.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #7633: In the decimal module, Context class methods (with the exception
 | |
|   of canonical and is_canonical) now accept instances of int and long wherever a
 | |
|   Decimal instance is accepted, and implicitly convert that argument to Decimal.
 | |
|   Previously only some arguments were converted.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #7835: shelve should no longer produce mysterious warnings during
 | |
|   interpreter shutdown.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #2746: Don't escape ampersands and angle brackets ("&", "<", ">") in XML
 | |
|   processing instructions and comments.  These raw characters are allowed by the
 | |
|   XML specification, and are necessary when outputting e.g.  PHP code in a
 | |
|   processing instruction.  Patch by Neil Muller.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #6233: ElementTree failed converting unicode characters to XML entities
 | |
|   when they could't be represented in the requested output encoding.  Patch by
 | |
|   Jerry Chen.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #6003: add an argument to ``zipfile.Zipfile.writestr`` to specify the
 | |
|   compression type.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #4772: Raise a ValueError when an unknown Bluetooth protocol is
 | |
|   specified, rather than fall through to AF_PACKET (in the `socket` module).
 | |
|   Also, raise ValueError rather than TypeError when an unknown TIPC address type
 | |
|   is specified.  Patch by Brian Curtin.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #6939: Fix file I/O objects in the `io` module to keep the original file
 | |
|   position when calling `truncate()`.  It would previously change the file
 | |
|   position to the given argument, which goes against the tradition of
 | |
|   ftruncate() and other truncation APIs.  Patch by Pascal Chambon.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #7610: Reworked implementation of the internal
 | |
|   ``zipfile.ZipExtFile`` class used to represent files stored inside an
 | |
|   archive.  The new implementation is significantly faster and can be wrapped in
 | |
|   a ``io.BufferedReader`` object for more speedups.  It also solves an
 | |
|   issue where interleaved calls to `read()` and `readline()` give wrong results.
 | |
|   Patch by Nir Aides.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #6963: Added "maxtasksperchild" argument to multiprocessing.Pool,
 | |
|   allowing for a maximum number of tasks within the pool to be completed by the
 | |
|   worker before that worker is terminated, and a new one created to replace it.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #7792: Registering non-classes to ABCs raised an obscure error.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #7785: Don't accept bytes in FileIO.write().
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Removed the functions 'verify' and 'vereq' from Lib/test/support.py.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #7773: Fix an UnboundLocalError in platform.linux_distribution() when
 | |
|   the release file is empty.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #7561: Fix crashes when using bytearray objects with the posix
 | |
|   module.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #1670765: Prevent email.generator.Generator from re-wrapping headers in
 | |
|   multipart/signed MIME parts, which fixes one of the sources of invalid
 | |
|   modifications to such parts by Generator.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #7703: Add support for the new buffer API to `binascii.a2bhqx`.  Patch
 | |
|   by Florent Xicluna, along with some additional tests.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #7701: Fix crash in binascii.b2a_uu() in debug mode when given a 1-byte
 | |
|   argument.  Patch by Victor Stinner.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #3299: Fix possible crash in the _sre module when given bad argument
 | |
|   values in debug mode.  Patch by Victor Stinner.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #2846: Add support for gzip.GzipFile reading zero-padded files.  Patch
 | |
|   by Brian Curtin.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #7681: Use floor division in appropiate places in the wave module.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #5372: Drop the reuse of .o files in Distutils' ccompiler (since
 | |
|   Extension extra options may change the output without changing the .c
 | |
|   file). Initial patch by Collin Winter.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #7617: Make sure distutils.unixccompiler.UnixCCompiler recognizes gcc
 | |
|   when it has a fully qualified configuration prefix. Initial patch by Arfrever.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #7105: Make WeakKeyDictionary and WeakValueDictionary robust against the
 | |
|   destruction of weakref'ed objects while iterating.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #7455: Fix possible crash in cPickle on invalid input.  Patch by Victor
 | |
|   Stinner.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #1628205: Socket file objects returned by socket.socket.makefile() now
 | |
|   properly handles EINTR within the read, readline, write & flush methods.  The
 | |
|   socket.sendall() method now properly handles interrupted system calls.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #7471: Improve the performance of GzipFile's buffering mechanism, and
 | |
|   make it implement the `io.BufferedIOBase` ABC to allow for further speedups by
 | |
|   wrapping it in an `io.BufferedReader`.  Patch by Nir Aides.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #3972: http.client.HTTPConnection now accepts an optional source_address
 | |
|   parameter to allow specifying where your connections come from.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - socket.create_connection now accepts an optional source_address parameter.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #5511: now zipfile.ZipFile can be used as a context manager.  Initial
 | |
|   patch by Brian Curtin.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #7556: Make sure Distutils' msvc9compile reads and writes the MSVC XML
 | |
|   Manifest file in text mode so string patterns can be used in regular
 | |
|   expressions.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #7552: Removed line feed in the base64 Authorization header in the
 | |
|   Distutils upload command to avoid an error when PyPI reads it.  This occurs on
 | |
|   long passwords. Initial patch by JP St. Pierre.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #7231: urllib2 cannot handle https with proxy requiring auth.  Patch by
 | |
|   Tatsuhiro Tsujikawa.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #4757: `zlib.compress` and other methods in the zlib module now raise a
 | |
|   TypeError when given an `str` object (rather than a `bytes`-like object).
 | |
|   Patch by Victor Stinner and Florent Xicluna.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #7349: Make methods of file objects in the io module accept None as an
 | |
|   argument where file-like objects (ie StringIO and BytesIO) accept them to mean
 | |
|   the same as passing no argument.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #7357: tarfile no longer suppresses fatal extraction errors by default.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #5949: added check for correct lineends in input from IMAP server in
 | |
|   imaplib.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Add count() and reverse() methods to collections.deque().
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Fix variations of extending deques:  d.extend(d)  d.extendleft(d)  d+=d
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #6986: Fix crash in the JSON C accelerator when called with the wrong
 | |
|   parameter types.  Patch by Victor Stinner.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #7457: added a read_pkg_file method to
 | |
|   distutils.dist.DistributionMetadata.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - logging: Added optional `secure` parameter to SMTPHandler, to enable use of
 | |
|   TLS with authentication credentials.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #1923: Fixed the removal of meaningful spaces when PKG-INFO is generated
 | |
|   in Distutils.  Patch by Stephen Emslie.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #4120: Drop reference to CRT from manifest when building extensions with
 | |
|   msvc9compiler.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #7333: The `posix` module gains an `initgroups()` function providing
 | |
|   access to the initgroups(3) C library call on Unix systems which implement it.
 | |
|   Patch by Jean-Paul Calderone.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #7408: Fixed distutils.tests.sdist so it doesn't check for group
 | |
|   ownership when the group is not forced, because the group may be different
 | |
|   from the user's group and inherit from its container when the test is run.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #4486: When an exception has an explicit cause, do not print its
 | |
|   implicit context too.  This affects the `traceback` module as well as built-in
 | |
|   exception printing.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #1515: Enable use of deepcopy() with instance methods.  Patch by Robert
 | |
|   Collins.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #7403: logging: Fixed possible race condition in lock creation.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #6845: Add restart support for binary upload in ftplib.  The
 | |
|   `storbinary()` method of FTP and FTP_TLS objects gains an optional `rest`
 | |
|   argument.  Patch by Pablo Mouzo.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #5788: `datetime.timedelta` objects get a new `total_seconds()` method
 | |
|   returning the total number of seconds in the duration.  Patch by Brian
 | |
|   Quinlan.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #7133: SSL objects now support the new buffer API.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #1488943: difflib.Differ() doesn't always add hints for tab characters.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #6123: tarfile now opens empty archives correctly and consistently
 | |
|   raises ReadError on empty files.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #7354: distutils.tests.test_msvc9compiler - dragfullwindows can be 2.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #5037: Proxy the __bytes__ special method instead to __bytes__ instead
 | |
|   of __str__.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #7341: Close the internal file object in the TarFile constructor in case
 | |
|   of an error.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #7293: distutils.test_msvc9compiler is fixed to work on any fresh
 | |
|   Windows box. Help provided by David Bolen.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #2054: ftplib now provides an FTP_TLS class to do secure FTP using TLS
 | |
|   or SSL.  Patch by Giampaolo Rodola'.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #7328: pydoc no longer corrupts sys.path when run with the '-m' switch.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #4969: The mimetypes module now reads the MIME database from the
 | |
|   registry under Windows.  Patch by Gabriel Genellina.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #6816: runpy now provides a run_path function that allows Python code to
 | |
|   execute file paths that refer to source or compiled Python files as well as
 | |
|   zipfiles, directories and other valid sys.path entries that contain a
 | |
|   __main__.py file.  This allows applications that run other Python scripts to
 | |
|   support the same flexibility as the CPython command line itself.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #7318: multiprocessing now uses a timeout when it fails to establish a
 | |
|   connection with another process, rather than looping endlessly.  The default
 | |
|   timeout is 20 seconds, which should be amply sufficient for local connections.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #7197: Allow unittest.TextTestRunner objects to be pickled and
 | |
|   unpickled.  This fixes crashes under Windows when trying to run
 | |
|   test_multiprocessing in verbose mode.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #7893: ``unittest.TextTestResult`` is made public and a ``resultclass``
 | |
|   argument added to the TextTestRunner constructor allowing a different result
 | |
|   class to be used without having to subclass.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #7588: ``unittest.TextTestResult.getDescription`` now includes the test
 | |
|   name in failure reports even if the test has a docstring.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #3001: Add a C implementation of recursive locks which is used by
 | |
|   default when instantiating a `threading.RLock` object. This makes recursive
 | |
|   locks as fast as regular non-recursive locks (previously, they were slower by
 | |
|   10x to 15x).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #7282: Fix a memory leak when an RLock was used in a thread other than
 | |
|   those started through `threading.Thread` (for example, using
 | |
|   `_thread.start_new_thread()`).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #7187: Importlib would not silence the IOError raised when trying to
 | |
|   write new bytecode when it was made read-only.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #7264: Fix a possible deadlock when deallocating thread-local objects
 | |
|   which are part of a reference cycle.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #7211: Allow 64-bit values for the `ident` and `data` fields of kevent
 | |
|   objects on 64-bit systems.  Patch by Michael Broghton.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #6896: mailbox.Maildir now invalidates its internal cache each time a
 | |
|   modification is done through it.  This fixes inconsistencies and test failures
 | |
|   on systems with slightly bogus mtime behaviour.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #7246 & Issue #7208: getpass now properly flushes input before reading
 | |
|   from stdin so that existing input does not confuse it and lead to incorrect
 | |
|   entry or an IOError.  It also properly flushes it afterwards to avoid the
 | |
|   terminal echoing the input afterwards on OSes such as Solaris.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #7233: Fix a number of two-argument Decimal methods to make sure that
 | |
|   they accept an int or long as the second argument.  Also fix buggy handling of
 | |
|   large arguments (those with coefficient longer than the current precision) in
 | |
|   shift and rotate.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #4750: Store the basename of the original filename in the gzip FNAME
 | |
|   header as required by RFC 1952.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #1180: Added a new global option to ignore ~/.pydistutils.cfg in
 | |
|   Distutils.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #7218: Fix test_site for win32, the directory comparison was done with
 | |
|   an uppercase.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #7205: Fix a possible deadlock when using a BZ2File object from
 | |
|   several threads at once.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #7077: logging: SysLogHandler now treats Unicode as per RFC 5424.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #7099: Decimal.is_normal now returns True for numbers with exponent
 | |
|   larger than emax.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #7080: locale.strxfrm() raises a MemoryError on 64-bit non-Windows
 | |
|   platforms, and assorted locale fixes by Derk Drukker.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #5833: Fix extra space character in readline completion with the GNU
 | |
|   readline library version 6.0.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #6894: Fixed the issue urllib2 doesn't respect "no_proxy" environment.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #7086: Added TCP support to SysLogHandler, and tidied up some
 | |
|   anachronisms in the code which were a relic of 1.5.2 compatibility.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #7082: When falling back to the MIME 'name' parameter, the correct place
 | |
|   to look for it is the Content-Type header.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Make tokenize.detect_coding() normalize utf-8 and iso-8859-1 variants like the
 | |
|   builtin tokenizer.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #7048: Force Decimal.logb to round its result when that result is too
 | |
|   large to fit in the current precision.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #6236, #6348: Fix various failures in the I/O library under AIX and
 | |
|   other platforms, when using a non-gcc compiler. Patch by Derk Drukker.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #4606: Passing 'None' if ctypes argtype is set to POINTER(...)  does now
 | |
|   always result in NULL.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #5042: Structure sub-subclass does now initialize correctly with base
 | |
|   class positional arguments.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #6882: Import uuid creates zombies processes.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #6635: Fix profiler printing usage message.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #6856: Add a filter keyword argument to TarFile.add().
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #6888: pdb's alias command was broken when no arguments were given.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #6857: Default format() alignment should be '>' for Decimal instances.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #6795: int(Decimal('nan')) now raises ValueError instead of returning
 | |
|   NaN or raising InvalidContext.  Also, fix infinite recursion in
 | |
|   long(Decimal('nan')).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #6850: Fix bug in Decimal._parse_format_specifier for formats with no
 | |
|   type specifier.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #6239: ctypes.c_char_p return value must return bytes.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #6838: Use a list to accumulate the value instead of repeatedly
 | |
|   concatenating strings in http.client's HTTPResponse._read_chunked providing a
 | |
|   significant speed increase when downloading large files servend with a
 | |
|   Transfer-Encoding of 'chunked'.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Trying to import a submodule from a module that is not a package, ImportError
 | |
|   should be raised, not AttributeError.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - When the globals past to importlib.__import__() has __package__ set to None,
 | |
|   fall back to computing what __package__ should be instead of giving up.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Raise a TypeError when the name of a module to be imported for
 | |
|   importlib.__import__ is not a string (was raising an AttributeError before).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Allow the fromlist passed into importlib.__import__ to be any iterable.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Have importlib raise ImportError if None is found in sys.modules.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #6054: Do not normalize stored pathnames in tarfile.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #6794: Fix Decimal.compare_total and Decimal.compare_total_mag: NaN
 | |
|   payloads are now ordered by integer value rather than lexicographically.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #1356969: Add missing info methods in tix.HList.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #1522587: New constants and methods for the tix.Grid widget.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #1250469: Fix the return value of tix.PanedWindow.panes.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #1119673: Do not override tkinter.Text methods when creating a
 | |
|   ScrolledText.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #6665: Fix fnmatch to properly match filenames with newlines in them.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #1135: Add the XView and YView mix-ins to avoid duplicating the xview*
 | |
|   and yview* methods.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #6629: Fix a data corruption issue in the new I/O library, which could
 | |
|   occur when writing to a BufferedRandom object (e.g. a file opened in "rb+" or
 | |
|   "wb+" mode) after having buffered a certain amount of data for reading. This
 | |
|   bug was not present in the pure Python implementation.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #6622: Fix "local variable 'secret' referenced before assignment" bug in
 | |
|   POP3.apop.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #2715: Remove remnants of Carbon.File from binhex module.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #6595: The Decimal constructor now allows arbitrary Unicode decimal
 | |
|   digits in input, as recommended by the standard.  Previously it was restricted
 | |
|   to accepting [0-9].
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #6106: telnetlib.Telnet.process_rawq doesn't handle default WILL/WONT
 | |
|   DO/DONT correctly.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #1424152: Fix for http.client, urllib.request to support SSL while
 | |
|   working through proxy.  Original patch by Christopher Li, changes made by
 | |
|   Senthil Kumaran.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Add importlib.abc.ExecutionLoader to represent the PEP 302 protocol for
 | |
|   loaders that allow for modules to be executed. Both importlib.abc.PyLoader and
 | |
|   PyPycLoader inherit from this class and provide implementations in relation to
 | |
|   other methods required by the ABCs.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - importlib.abc.PyLoader did not inherit from importlib.abc.ResourceLoader like
 | |
|   the documentation said it did even though the code in PyLoader relied on the
 | |
|   abstract method required by ResourceLoader.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #6431: Make Fraction type return NotImplemented when it doesn't know how
 | |
|   to handle a comparison without loss of precision.  Also add correct handling
 | |
|   of infinities and nans for comparisons with float.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #6415: Fixed warnings.warn segfault on bad formatted string.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #6358: The exit status of a command started with os.popen() was reported
 | |
|   differently than it did with python 2.x.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #6323: The pdb debugger did not exit when running a script with a syntax
 | |
|   error.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #3392: The subprocess communicate() method no longer fails in select()
 | |
|   when file descriptors are large; communicate() now uses poll() when possible.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #6369: Fix an RLE decompression bug in the binhex module.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #6344: Fixed a crash of mmap.read() when passed a negative argument.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The deprecated function string.maketrans has been removed.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #4005: Fixed a crash of pydoc when there was a zip file present in
 | |
|   sys.path.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #6218: io.StringIO and io.BytesIO instances are now picklable.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The os.get_exec_path() function to return the list of directories that will be
 | |
|   searched for an executable when launching a subprocess was added.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #7481: When a threading.Thread failed to start it would leave the
 | |
|   instance stuck in initial state and present in threading.enumerate().
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #1068268: The subprocess module now handles EINTR in internal os.waitpid
 | |
|   and os.read system calls where appropriate.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #6729: Added ctypes.c_ssize_t to represent ssize_t.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #6247: The argparse module has been added to the standard library.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #8235: _socket: Add the constant ``SO_SETFIB``.  SO_SETFIB is a socket
 | |
|   option available on FreeBSD 7.1 and newer.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #9315: Fix for the trace module to record correct class name
 | |
|   for tracing methods.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Extension Modules
 | |
| -----------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #9959: Tweak formula used for computing math.log of an integer,
 | |
|   making it marginally more accurate for exact powers of 2.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #9422: Fix memory leak when re-initializing a struct.Struct object.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #7900: The getgroups(2) system call on MacOSX behaves rather oddly
 | |
|   compared to other unix systems. In particular, os.getgroups() does not reflect
 | |
|   any changes made using os.setgroups() but basicly always returns the same
 | |
|   information as the id command. os.getgroups() can now return more than 16
 | |
|   groups on MacOSX.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #6095: Make directory argument to os.listdir optional.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #9277: Fix bug in struct.pack for bools in standard mode (e.g.,
 | |
|   struct.pack('>?')): if conversion to bool raised an exception then that
 | |
|   exception wasn't properly propagated on machines where char is unsigned.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #5180: Fixed a bug that prevented loading 2.x pickles in 3.x python when
 | |
|   they contain instances of old-style classes.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #9165: Add new functions math.isfinite and cmath.isfinite, to accompany
 | |
|   existing isinf and isnan functions.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #1578269: Implement os.symlink for Windows 6.0+.  Patch by Jason
 | |
|   R. Coombs.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - In struct.pack, correctly propogate exceptions from computing the truth of an
 | |
|   object in the '?' format.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #9000: datetime.timezone objects now have eval-friendly repr.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - In the math module, correctly lookup __trunc__, __ceil__, and __floor__ as
 | |
|   special methods.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #9005: Prevent utctimetuple() from producing year 0 or year 10,000.
 | |
|   Prior to this change, timezone adjustment in utctimetuple() could produce
 | |
|   tm_year value of 0 or 10,000.  Now an OverflowError is raised in these edge
 | |
|   cases.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #6641: The ``datetime.strptime`` method now supports the ``%z``
 | |
|   directive.  When the ``%z`` directive is present in the format string, an
 | |
|   aware ``datetime`` object is returned with ``tzinfo`` bound to a
 | |
|   ``datetime.timezone`` instance constructed from the parsed offset.  If both
 | |
|   ``%z`` and ``%Z`` are present, the data in ``%Z`` field is used for timezone
 | |
|   name, but ``%Z`` data without ``%z`` is discarded.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #5094: The ``datetime`` module now has a simple concrete class
 | |
|   implementing ``datetime.tzinfo`` interface.  Instances of the new class,
 | |
|   ``datetime.timezone``, return fixed name and UTC offset from their
 | |
|   ``tzname(dt)`` and ``utcoffset(dt)`` methods.  The ``dst(dt)`` method always
 | |
|   returns ``None``.  A class attribute, ``utc`` contains an instance
 | |
|   representing the UTC timezone.  Original patch by Rafe Kaplan.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #8973: Add __all__ to struct module; this ensures that help(struct)
 | |
|   includes documentation for the struct.Struct class.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #3129: Trailing digits in struct format string are no longer ignored.
 | |
|   For example, "1" or "ilib123" are now invalid formats and cause
 | |
|   ``struct.error`` to be raised.  Patch by Caleb Deveraux.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #7384: If the system readline library is linked against ncurses, the
 | |
|   curses module must be linked against ncurses as well. Otherwise it is not safe
 | |
|   to load both the readline and curses modules in an application.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #2810: Fix cases where the Windows registry API returns ERROR_MORE_DATA,
 | |
|   requiring a re-try in order to get the complete result.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #8692: Optimize math.factorial: replace the previous naive algorithm
 | |
|   with an improved 'binary-split' algorithm that uses fewer multiplications and
 | |
|   allows many of the multiplications to be performed using plain C integer
 | |
|   arithmetic instead of PyLong arithmetic.  Also uses a lookup table for small
 | |
|   arguments.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #8674: Fixed a number of incorrect or undefined-behaviour-inducing
 | |
|   overflow checks in the audioop module.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #8644: The accuracy of td.total_seconds() has been improved (by
 | |
|   calculating with integer arithmetic instead of float arithmetic internally):
 | |
|   the result is now always correctly rounded, and is equivalent to ``td /
 | |
|   timedelta(seconds=1)``.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #2706: Allow division of a timedelta by another timedelta: timedelta /
 | |
|   timedelta, timedelta % timedelta, timedelta // timedelta and divmod(timedelta,
 | |
|   timedelta) are all supported.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #8314: Fix unsigned long long bug in libffi on Sparc v8.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #8300: When passing a non-integer argument to struct.pack with any
 | |
|   integer format code, struct.pack first attempts to convert the non-integer
 | |
|   using its __index__ method.  If that method is non-existent or raises
 | |
|   TypeError it goes on to try the __int__ method, as described below.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #8142: Update libffi to the 3.0.9 release.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #6949: Allow the _dbm extension to be built with db 4.8.x.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #6544: Fix a reference leak in the kqueue implementation's error
 | |
|   handling.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Stop providing crtassem.h symbols when compiling with Visual Studio 2010, as
 | |
|   msvcr100.dll is not a platform assembly anymore.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #6508: Add posix.{getresuid,getresgid,setresuid,setresgid}.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #7078: Set struct.__doc__ from _struct.__doc__.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #3366: Add erf, erfc, expm1, gamma, lgamma functions to math module.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #6877: It is now possible to link the readline extension to the libedit
 | |
|   readline emulation on OSX 10.5 or later.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #6848: Fix curses module build failure on OS X 10.6.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Fix a segfault that could be triggered by expat with specially formed input.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #6561: '\d' in a regex now matches only characters with Unicode category
 | |
|   'Nd' (Number, Decimal Digit).  Previously it also matched characters with
 | |
|   category 'No'.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #4509: Array objects are no longer modified after an operation failing
 | |
|   due to the resize restriction in-place when the object has exported buffers.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #2389: Array objects are now pickled in a portable manner.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Expat: Fix DoS via XML document with malformed UTF-8 sequences
 | |
|   (CVE_2009_3560).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #7242: On Solaris 9 and earlier calling os.fork() from within a thread
 | |
|   could raise an incorrect RuntimeError about not holding the import lock.  The
 | |
|   import lock is now reinitialized after fork.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #7999: os.setreuid() and os.setregid() would refuse to accept a -1
 | |
|   parameter on some platforms such as OS X.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Build the ossaudio extension on GNU/kFreeBSD.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #7347: winreg: Add CreateKeyEx and DeleteKeyEx, as well as fix a bug in
 | |
|   the return value of QueryReflectionKey.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #7567: PyCurses_setupterm: Don't call ``setupterm`` twice.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Build
 | |
| -----
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Use OpenSSL 1.0.0a on Windows.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #9280: Make sharedinstall depend on sharedmods.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #9189: Make a user-specified CFLAGS, CPPFLAGS, or LDFLAGS setting
 | |
|   override the configure and makefile defaults, without deleting options the
 | |
|   user didn't intend to override.  Developers should no longer need to specify
 | |
|   OPT or EXTRA_CFLAGS, although those variables are still present for
 | |
|   backward-compatibility.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #8854: Fix finding Visual Studio 2008 on Windows x64.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #1759169, #8864: Drop _XOPEN_SOURCE on Solaris, define it for
 | |
|   multiprocessing only.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #8625: Turn off optimization in --with-pydebug builds with gcc.
 | |
|   (Optimization was unintentionally turned on in gcc --with-pydebug builds as a
 | |
|   result of the issue #1628484 fix, combined with autoconf's strange choice of
 | |
|   default CFLAGS produced by AC_PROG_CC for gcc.)
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #3646: It is now easily possible to install a Python framework into your
 | |
|   home directory on MacOSX, see Mac/README for more information.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #3928: os.mknod() now available in Solaris, also.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #3326: Build Python without -fno-strict-aliasing when the gcc does not
 | |
|   give false warnings.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #1628484: The Makefile doesn't ignore the CFLAGS environment variable
 | |
|   anymore.  It also forwards the LDFLAGS settings to the linker when building a
 | |
|   shared library.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #6716: Quote -x arguments of compileall in MSI installer.  Exclude 2to3
 | |
|   tests from compileall.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #3920, #7903: Define _BSD_SOURCE on OpenBSD 4.4 through 4.9.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #7632: When Py_USING_MEMORY_DEBUGGER is defined, disable the private
 | |
|   memory allocation scheme in dtoa.c and use PyMem_Malloc and PyMem_Free
 | |
|   instead.  Also disable caching of powers of 5.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #6491: Allow --with-dbmliborder to specify that no dbms will be built.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #6943: Use pkg-config to find the libffi headers when the
 | |
|   --with-system-ffi flag is used.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #7609: Add a --with-system-expat option that causes the system's expat
 | |
|   library to be used for the pyexpat module instead of the one included with
 | |
|   Python.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #7589: Only build the nis module when the correct header files are
 | |
|   found.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Switch to OpenSSL 0.9.8l and sqlite 3.6.21 on Windows.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #5792: Extend the short float repr support to x86 systems using
 | |
|   icc or suncc.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #6603: Change READ_TIMESTAMP macro in ceval.c so that it compiles
 | |
|   correctly under gcc on x86-64.  This fixes a reported problem with the
 | |
|   --with-tsc build on x86-64.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #6802: Fix build issues on MacOSX 10.6.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #6244: Allow detect_tkinter to look for Tcl/Tk 8.6.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #4601: 'make install' did not set the appropriate permissions on
 | |
|   directories.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #5390: Add uninstall icon independent of whether file extensions are
 | |
|   installed.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #7541: When using ``python-config`` with a framework install the
 | |
|   compiler might use the wrong library.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - python-config now supports multiple options on the same command line.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #8509: Fix quoting in help strings and code snippets in configure.in.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #8510: Update to autoconf2.65.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Documentation
 | |
| -------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #9817: Add expat COPYING file; add expat, libffi and expat licenses
 | |
|   to Doc/license.rst.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #9524: Document that two CTRL* signals are meant for use only
 | |
|   with os.kill.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #9255: Document that the 'test' package is meant for internal Python use
 | |
|   only.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - A small WSGI server was added as Tools/scripts/serve.py, and is used to
 | |
|   implement a local documentation server via 'make serve' in the doc directory.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Updating `Using Python` documentation to include description of CPython's -J
 | |
|   and -X options.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Document that importing a module that has None in sys.modules triggers an
 | |
|   ImportError.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #6556: Fixed the Distutils configuration files location explanation for
 | |
|   Windows.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Update python manual page (options -B, -O0, -s, environment variables
 | |
|   PYTHONDONTWRITEBYTECODE, PYTHONNOUSERSITE).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #8909: Added the size of the bitmap used in the installer created by
 | |
|   distutils' bdist_wininst. Patch by Anatoly Techtonik.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Tests
 | |
| -----
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #9251: test_threaded_import didn't fail when run through regrtest if the
 | |
|   import lock was disabled.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #8605: Skip test_gdb if Python is compiled with optimizations.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #7449: Skip test_socketserver if threading support is disabled.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #8672: Add a zlib test ensuring that an incomplete stream can be handled
 | |
|   by a decompressor object without errors (it returns incomplete uncompressed
 | |
|   data).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #8533: regrtest uses backslashreplace error handler for stdout to avoid
 | |
|   UnicodeEncodeError (write non-ASCII character to stdout using ASCII encoding).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #8576: Remove use of find_unused_port() in test_smtplib and
 | |
|   test_multiprocessing.  Patch by Paul Moore.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #7449: Fix many tests to support Python compiled without thread
 | |
|   support. Patches written by Jerry Seutter.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #8108: test_ftplib's non-blocking SSL server now has proper handling of
 | |
|   SSL shutdowns.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issues #8279, #8330, #8437, #8480, #8495: Fix test_gdb failures, patch written
 | |
|   by Dave Malcolm.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #3864: Skip three test_signal tests on freebsd6 because they fail if any
 | |
|   thread was previously started, most likely due to a platform bug.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #8193: Fix test_zlib failure with zlib 1.2.4.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #8248: Add some tests for the bool type.  Patch by Gregory Nofi.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #8263: Now regrtest.py will report a failure if it receives a
 | |
|   KeyboardInterrupt (SIGINT).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #8180 and #8207: Fix test_pep277 on OS X and add more tests for special
 | |
|   Unicode normalization cases.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #7783: test.support.open_urlresource invalidates the outdated files from
 | |
|   the local cache.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #7849: Now the utility ``check_warnings`` verifies if the warnings are
 | |
|   effectively raised.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The four path modules (genericpath, macpath, ntpath, posixpath) share a common
 | |
|   TestCase for some tests: test_genericpath.CommonTest.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Print platform information when running the whole test suite, or using the
 | |
|   --verbose flag.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #767675: enable test_pep277 on POSIX platforms with Unicode-friendly
 | |
|   filesystem encoding.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #6292: for the moment at least, the test suite runs cleanly if python is
 | |
|   run with the -OO flag.  Tests requiring docstrings are skipped.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #7712: test.support gained a new `temp_cwd` context manager which is now
 | |
|   also used by regrtest to run all the tests in a temporary directory.  The
 | |
|   original CWD is saved in `support.SAVEDCWD`.  Thanks to Florent Xicluna who
 | |
|   helped with the patch.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #7924: Fix an intermittent 'XXX undetected error' failure in test_capi
 | |
|   (only seen so far on platforms where the curses module wasn't built), due to
 | |
|   an uncleared exception.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #7728: test_timeout was changed to use support.bind_port instead of a
 | |
|   hard coded port.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #7376: Instead of running a self-test (which was failing) when called
 | |
|   with no arguments, doctest.py now gives a usage message.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #7396: fix regrtest -s, which was broken by the -j enhancement.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #7498: test_multiprocessing now uses test.support.find_unused_port
 | |
|   instead of a hardcoded port number in test_rapid_restart.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #7431: Use TESTFN in test_linecache instead of trying to create a file
 | |
|   in the Lib/test directory, which might be read-only for the user running the
 | |
|   tests.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #7324: Add a sanity check to regrtest argument parsing to catch the case
 | |
|   of an option with no handler.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #7312: Add a -F flag to run the selected tests in a loop until a test
 | |
|   fails.  Can be combined with -j.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #6551: test_zipimport could import and then destroy some modules of the
 | |
|   encodings package, which would make other tests fail further down the road
 | |
|   because the internally cached encoders and decoders would point to empty
 | |
|   global variables.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #7295: Do not use a hardcoded file name in test_tarfile.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #7270: Add some dedicated unit tests for multi-thread synchronization
 | |
|   primitives such as Lock, RLock, Condition, Event and Semaphore.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #7248 (part 2): Use a unique temporary directory for importlib source
 | |
|   tests instead of tempfile.tempdir. This prevents the tests from sharing state
 | |
|   between concurrent executions on the same system.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #7248: In importlib.test.source.util a try/finally block did not make
 | |
|   sure that some referenced objects actually were created in the block before
 | |
|   calling methods on the object.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #7222: Make thread "reaping" more reliable so that reference
 | |
|   leak-chasing test runs give sensible results.  The previous method of reaping
 | |
|   threads could return successfully while some Thread objects were still
 | |
|   referenced.  This also introduces a new private function:
 | |
|   ``_thread._count()``.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #7151: Fixed regrtest -j so that output to stderr from a test no longer
 | |
|   runs the risk of causing the worker thread to fail.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #7055: test___all__ now greedily detects all modules which have an
 | |
|   __all__ attribute, rather than using a hardcoded and incomplete list.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #7058: Added save/restore for things like sys.argv and cwd to
 | |
|   runtest_inner in regrtest, with warnings if the called test modifies them, and
 | |
|   a new section in the summary report at the end.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #7042: Fix test_signal (test_itimer_virtual) failure on OS X 10.6.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Fixed tests in importlib.test.source.test_abc_loader that were masking the
 | |
|   proper exceptions that should be raised for missing or improper code object
 | |
|   bytecode.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Removed importlib's custom test discovery code and switched to
 | |
|   unittest.TestLoader.discover().
 | |
| 
 | |
| Tools/Demos
 | |
| -----------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #5464, #8974: Implement plural forms in msgfmt.py.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - iobench (a file I/O benchmark) and ccbench (a concurrency benchmark) were
 | |
|   added to the `Tools/` directory.  They were previously living in the sandbox.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| What's New in Python 3.1?
 | |
| =========================
 | |
| 
 | |
| *Release date: 27-June-2009*
 | |
| 
 | |
| Core and Builtins
 | |
| -----------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #6334: Fix bug in range length calculation for ranges with
 | |
|   large arguments.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #6329: Fixed iteration for memoryview objects (it was being blocked
 | |
|   because it wasn't recognized as a sequence).
 | |
| 
 | |
| Library
 | |
| -------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #6126: Fixed pdb command-line usage.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #6314: logging: performs extra checks on the "level" argument.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #6274: Fixed possible file descriptors leak in subprocess.py
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Accessing io.StringIO.buffer now raises an AttributeError instead of
 | |
|   io.UnsupportedOperation.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #6271: mmap tried to close invalid file handle (-1) when anonymous.
 | |
|   (On Unix)
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #1202: zipfile module would cause a struct.error when attempting to
 | |
|   store files with a CRC32 > 2**31-1.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Extension Modules
 | |
| -----------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #5590: Remove unused global variable in pyexpat extension.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| What's New in Python 3.1 Release Candidate 2?
 | |
| =============================================
 | |
| 
 | |
| *Release date: 13-June-2009*
 | |
| 
 | |
| Core and Builtins
 | |
| -----------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Fixed SystemError triggered by "range([], 1, -1)".
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #5924: On Windows, a large PYTHONPATH environment variable
 | |
|   (more than 255 characters) would be completely ignored.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #4547: When debugging a very large function, it was not always
 | |
|   possible to update the lineno attribute of the current frame.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #5330: C functions called with keyword arguments were not reported by
 | |
|   the various profiling modules (profile, cProfile). Patch by Hagen Fürstenau.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Library
 | |
| -------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #6438: Fixed distutils.cygwinccompiler.get_versions : the regular
 | |
|   expression string pattern was trying to match against a bytes returned by
 | |
|   Popen. Tested under win32 to build the py-postgresql project.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #6258: Support AMD64 in bdist_msi.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #6195: fixed doctest to no longer try to read 'source' data from
 | |
|   binary files.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #5262: Fixed bug in next rollover time computation in
 | |
|   TimedRotatingFileHandler.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #6217: The C implementation of io.TextIOWrapper didn't include the
 | |
|   errors property.  Additionally, the errors and encoding properties of StringIO
 | |
|   are always None now.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #6137: The pickle module now translates module names when loading
 | |
|   or dumping pickles with a 2.x-compatible protocol, in order to make data
 | |
|   sharing and migration easier. This behaviour can be disabled using the
 | |
|   new `fix_imports` optional argument.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Removed the ipaddr module.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #3613: base64.{encode,decode}string are now called
 | |
|   base64.{encode,decode}bytes which reflects what type they accept and return.
 | |
|   The old names are still there as deprecated aliases.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #5767: Remove sgmlop support from xmlrpc.client.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #6150: Fix test_unicode on wide-unicode builds.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #6149: Fix initialization of WeakValueDictionary objects from non-empty
 | |
|   parameters.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Windows
 | |
| -------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #6221: Delete test registry key before running the test.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #6158: Package Sine-1000Hz-300ms.aif in MSI file.
 | |
| 
 | |
| C-API
 | |
| -----
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #5735: Python compiled with --with-pydebug should throw an
 | |
|   ImportError when trying to import modules compiled without
 | |
|   --with-pydebug, and vice-versa.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| Build
 | |
| -----
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #6154: Make sure the intl library is added to LIBS if needed. Also
 | |
|   added LIBS to OS X framework builds.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #5809: Specifying both --enable-framework and --enable-shared is
 | |
|   an error. Configure now explicity tells you about this.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| What's New in Python 3.1 release candidate 1?
 | |
| =============================================
 | |
| 
 | |
| *Release date: 2009-05-30*
 | |
| 
 | |
| Core and Builtins
 | |
| -----------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #6097: Escape UTF-8 surrogates resulting from mbstocs conversion
 | |
|   of the command line.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #6012: Add cleanup support to O& argument parsing.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #6089: Fixed str.format with certain invalid field specifiers
 | |
|   that would raise SystemError.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #5982: staticmethod and classmethod now expose the wrapped
 | |
|   function with __func__.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Added support for multiple context managers in the same with-statement.
 | |
|   Deprecated contextlib.nested() which is no longer needed.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #5829: complex("1e500") no longer raises OverflowError.  This
 | |
|   makes it consistent with float("1e500") and interpretation of real
 | |
|   and imaginary literals.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #3527: Removed Py_WIN_WIDE_FILENAMES which is not used any more.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #5994: the marshal module now has docstrings.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #5981: Fix three minor inf/nan issues in float.fromhex:
 | |
|   (1) inf and nan strings with trailing whitespace were incorrectly
 | |
|   rejected;  (2) parsing of strings representing infinities and nans
 | |
|   was locale aware; and (3) the interpretation of fromhex('-nan')
 | |
|   didn't match that of float('-nan').
 | |
| 
 | |
| Library
 | |
| -------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #4859: Implement PEP 383 for pwd, spwd, and grp.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - smtplib 'login' and 'cram-md5' login are also fixed (see Issue #5259).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #6121: pydoc now ignores leading and trailing spaces in the
 | |
|   argument to the 'help' function.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #6118: urllib.parse.quote_plus ignored the encoding and errors
 | |
|   arguments for strings with a space in them.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - collections.namedtuple() was not working with the following field
 | |
|   names:  cls, self, tuple, itemgetter, and property.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - In unittest, using a skipping decorator on a class is now equivalent to
 | |
|   skipping every test on the class.  The ClassTestSuite class has been removed.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #6050: Don't fail extracting a directory from a zipfile if
 | |
|   the directory already exists.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #1309352: fcntl now converts its third arguments to a C `long` rather
 | |
|   than an int, which makes some operations possible under 64-bit Linux (e.g.
 | |
|   DN_MULTISHOT with F_NOTIFY).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #5761: Add the name of the underlying file to the repr() of various
 | |
|   IO objects.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #5259: smtplib plain auth login no longer gives a traceback.  Fix
 | |
|   by Musashi Tamura, tests by Marcin Bachry.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #1983: Fix functions taking or returning a process identifier to use
 | |
|   the dedicated C type ``pid_t`` instead of a C ``int``. Some platforms have
 | |
|   a process identifier type wider than the standard C integer type.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #4066: smtplib.SMTP_SSL._get_socket now correctly returns the socket.
 | |
|   Patch by Farhan Ahmad, test by Marcin Bachry.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #2116: Weak references and weak dictionaries now support copy()ing and
 | |
|   deepcopy()ing.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #1655: Make imaplib IPv6-capable. Patch by Derek Morr.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #5918: Fix a crash in the parser module.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #1664: Make nntplib IPv6-capable. Patch by Derek Morr.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #5006: Better handling of unicode byte-order marks (BOM) in the io
 | |
|   library. This means, for example, that opening an UTF-16 text file in
 | |
|   append mode doesn't add a BOM at the end of the file if the file isn't
 | |
|   empty.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #4050: inspect.findsource/getsource now raise an IOError if the 'source'
 | |
|   file is a binary.  Patch by Brodie Rao, tests by Daniel Diniz.  This fix
 | |
|   corrects a pydoc regression.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #5955: aifc's close method did not close the file it wrapped,
 | |
|   now it does.  This also means getfp method now returns the real fp.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Installation
 | |
| ------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #6047: fullinstall has been removed because Python 3's executable will
 | |
|   now be known as python3.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Lib/smtpd.py is no longer installed as a script.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Extension Modules
 | |
| -----------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #3061: Use wcsftime for time.strftime where available.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #4873: Fix resource leaks in error cases of pwd and grp.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #6093: Fix off-by-one error in locale.strxfrm.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The _functools and _locale modules are now built into the libpython shared
 | |
|   library instead of as extension modules.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Build
 | |
| -----
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #3585: Add pkg-config support. It creates a python-2.7.pc file
 | |
|   and a python3.pc symlink in the $(LIBDIR)/pkgconfig directory. Patch by
 | |
|   Clinton Roy.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Tests
 | |
| -----
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #5442: Tests for importlib were not properly skipping case-sensitivity
 | |
|   tests on darwin even when the OS was installed on a case-sensitive
 | |
|   filesystem. Also fixed tests that should not be run when
 | |
|   sys.dont_write_bytecode is true.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| What's New in Python 3.1 beta 1?
 | |
| ================================
 | |
| 
 | |
| *Release date: 2009-05-06*
 | |
| 
 | |
| Core and Builtins
 | |
| -----------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #5914: Add new C API function PyOS_string_to_double, and
 | |
|   deprecate PyOS_ascii_strtod and PyOS_ascii_atof.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #3382: float.__format__, complex.__format__, and %-formatting
 | |
|   no longer map 'F' to 'f'. Because of issue #5859 (below), this only
 | |
|   affects nan -> NAN and inf -> INF.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #5799: ntpath (ie, os.path on Windows) fully supports UNC pathnames
 | |
|   in all operations, including splitdrive, split, etc.  splitunc() now issues
 | |
|   a PendingDeprecation warning.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #5920: For float.__format__, change the behavior with the
 | |
|   empty presentation type (that is, not one of 'e', 'f', 'g', or 'n')
 | |
|   to be like 'g' but with at least one decimal point and with a
 | |
|   default precision of 12. Previously, the behavior the same but with
 | |
|   a default precision of 6.  This more closely matches str(), and
 | |
|   reduces surprises when adding alignment flags to the empty
 | |
|   presentation type. This also affects the new complex.__format__ in
 | |
|   the same way.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Implement PEP 383, Non-decodable Bytes in System Character Interfaces.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #5890: in subclasses of 'property' the __doc__ attribute was
 | |
|   shadowed by classtype's, even if it was None.  property now
 | |
|   inserts the __doc__ into the subclass instance __dict__.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #4426: The UTF-7 decoder was too strict and didn't accept some legal
 | |
|   sequences. Patch by Nick Barnes and Victor Stinner.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #3672: Reject surrogates in utf-8 codec; add surrogatepass error handler.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #5883: In the io module, the BufferedIOBase and TextIOBase ABCs have
 | |
|   received a new method, detach().  detach() disconnects the underlying stream
 | |
|   from the buffer or text IO and returns it.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #5859: Remove switch from '%f' to '%g'-style formatting for
 | |
|   floats with absolute value over 1e50.  Also remove length
 | |
|   restrictions for float formatting: '%.67f' % 12.34 and '%.120e' %
 | |
|   12.34 no longer raise an exception.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #1588: Add complex.__format__. For example,
 | |
|   format(complex(1, 2./3), '.5') now produces a sensible result.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #5864: Fix empty format code formatting for floats so that it
 | |
|   never gives more than the requested number of significant digits.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #5793: Rationalize isdigit / isalpha / tolower, etc. Includes
 | |
|   new Py_ISDIGIT / Py_ISALPHA / Py_TOLOWER, etc. in pctypes.h.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #5835: Deprecate PyOS_ascii_formatd.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #4971: Fix titlecase for characters that are their own
 | |
|   titlecase, but not their own uppercase.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #5283: Setting __class__ in __del__ caused a segfault.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #5816: complex(repr(z)) now recovers z exactly, even when
 | |
|   z involves nans, infs or negative zeros.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #3166: Make int -> float conversions correctly rounded.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #1869 (and many duplicates): make round(x, n) correctly
 | |
|   rounded for a float x, by using the decimal <-> binary conversions
 | |
|   from Python/dtoa.c.  As a consequence, (e.g.) round(x, 2) now
 | |
|   consistently agrees with format(x, '.2f').
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #5787: object.__getattribute__(some_type, "__bases__") segfaulted on
 | |
|   some builtin types.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #5772: format(1e100, '<') produces '1e+100', not '1.0e+100'.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #5515: str.format() type 'n' combined with commas and leading
 | |
|   zeros no longer gives odd results with ints and floats.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Implement PEP 378, Format Specifier for Thousands Separator, for
 | |
|   floats.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The str function switches to exponential notation at
 | |
|   1e11, not 1e12.  This avoids printing 13 significant digits in
 | |
|   situations where only 12 of them are correct.  Example problem
 | |
|   value: str(1e11 + 0.5).  (This minor issue has existed in 2.x for a
 | |
|   long time.)
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #1580: On most platforms, use a 'short' float repr: for a
 | |
|   finite float x, repr(x) now outputs a string based on the shortest
 | |
|   sequence of decimal digits that rounds to x.  Previous behaviour was
 | |
|   to output 17 significant digits and then strip trailing zeros.
 | |
|   Another minor difference is that the new repr switches to
 | |
|   exponential notation at 1e16 instead of the previous 1e17; this
 | |
|   avoids misleading output in some cases.
 | |
| 
 | |
|   There's a new sys attribute sys.float_repr_style, which takes
 | |
|   the value 'short' to indicate that we're using short float repr,
 | |
|   and 'legacy' if the short float repr isn't available for one
 | |
|   reason or another.
 | |
| 
 | |
|   The float repr change involves incorporating David Gay's 'perfect
 | |
|   rounding' code into the Python core (it's in Python/dtoa.c).  As a
 | |
|   secondary consequence, all string-to-float and float-to-string
 | |
|   conversions (including all float formatting operations) will be
 | |
|   correctly rounded on these platforms.
 | |
| 
 | |
|   See issue #1580 discussions for details of platforms for which
 | |
|   this change does not apply.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #5759: float() didn't call __float__ on str subclasses.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The string.maketrans() function is deprecated; there is a new static method
 | |
|   maketrans() on the bytes and bytearray classes.  This removes confusion about
 | |
|   the types string.maketrans() is supposed to work with, and mirrors the
 | |
|   methods available on the str class.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #2170: refactored xml.dom.minidom.normalize, increasing both
 | |
|   its clarity and its speed.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #1113244: Py_XINCREF, Py_DECREF, Py_XDECREF: Add ``do { ... } while (0)``
 | |
|   to avoid compiler warnings.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #3739: The unicode-internal encoder now reports the number of characters
 | |
|   consumed like any other encoder (instead of the number of bytes).
 | |
| 
 | |
| Installation
 | |
| ------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #5756: Install idle and pydoc with a 3 suffix.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Library
 | |
| -------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #8203: Fix IDLE Credits dialog: view_file() uses its encoding argument.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #5311: bdist_msi can now build packages that do not depend on a
 | |
|   specific Python version.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #5150: IDLE's format menu now has an option to strip trailing
 | |
|   whitespace.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #5940: distutils.command.build_clib.check_library_list was not doing
 | |
|   the right type checkings anymore.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #4875: On win32, ctypes.util.find_library does no longer
 | |
|   return directories.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #5142: Add the ability to skip modules while stepping to pdb.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #1309567: Fix linecache behavior of stripping subdirectories when
 | |
|   looking for files given by a relative filename.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #5923: Update the ``turtle`` module to version 1.1, add two new
 | |
|   turtle demos in Demo/turtle.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #5692: In ``zipfile.Zipfile``, fix wrong path calculation when
 | |
|   extracting a file to the root directory.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #5913: os.listdir() should fail for empty path on windows.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #5084: unpickling now interns the attribute names of pickled objects,
 | |
|   saving memory and avoiding growth in size of subsequent pickles. Proposal
 | |
|   and original patch by Jake McGuire.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The json module now works exclusively with str and not bytes.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #3959: The ipaddr module has been added to the standard library.
 | |
|   Contributed by Google.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #3002: ``shutil.copyfile()`` and ``shutil.copytree()`` now raise an
 | |
|   error when a named pipe is encountered, rather than blocking infinitely.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #5857: tokenize.tokenize() now returns named tuples.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #4305: ctypes should now build again on mipsel-linux-gnu
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #1734234: Massively speedup ``unicodedata.normalize()`` when the
 | |
|   string is already in normalized form, by performing a quick check beforehand.
 | |
|   Original patch by Rauli Ruohonen.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #5853: calling a function of the mimetypes module from several threads
 | |
|   at once could hit the recursion limit if the mimetypes database hadn't been
 | |
|   initialized before.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #5854: Updated __all__ to include some missing names and remove some
 | |
|   names which should not be exported.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #3102:  All global symbols that the _ctypes extension defines
 | |
|   are now prefixed with 'Py' or '_ctypes'.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #5041: ctypes does now allow pickling wide character.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #5812: For the two-argument form of the Fraction constructor,
 | |
|   Fraction(m, n), m and n are permitted to be arbitrary Rational
 | |
|   instances.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #5812: Fraction('1e6') is valid: more generally, any string
 | |
|   that's valid for float() is now valid for Fraction(), with the
 | |
|   exception of strings representing NaNs and infinities.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #5734: BufferedRWPair was poorly tested and had several glaring
 | |
|   bugs. Patch by Brian Quinlan.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #1161031: fix readwrite select flag handling: POLLPRI now
 | |
|   results in a handle_expt_event call, not handle_read_event, and POLLERR
 | |
|   and POLLNVAL now call handle_close, not handle_expt_event.  Also,
 | |
|   dispatcher now has an 'ignore_log_types' attribute for suppressing
 | |
|   log messages, which is set to 'warning' by default.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #2703: SimpleXMLRPCDispatcher.__init__: Provide default values for
 | |
|   new arguments introduced in 2.5.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #5828 (Invalid behavior of unicode.lower): Fixed bogus logic in
 | |
|   makeunicodedata.py and regenerated the Unicode database (This fixes
 | |
|   u'\u1d79'.lower() == '\x00').
 | |
| 
 | |
| Extension Modules
 | |
| -----------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #5881: Remove old undocumented compatibility interfaces in hashlib and
 | |
|   pwd.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #5463: In struct module, remove deprecated float coercion
 | |
|   for integer type codes: struct.pack('L', 0.3) should now raise
 | |
|   an error.  The _PY_STRUCT_FLOAT_COERCE constant has been removed.
 | |
|   The version number has been bumped to 0.3.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #5359: Readd the Berkeley DB detection code to allow _dbm be built
 | |
|   using Berkeley DB.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Tests
 | |
| -----
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #5354: New test support function import_fresh_module() makes
 | |
|   it easy to import both normal and optimised versions of modules.
 | |
|   test_heapq and test_warnings have been adjusted to use it, tests for
 | |
|   other modules with both C and Python implementations in the stdlib
 | |
|   can be adjusted to use it over time.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #5837: Certain sequences of calls to set() and unset() for
 | |
|   support.EnvironmentVarGuard objects restored the environment variables
 | |
|   incorrectly on __exit__.
 | |
| 
 | |
| C-API
 | |
| -----
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #5630: A replacement PyCObject API, PyCapsule, has been added.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| What's New in Python 3.1 alpha 2?
 | |
| =================================
 | |
| 
 | |
| *Release date: 2009-4-4*
 | |
| 
 | |
| Core and Builtins
 | |
| -----------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Implement PEP 378, Format Specifier for Thousands Separator, for
 | |
|   integers.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #5666: Py_BuildValue's 'c' code should create byte strings.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #5499: The 'c' code for argument parsing functions now only accepts a
 | |
|   byte, and the 'C' code only accepts a unicode character.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Fix a problem in PyErr_NormalizeException that leads to "undetected errors"
 | |
|   when hitting the recursion limit under certain circumstances.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #1665206: Remove the last eager import in _warnings.c and make it lazy.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Fix a segfault when running test_exceptions with coverage, caused by
 | |
|   insufficient checks in accessors of Exception.__context__.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #5604: non-ASCII characters in module name passed to
 | |
|   imp.find_module() were converted to UTF-8 while the path is
 | |
|   converted to the default filesystem encoding, causing nonsense.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #5126: str.isprintable() returned False for space characters.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #4865: On MacOSX /Library/Python/2.7/site-packages is added to
 | |
|   the end sys.path, for compatibility with the system install of Python.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #4688: Add a heuristic so that tuples and dicts containing only
 | |
|   untrackable objects are not tracked by the garbage collector. This can
 | |
|   reduce the size of collections and therefore the garbage collection overhead
 | |
|   on long-running programs, depending on their particular use of datatypes.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #5512: Rewrite PyLong long division algorithm (x_divrem) to
 | |
|   improve its performance.  Long divisions and remainder operations
 | |
|   are now between 50% and 150% faster.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #4258: Make it possible to use base 2**30 instead of base
 | |
|   2**15 for the internal representation of integers, for performance
 | |
|   reasons.  Base 2**30 is enabled by default on 64-bit machines.  Add
 | |
|   --enable-big-digits option to configure, which overrides the
 | |
|   default.  Add sys.int_info structseq to provide information about
 | |
|   the internal format.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #4474: PyUnicode_FromWideChar now converts characters outside
 | |
|   the BMP to surrogate pairs, on systems with sizeof(wchar_t) == 4
 | |
|   and sizeof(Py_UNICODE) == 2.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #5237: Allow auto-numbered fields in str.format(). For
 | |
|   example: '{} {}'.format(1, 2) == '1 2'.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #5392: when a very low recursion limit was set, the interpreter would
 | |
|   abort with a fatal error after the recursion limit was hit twice.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #3845: In PyRun_SimpleFileExFlags avoid invalid memory access with
 | |
|   short file names.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Library
 | |
| -------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #2625: added missing items() call to the for loop in
 | |
|   mailbox.MH.get_message().
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #5640: Fix _multibytecodec so that CJK codecs don't repeat
 | |
|   error substitutions from non-strict codec error callbacks in
 | |
|   incrementalencoder and StreamWriter.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #5656: Fix the coverage reporting when running the test suite with
 | |
|   the -T argument.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #5647: MutableSet.__iand__() no longer mutates self during iteration.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #5624: Fix the _winreg module name still used in several modules.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #5628: Fix io.TextIOWrapper.read() with a unreadable buffer.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #5619: Multiprocessing children disobey the debug flag and causes
 | |
|   popups on windows buildbots. Patch applied to work around this issue.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #5400: Added patch for multiprocessing on netbsd compilation/support
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #5387: Fixed mmap.move crash by integer overflow.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #5261: Patch multiprocessing's semaphore.c to support context
 | |
|   manager use: "with multiprocessing.Lock()" works now.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #5236: Change time.strptime() to only take strings. Didn't work with
 | |
|   bytes already but the failure was non-obvious.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #5177: Multiprocessing's SocketListener class now uses
 | |
|   socket.SO_REUSEADDR on all connections so that the user no longer needs
 | |
|   to wait 120 seconds for the socket to expire.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #5595: Fix UnboundedLocalError in ntpath.ismount().
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #1174606: Calling read() without arguments of an unbounded file
 | |
|   (typically /dev/zero under Unix) could crash the interpreter.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The max_buffer_size arguments of io.BufferedWriter, io.BufferedRWPair, and
 | |
|   io.BufferedRandom have been deprecated for removal in Python 3.2.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #5068: Fixed the tarfile._BZ2Proxy.read() method that would loop
 | |
|   forever on incomplete input. That caused tarfile.open() to hang when used
 | |
|   with mode 'r' or 'r:bz2' and a fileobj argument that contained no data or
 | |
|   partial bzip2 compressed data.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #2110: Add support for thousands separator and 'n' type
 | |
|   specifier to Decimal.__format__
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Fix Decimal.__format__ bug that swapped the meanings of the '<' and
 | |
|   '>' alignment characters.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The error detection code in FileIO.close() could fail to reflect the `errno`
 | |
|   value, and report it as -1 instead.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #5016: FileIO.seekable() could return False if the file position
 | |
|   was negative when truncated to a C int. Patch by Victor Stinner.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Extension Modules
 | |
| -----------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #5391: mmap now deals exclusively with bytes.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #5463: In struct module, remove deprecated overflow wrapping
 | |
|   when packing an integer: struct.pack('=L', -1) now raises
 | |
|   struct.error instead of returning b'\xff\xff\xff\xff'.  The
 | |
|   _PY_STRUCT_RANGE_CHECKING and _PY_STRUCT_OVERFLOW_MASKING constants
 | |
|   have been removed from the struct module.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| What's New in Python 3.1 alpha 1
 | |
| ================================
 | |
| 
 | |
| *Release date: 2009-03-07*
 | |
| 
 | |
| Core and Builtins
 | |
| -----------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The io module has been reimplemented in C for speed.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Give dict views an informative __repr__.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #5247: Improve error message when unknown format codes are
 | |
|   used when using str.format() with str, int, and float arguments.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #5249: time.strftime returned malformed string when format string
 | |
|   contained non ascii character on windows.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #4626: compile(), exec(), and eval() ignore the coding cookie if the
 | |
|   source has already been decoded into str.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #5186: Reduce hash collisions for objects with no __hash__ method by
 | |
|   rotating the object pointer by 4 bits to the right.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #4575: Fix Py_IS_INFINITY macro to work correctly on x87 FPUs:
 | |
|   it now forces its argument to double before testing for infinity.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #5137: Make len() correctly raise a TypeError when a __len__ method
 | |
|   returns a non-number type.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #5182: Removed memoryview.__str__.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #1717: Removed builtin cmp() function, dropped tp_compare
 | |
|   slot, the C API functions PyObject_Compare and PyUnicode_Compare and
 | |
|   the type definition cmpfunc.  The tp_compare slot has been renamed
 | |
|   to tp_reserved, and is reserved for future usage.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #1242657: the __len__() and __length_hint__() calls in several tools
 | |
|   were suppressing all exceptions.  These include list() and bytearray().
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #4707: round(x, n) now returns an integer if x is an integer.
 | |
|   Previously it returned a float.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #4753: By enabling a configure option named '--with-computed-gotos'
 | |
|   on compilers that support it (notably: gcc, SunPro, icc), the bytecode
 | |
|   evaluation loop is compiled with a new dispatch mechanism which gives
 | |
|   speedups of up to 20%, depending on the system, on various benchmarks.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #4874: Most builtin decoders now reject unicode input.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #4842: Don't allow trailing 'L' when constructing an integer
 | |
|   from a string.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #4991: os.fdopen now raises an OSError for invalid file descriptors.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #4838: When a module is deallocated, free the memory backing the
 | |
|   optional module state data.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #4910: Rename nb_long slot to nb_reserved, and change its
 | |
|   type to ``(void *)``.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #4935: The overflow checking code in the expandtabs() method common
 | |
|   to str, bytes and bytearray could be optimized away by the compiler, letting
 | |
|   the interpreter segfault instead of raising an error.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #3720: Fix a crash when an iterator modifies its class and removes its
 | |
|   __next__ method.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #4910: Builtin int() function and PyNumber_Long/PyNumber_Int API
 | |
|   function no longer attempt to call the __long__ slot to convert an object
 | |
|   to an integer.  Only the __int__ and __trunc__ slots are examined.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #4893: Use NT threading on CE.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #4915: Port sysmodule to Windows CE.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #4868: utf-8, utf-16 and latin1 decoding are now 2x to 4x faster. The
 | |
|   common cases are optimized thanks to a dedicated fast path and a moderate
 | |
|   amount of loop unrolling.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #4074: Change the criteria for doing a full garbage collection (i.e.
 | |
|   collecting the oldest generation) so that allocating lots of objects without
 | |
|   destroying them does not show quadratic performance. Based on a proposal by
 | |
|   Martin von Löwis at
 | |
|   http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2008-June/080579.html.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #4604: Some objects of the I/O library could still be used after
 | |
|   having been closed (for instance, a read() call could return some
 | |
|   previously buffered data). Patch by Dmitry Vasiliev.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #4705: Fix the -u ("unbuffered binary stdout and stderr") command-line
 | |
|   flag to work properly. Furthermore, when specifying -u, the text stdout
 | |
|   and stderr streams have line-by-line buffering enabled (the default being
 | |
|   to buffer arbitrary chunks of data).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The internal table, _PyLong_DigitValue, is now an array of unsigned chars
 | |
|   instead of ints (reducing its size from 4 to 8 times thereby reducing
 | |
|   Python's overall memory).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #1180193: When importing a module from a .pyc (or .pyo) file with
 | |
|   an existing .py counterpart, override the co_filename attributes of all
 | |
|   code objects if the original filename is obsolete (which can happen if the
 | |
|   file has been renamed, moved, or if it is accessed through different paths).
 | |
|   Patch by Ziga Seilnacht and Jean-Paul Calderone.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #4580: Fix slicing of memoryviews when the item size is greater than
 | |
|   one byte. Also fixes the meaning of len() so that it returns the number of
 | |
|   items, rather than the size in bytes.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #4075: Use OutputDebugStringW in Py_FatalError.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #4747: When the terminal does not use utf-8, executing a script with
 | |
|   non-ascii characters in its name could fail with a "SyntaxError: None" error.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #4797: IOError.filename was not set when ``_fileio.FileIO`` failed
 | |
|   to open file with a bytes filename on Windows.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #3680: Reference cycles created through a dict, set or deque iterator
 | |
|   did not get collected.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #4701: PyObject_Hash now implicitly calls PyType_Ready on types
 | |
|   where the tp_hash and tp_dict slots are both NULL.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #4759: None is now allowed as the first argument of
 | |
|   bytearray.translate().  It was always allowed for bytes.translate().
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Added test case to ensure attempts to read from a file opened for writing
 | |
|   fail.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #3106: Speedup some comparisons (str/str and int/int).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #2183: Simplify and optimize bytecode for list, dict and set
 | |
|   comprehensions. Original patch for list comprehensions by Neal Norwitz.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #2467: gc.DEBUG_STATS reported invalid elapsed times. Also, always
 | |
|   print elapsed times, not only when some objects are uncollectable /
 | |
|   unreachable. Original patch by Neil Schemenauer.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #3439: Add a bit_length method to int.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #2173: When getting device encoding, check that return value of
 | |
|   nl_langinfo is not the empty string.  This was causing silent build
 | |
|   failures on OS X.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #4597: Fixed several opcodes that weren't always propagating
 | |
|   exceptions.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #4589: Fixed exception handling when the __exit__ function of a
 | |
|   context manager returns a value that cannot be converted to a bool.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #4445: Replace "sizeof(PyBytesObject)" with
 | |
|   "offsetof(PyBytesObject, ob_sval) + 1" when allocating memory for
 | |
|   bytes instances.  On a typical machine this saves 3 bytes of memory
 | |
|   (on average) per allocation of a bytes instance.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #4533: File read operation was dreadfully slow due to a slowly
 | |
|   growing read buffer. Fixed by using the same growth rate algorithm as
 | |
|   Python 2.x.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #4509: Various issues surrounding resize of bytearray objects to
 | |
|   which there are buffer exports (e.g. memoryview instances).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #4233: Changed semantic of ``_fileio.FileIO``'s ``close()``
 | |
|   method on file objects with closefd=False. The file descriptor is still
 | |
|   kept open but the file object behaves like a closed file. The ``FileIO``
 | |
|   object also got a new readonly attribute ``closefd``.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #4569: Interpreter crash when mutating a memoryview with an item size
 | |
|   larger than 1.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #4748: Lambda generators no longer return a value.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The re.sub(), re.subn() and re.split() functions now accept a flags parameter.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #5108: Handle %s like %S, %R and %A in PyUnicode_FromFormatV(): Call
 | |
|   PyUnicode_DecodeUTF8() once, remember the result and output it in a second
 | |
|   step. This avoids problems with counting UTF-8 bytes that ignores the effect
 | |
|   of using the replace error handler in PyUnicode_DecodeUTF8().
 | |
| 
 | |
| Library
 | |
| -------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #7071: byte-compilation in Distutils is now done with respect to
 | |
|   sys.dont_write_bytecode.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #7066: archive_util.make_archive now restores the cwd if an error is
 | |
|   raised. Initial patch by Ezio Melotti.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #6516: Added owner/group support when creating tar archives in
 | |
|   Distutils.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #6954: Fixed crash when using DISTUTILS_DEBUG flag in Distutils.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #6163: Fixed HP-UX runtime library dir options in
 | |
|   distutils.unixcompiler. Initial patch by Sridhar Ratnakumar and
 | |
|   Michael Haubenwallner.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #6693: New functions in site.py to get user/global site packages paths.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #6511: ZipFile now raises BadZipfile (instead of an IOError) when
 | |
|   opening an empty or very small file.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #6545: Removed assert statements in distutils.Extension, so the
 | |
|   behavior is similar when used with -O.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - unittest has been split up into a package.  All old names should still work.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #6466: now distutils.cygwinccompiler and distutils.emxccompiler
 | |
|   uses the same refactored function to get gcc/ld/dllwrap versions numbers.
 | |
|   It's `distutils.util.get_compiler_versions`. Added deprecation warnings
 | |
|   for the obsolete get_versions() functions.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #6433: fixed issues with multiprocessing.pool.map hanging on empty list
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #6314: logging: Extra checks on the "level" argument in more places.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #2622: Fixed an ImportError when importing email.message from a
 | |
|   standalone application built with py2exe or py2app.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #6455: Fixed test_build_ext under win32.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #6377: Enabled the compiler option, and deprecate its usage as an
 | |
|   attribute.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #6413: Fixed the log level in distutils.dist for announce.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #6403: Fixed package path usage in build_ext.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issues #5155, 5313, 5331: multiprocessing.Process._bootstrap was
 | |
|   unconditionally calling "os.close(sys.stdin.fileno())" resulting in file
 | |
|   descriptor errors
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #6365: Distutils build_ext inplace mode was copying the compiled
 | |
|   extension in a subdirectory if the extension name had dots.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #6164: Added an AIX specific linker argument in Distutils
 | |
|   unixcompiler. Original patch by Sridhar Ratnakumar.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #6286: Now Distutils upload command is based on urllib2 instead of
 | |
|   httplib, allowing the usage of http_proxy.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #6287: Added the license field in Distutils documentation.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #6263: Fixed syntax error in distutils.cygwincompiler.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #5201: distutils.sysconfig.parse_makefile() now understands `$$`
 | |
|   in Makefiles. This prevents compile errors when using syntax like:
 | |
|   `LDFLAGS='-rpath=\$$LIB:/some/other/path'`. Patch by Floris Bruynooghe.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #6131: test_modulefinder leaked when run after test_distutils.
 | |
|   Patch by Hirokazu Yamamoto.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #6048: Now Distutils uses the tarfile module in archive_util.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #6062: In distutils, fixed the package option of build_ext. Feedback
 | |
|   and tests on pywin32 by Tim Golden.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #6053: Fixed distutils tests on win32. patch by Hirokazu Yamamoto.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #6046: Fixed the library extension when distutils build_ext is used
 | |
|   inplace. Initial patch by Roumen Petrov.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #6041: Now distutils `sdist` and `register` commands use `check` as a
 | |
|   subcommand.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #6022: a test file was created in the current working directory by
 | |
|   test_get_outputs in Distutils.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #5977: distutils build_ext.get_outputs was not taking into account the
 | |
|   inplace option. Initial patch by kxroberto.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #5984: distutils.command.build_ext.check_extensions_list checks were broken
 | |
|   for old-style extensions.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #5976: Fixed Distutils test_check_environ.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #5941: Distutils build_clib command was not working anymore because
 | |
|   of an incomplete costumization of the archiver command. Added ARFLAGS in the
 | |
|   Makefile besides AR and make Distutils use it. Original patch by David
 | |
|   Cournapeau.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #2245: aifc now skips chunk types it doesn't recognize, per spec.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #5874: distutils.tests.test_config_cmd is not locale-sensitive
 | |
|   anymore.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #5810: Fixed Distutils test_build_scripts so it uses
 | |
|   sysconfig.get_config_vars.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #4951: Fixed failure in test_httpservers.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #5795: Fixed test_distutils failure on Debian ppc.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #5607: fixed Distutils test_get_platform for Mac OS X fat binaries.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #5741: don't disallow "%%" (which is an escape for "%") when setting
 | |
|   a value in SafeConfigParser.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #5732: added a new command in Distutils: check.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #5731: Distutils bdist_wininst no longer worked on non-Windows
 | |
|   platforms. Initial patch by Paul Moore.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #5095: Added bdist_msi to the list of bdist supported formats.
 | |
|   Initial fix by Steven Bethard.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #1491431: Fixed distutils.filelist.glob_to_re for edge cases.
 | |
|   Initial fix by Wayne Davison.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #5694: removed spurious test output in Distutils (test_clean).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #1326077: fix the formatting of SyntaxErrors by the traceback module.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #1665206 (partially): Move imports in cgitb to the top of the module
 | |
|   instead of performing them in functions. Helps prevent import deadlocking in
 | |
|   threads.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #2522: locale.format now checks its first argument to ensure it has
 | |
|   been passed only one pattern, avoiding mysterious errors where it appeared
 | |
|   that it was failing to do localization.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #5583: Added optional Extensions in Distutils. Initial patch by Georg
 | |
|   Brandl.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #1222: locale.format() bug when the thousands separator is a space
 | |
|   character.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #5472: Fixed distutils.test_util tear down. Original patch by
 | |
|   Tim Golden.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - collections.deque() objects now have a read-only attribute called maxlen.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #2638: Show a window constructed with tkSimpleDialog.Dialog only after
 | |
|   it is has been populated and properly configured in order to prevent
 | |
|   window flashing.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #4792: Prevent a segfault in _tkinter by using the
 | |
|   guaranteed to be safe interp argument given to the PythonCmd in place of
 | |
|   the Tcl interpreter taken from a PythonCmd_ClientData.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #5193: Guarantee that tkinter.Text.search returns a string.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #5394: removed > 2.3 syntax from distutils.msvc9compiler.
 | |
|   Original patch by Akira Kitada.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #5334: array.fromfile() failed to insert values when EOFError was raised.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #5385: Fixed mmap crash after resize failure on windows.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #5179: Fixed subprocess handle leak on failure on windows.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - PEP 372:  Added collections.OrderedDict().
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The _asdict() for method for namedtuples now returns an OrderedDict().
 | |
| 
 | |
| - configparser now defaults to using an ordered dictionary.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #5401: Fixed a performance problem in mimetypes when ``from mimetypes
 | |
|   import guess_extension`` was used.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #1733986: Fixed mmap crash in accessing elements of second map object
 | |
|   with same tagname but larger size than first map. (Windows)
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #5386: mmap.write_byte didn't check map size, so it could cause buffer
 | |
|   overrun.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #1533164: Installed but not listed ``*.pyo`` was breaking Distutils
 | |
|   bdist_rpm command.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #5378: added --quiet option to Distutils bdist_rpm command.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #5052: make Distutils compatible with 2.3 again.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #5316: Fixed buildbot failures introduced by multiple inheritance
 | |
|   in Distutils tests.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #5287: Add exception handling around findCaller() call to help out
 | |
|   IronPython.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #5282: Fixed mmap resize on 32bit windows and unix. When offset > 0,
 | |
|   The file was resized to wrong size.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #5292: Fixed mmap crash on its boundary access m[len(m)].
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #2279: distutils.sdist.add_defaults now add files
 | |
|   from the package_data and the data_files metadata.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #5257: refactored all tests in distutils, so they use
 | |
|   support.TempdirManager, to avoid writing in the tests directory.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #4524: distutils build_script command failed with --with-suffix=3.
 | |
|   Initial patch by Amaury Forgeot d'Arc.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #2461: added tests for distutils.util
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #4998: The memory saving effect of __slots__ had been lost on Fractions
 | |
|   which inherited from numbers.py which did not have __slots__ defined.  The
 | |
|   numbers hierarchy now has its own __slots__ declarations.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #4631: Fix urlopen() result when an HTTP response uses chunked
 | |
|   encoding.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #5203: Fixed ctypes segfaults when passing a unicode string to a
 | |
|   function without argtypes (only occurs if HAVE_USABLE_WCHAR_T is false).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #3386: distutils.sysconfig.get_python_lib prefix argument was ignored
 | |
|   under NT and OS2. Patch by Philip Jenvey.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #5128: Make compileall properly inspect bytecode to determine if needs
 | |
|   to be recreated. This avoids a timing hole thanks to the old reliance on the
 | |
|   ctime of the files involved.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #5122: Synchronize tk load failure check to prevent a potential
 | |
|   deadlock.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #1818: collections.namedtuple() now supports a keyword argument
 | |
|   'rename' which lets invalid fieldnames be automatically converted to
 | |
|   positional names in the form, _1, _2, ...
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #4890: Handle empty text search pattern in Tkinter.Text.search.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #4512 (part 2): Promote ``ZipImporter._get_filename()`` to be a
 | |
|   public documented method ``ZipImporter.get_filename()``.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #4195: The ``runpy`` module (and the ``-m`` switch) now support
 | |
|   the execution of packages by looking for and executing a ``__main__``
 | |
|   submodule when a package name is supplied. Initial patch by Andi
 | |
|   Vajda.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #1731706: Call Tcl_ConditionFinalize for Tcl_Conditions that will
 | |
|   not be used again (this requires Tcl/Tk 8.3.1), also fix a memory leak in
 | |
|   Tkapp_Call when calling from a thread different than the one that created
 | |
|   the Tcl interpreter. Patch by Robert Hancock.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #4285: Change sys.version_info to be a named tuple. Patch by
 | |
|   Ross Light.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #1520877: Now distutils.sysconfig reads $AR from the
 | |
|   environment/Makefile. Patch by Douglas Greiman.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #1276768: The verbose option was not used in the code of
 | |
|   distutils.file_util and distutils.dir_util.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #5132: Fixed trouble building extensions under Solaris with
 | |
|   --enabled-shared activated. Initial patch by Dave Peterson.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #1581476: Always use the Tcl global namespace when calling into Tcl.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The shelve module now defaults to pickle protocol 3.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Fix a bug in the trace module where a bytes object from co_lnotab had its
 | |
|   items being passed through ord().
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #2047: shutil.move() could believe that its destination path was
 | |
|   inside its source path if it began with the same letters (e.g. "src" vs.
 | |
|   "src.new").
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Added the ttk module. See issue #2983: Ttk support for Tkinter.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Removed isSequenceType(), isMappingType, and isNumberType() from the
 | |
|   operator module; use the abstract base classes instead.  Also removed
 | |
|   the repeat() function; use mul() instead.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #5021:  doctest.testfile() did not create __name__ and
 | |
|   collections.namedtuple() relied on __name__ being defined.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Backport importlib from Python 3.1. Only the import_module() function has
 | |
|   been backported to help facilitate transitions from 2.7 to 3.1.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #1885: distutils. When running sdist with --formats=tar,gztar
 | |
|   the tar file was overriden by the gztar one.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #4863: distutils.mwerkscompiler has been removed.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Added a new itertools functions:  combinations_with_replacement()
 | |
|   and compress().
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #5032:  added a step argument to itertools.count() and
 | |
|   allowed non-integer arguments.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Fix and properly document the multiprocessing module's logging
 | |
|   support, expose the internal levels and provide proper usage
 | |
|   examples.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #1672332: fix unpickling of subnormal floats, which was
 | |
|   producing a ValueError on some platforms.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #3881: Help Tcl to load even when started through the
 | |
|   unreadable local symlink to "Program Files" on Vista.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #4710: Extract directories properly in the zipfile module;
 | |
|   allow adding directories to a zipfile.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #3807: _multiprocessing build fails when configure is passed
 | |
|   --without-threads argument. When this occurs, _multiprocessing will
 | |
|   be disabled, and not compiled.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #5008: When a file is opened in append mode with the new IO library,
 | |
|   do an explicit seek to the end of file (so that e.g. tell() returns the
 | |
|   file size rather than 0). This is consistent with the behaviour of the
 | |
|   traditional 2.x file object.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #5013: Fixed a bug in FileHandler which occurred when the delay
 | |
|   parameter was set.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #4842: Always append a trailing 'L' when pickling longs using
 | |
|   pickle protocol 0.  When reading, the 'L' is optional.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Add the importlib package.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #4301: Patch the logging module to add processName support, remove
 | |
|   _check_logger_class from multiprocessing.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #3325: Remove python2.x try: except: imports for old cPickle from
 | |
|   multiprocessing.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #4959: inspect.formatargspec now works for keyword only arguments
 | |
|   without defaults.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #3321: ``_multiprocessing.Connection()`` doesn't check handle; added checks
 | |
|   for Unix machines for negative handles and large int handles. Without this check
 | |
|   it is possible to segfault the interpreter.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #4449: AssertionError in mp_benchmarks.py, caused by an underlying issue
 | |
|   in sharedctypes.py.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #1225107: inspect.isclass() returned True for instances with a custom
 | |
|   __getattr__.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #3826 and #4791: The socket module now closes the underlying socket
 | |
|   appropriately when it is being used via socket.makefile() objects
 | |
|   rather than delaying the close by waiting for garbage collection to do it.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #1696199:  Add collections.Counter() for rapid and convenient
 | |
|   counting.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #3860: GzipFile and BZ2File now support the context manager protocol.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #4867: Fixed a crash in ctypes when passing a string to a
 | |
|   function without defining argtypes.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #4272: Add an optional argument to the GzipFile constructor to override
 | |
|   the timestamp in the gzip stream. The default value remains the current time.
 | |
|   The information can be used by e.g. gunzip when decompressing. Patch by
 | |
|   Jacques Frechet.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Restore Python 2.3 compatibility for decimal.py.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #3638: Remove functions from _tkinter module level that depend on
 | |
|   TkappObject to work with multiple threads.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #4718: Adapt the wsgiref package so that it actually works with
 | |
|   Python 3.x, in accordance with the `official amendments of the spec
 | |
|   <http://www.wsgi.org/wsgi/Amendments_1.0>`_.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #4796: Added Decimal.from_float() and Context.create_decimal_from_float()
 | |
|   to the decimal module.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Fractions.from_float() no longer loses precision for integers too big to
 | |
|   cast as floats.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #4812: add missing underscore prefix to some internal-use-only
 | |
|   constants in the decimal module.  (Dec_0 becomes _Dec_0, etc.)
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #4790: The nsmallest() and nlargest() functions in the heapq module
 | |
|   did unnecessary work in the common case where no key function was specified.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #4795: inspect.isgeneratorfunction() returns False instead of None when
 | |
|   the function is not a generator.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #4702: Throwing a DistutilsPlatformError instead of IOError in case
 | |
|   no MSVC compiler is found under Windows. Original patch by Philip Jenvey.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #4646: distutils was choking on empty options arg in the setup
 | |
|   function. Original patch by Thomas Heller.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #3767: Convert Tk object to string in tkColorChooser.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #3248: Allow placing ScrolledText in a PanedWindow.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #4444: Allow assertRaises() to be used as a context handler, so that
 | |
|   the code under test can be written inline if more practical.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #4739: Add pydoc help topics for symbols, so that e.g. help('@')
 | |
|   works as expected in the interactive environment.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #4756: zipfile.is_zipfile() now supports file-like objects. Patch by
 | |
|   Gabriel Genellina.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #4574: reading an UTF16-encoded text file crashes if \r on 64-char
 | |
|   boundary.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #4223: inspect.getsource() will now correctly display source code
 | |
|   for packages loaded via zipimport (or any other conformant PEP 302
 | |
|   loader). Original patch by Alexander Belopolsky.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #4201: pdb can now access and display source code loaded via
 | |
|   zipimport (or any other conformant PEP 302 loader). Original patch by
 | |
|   Alexander Belopolsky.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #4197: doctests in modules loaded via zipimport (or any other PEP
 | |
|   302 conformant loader) will now work correctly in most cases (they
 | |
|   are still subject to the constraints that exist for all code running
 | |
|   from inside a module loaded via a PEP 302 loader and attempting to
 | |
|   perform IO operations based on __file__). Original patch by
 | |
|   Alexander Belopolsky.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issues #4082 and #4512: Add runpy support to zipimport in a manner that
 | |
|   allows backporting to maintenance branches. Original patch by
 | |
|   Alexander Belopolsky.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #4163: textwrap module: allow word splitting on a hyphen preceded by
 | |
|   a non-ASCII letter.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #4616: TarFile.utime(): Restore directory times on Windows.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #4021: tokenize.detect_encoding() now raises a SyntaxError when the
 | |
|   codec cannot be found.  This is for compatibility with the builtin behavior.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #4084: Fix max, min, max_mag and min_mag Decimal methods to
 | |
|   give correct results in the case where one argument is a quiet NaN
 | |
|   and the other is a finite number that requires rounding.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #4483: _dbm module now builds on systems with gdbm & gdbm_compat
 | |
|   libs.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Added the subprocess.check_call_output() convenience function to get output
 | |
|   from a subprocess on success or raise an exception on error.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #1055234: cgi.parse_header(): Fixed parsing of header parameters to
 | |
|   support unusual filenames (such as those containing semi-colons) in
 | |
|   Content-Disposition headers.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #4384: Added logging integration with warnings module using
 | |
|   captureWarnings(). This change includes a NullHandler which does nothing;
 | |
|   it will be of use to library developers who want to avoid the "No handlers
 | |
|   could be found for logger XXX" message which can appear if the library user
 | |
|   doesn't configure logging.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #3741: DISTUTILS_USE_SDK set causes msvc9compiler.py to raise an
 | |
|   exception.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #4529: fix the parser module's validation of try-except-finally
 | |
|   statements.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #4458: getopt.gnu_getopt() now recognizes a single "-" as an argument,
 | |
|   not a malformed option.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Added the subprocess.check_output() convenience function to get output
 | |
|   from a subprocess on success or raise an exception on error.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #4542: On Windows, binascii.crc32 still accepted str as binary input;
 | |
|   the corresponding tests now pass.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #4537: webbrowser.UnixBrowser would fail to open the browser because
 | |
|   it was calling the wrong open() function.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #1055234: cgi.parse_header(): Fixed parsing of header parameters to
 | |
|   support unusual filenames (such as those containing semi-colons) in
 | |
|   Content-Disposition headers.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #4861: ctypes.util.find_library(): Robustify. Fix library detection on
 | |
|   biarch systems. Try to rely on ldconfig only, without using objdump and gcc.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #5104: The socket module now raises OverflowError when 16-bit port and
 | |
|   protocol numbers are supplied outside the allowed 0-65536 range on bind()
 | |
|   and getservbyport().
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Windows locale mapping updated to Vista.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Tools/Demos
 | |
| -----------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #4704: remove use of cmp() in pybench, bump its version number to 2.1,
 | |
|   and make it 2.6-compatible.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Ttk demos added in Demo/tkinter/ttk/
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #4677: add two list comprehension tests to pybench.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| Build
 | |
| -----
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #6094: Build correctly with Subversion 1.7.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #5847: Remove -n switch on "Edit with IDLE" menu item.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #5726: Make Modules/ld_so_aix return the actual exit code of the
 | |
|   linker, rather than always exit successfully. Patch by Floris Bruynooghe.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #4587: Add configure option --with-dbmliborder=db1:db2:... to specify
 | |
|   the order that backends for the dbm extension are checked.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Link the shared python library with $(MODLIBS).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #5134: Silence compiler warnings when compiling sqlite with VC++.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #4494: Fix build with Py_NO_ENABLE_SHARED on Windows.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #4895: Use _strdup on Windows CE.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #4472: "configure --enable-shared" now works on OSX
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issues #4728 and #4060: WORDS_BIGEDIAN is now correct in Universal builds.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #4389: Add icon to the uninstall entry in "add-and-remove-programs".
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #4289: Remove Cancel button from AdvancedDlg.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #1656675: Register a drop handler for .py* files on Windows.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #4120: Exclude manifest from extension modules in VS2008.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #4091: Install pythonxy.dll in system32 again.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #4018: Disable "for me" installations on Vista.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #3758: Add ``patchcheck`` build target to .PHONY.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #4204: Fixed module build errors on FreeBSD 4.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| C-API
 | |
| -----
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #6624: yArg_ParseTuple with "s" format when parsing argument with
 | |
|   NUL: Bogus TypeError detail string.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #5175: PyLong_AsUnsignedLongLong now raises OverflowError
 | |
|   for negative arguments.  Previously, it raised TypeError.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #4720: The format for PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords can begin with '|'.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #3632: from the gdb debugger, the 'pyo' macro can now be called when
 | |
|   the GIL is released, or owned by another thread.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #4122: On Windows, fix a compilation error when using the
 | |
|   Py_UNICODE_ISSPACE macro in an extension module.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| Extension Modules
 | |
| -----------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #3745: Fix hashlib to always reject unicode and non buffer-api
 | |
|   supporting objects as input no matter how it was compiled (built in
 | |
|   implementations or external openssl library).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #4397: Fix occasional test_socket failure on OS X.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #4279: Fix build of parsermodule under Cygwin.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #4751: hashlib now releases the GIL when hashing large buffers
 | |
|   (with a hardwired threshold of 2048 bytes), allowing better parallelization
 | |
|   on multi-CPU systems. Contributed by Lukas Lueg (ebfe) and Victor Stinner.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #4051: Prevent conflict of UNICODE macros in cPickle.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #4738: Each zlib object now has a separate lock, allowing to compress
 | |
|   or decompress several streams at once on multi-CPU systems. Also, the GIL
 | |
|   is now released when computing the CRC of a large buffer. Patch by ebfe.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #4228: Pack negative values the same way as 2.4 in struct's L format.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #1040026: Fix os.times result on systems where HZ is incorrect.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issues #3167, #3682: Fix test_math failures for log, log10 on Solaris,
 | |
|   OpenBSD.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #4583: array.array would not always prohibit resizing when a buffer
 | |
|   has been exported, resulting in an interpreter crash when accessing the
 | |
|   buffer.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #5228: Make functools.partial objects can now be pickled.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Tests
 | |
| -----
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #6152: New option '-j'/'--multiprocess' for regrtest allows running
 | |
|   regression tests in parallel, shortening the total runtime.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #5450: Moved tests involving loading tk from Lib/test/test_tcl to
 | |
|   Lib/tkinter/test/test_tkinter/test_loadtk. With this, these tests demonstrate
 | |
|   the same behaviour as test_ttkguionly (and now also test_tk) which is to
 | |
|   skip the tests if DISPLAY is defined but can't be used.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - regrtest no longer treats ImportError as equivalent to SkipTest.  Imports
 | |
|   that should cause a test to be skipped are now done using import_module
 | |
|   from test support, which does the conversion.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #5083: New 'gui' resource for regrtest.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| Docs
 | |
| ----
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| What's New in Python 3.0 final
 | |
| ==============================
 | |
| 
 | |
| *Release date: 03-Dec-2008*
 | |
| 
 | |
| Core and Builtins
 | |
| -----------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #3996: On Windows, the PyOS_CheckStack function would cause the
 | |
|   interpreter to abort ("Fatal Python error: Could not reset the stack!")
 | |
|   instead of throwing a MemoryError.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #3689: The list reversed iterator now supports __length_hint__
 | |
|   instead of __len__.  Behavior now matches other reversed iterators.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #4367: Python would segfault during compiling when the unicodedata
 | |
|   module couldn't be imported and \N escapes were present.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Fix build failure of _cursesmodule.c building with -D_FORTIFY_SOURCE=2.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Library
 | |
| -------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #4387: binascii now refuses to accept str as binary input.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #4073: Add 2to3 support to build_scripts, refactor that support
 | |
|   in build_py.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - IDLE would print a "Unhandled server exception!" message when internal
 | |
|   debugging is enabled.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #4455: IDLE failed to display the windows list when two windows have
 | |
|   the same title.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #3741: DISTUTILS_USE_SDK set causes msvc9compiler.py to raise an
 | |
|   exception.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #4433: Fixed an access violation when garbage collecting
 | |
|   _ctypes.COMError instances.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #4429: Fixed UnicodeDecodeError in ctypes.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #4373: Corrected a potential reference leak in the pickle module and
 | |
|   silenced a false positive ref leak in distutils.tests.test_build_ext.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #4382: dbm.dumb did not specify the expected file encoding for opened
 | |
|   files.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #4383: When IDLE cannot make the connection to its subprocess, it would
 | |
|   fail to properly display the error message.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Build
 | |
| -----
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #4407: Fix source file that caused the compileall step in Windows installer
 | |
|   to fail.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Docs
 | |
| ----
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #4449: Fixed multiprocessing examples
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #3799: Document that dbm.gnu and dbm.ndbm will accept string arguments
 | |
|   for keys and values which will be converted to bytes before committal.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| What's New in Python 3.0 release candidate 3?
 | |
| =============================================
 | |
| 
 | |
| *Release date: 20-Nov-2008*
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| Core and Builtins
 | |
| -----------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #4349: sys.path included a non-existent platform directory because of a
 | |
|   faulty Makefile.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #3327: Don't overallocate in the modules_by_index list.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #1721812:  Binary set operations and copy() returned the input type
 | |
|   instead of the appropriate base type.  This was incorrect because set
 | |
|   subclasses would be created without their __init__() method being called.
 | |
|   The corrected behavior brings sets into line with lists and dicts.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #4296: Fix PyObject_RichCompareBool so that "x in [x]" evaluates to
 | |
|   True, even when x doesn't compare equal to itself.  This was a regression
 | |
|   from 2.6.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #3705: Command-line arguments were not correctly decoded when the
 | |
|   terminal does not use UTF8.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Library
 | |
| -------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #4363: The uuid.uuid1() and uuid.uuid4() functions now work even if
 | |
|   the ctypes module is not present.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - FileIO's mode attribute now always includes ``"b"``.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #3799: Fix dbm.dumb to accept strings as well as bytes for keys. String
 | |
|   keys are now written out in UTF-8.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #4338: Fix distutils upload command.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #4354: Fix distutils register command.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #4116: Resolve member name conflict in ScrolledCanvas.__init__.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #4307: The named tuple that ``inspect.getfullargspec()`` returns now
 | |
|   uses ``kwonlydefaults`` instead of ``kwdefaults``.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #4298: Fix a segfault when pickle.loads is passed a ill-formed input.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #4283: Fix a left-over "iteritems" call in distutils.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Build
 | |
| -----
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #4389: Add icon to the uninstall entry in "add-and-remove-programs".
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #4289: Remove Cancel button from AdvancedDlg.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #1656675: Register a drop handler for .py* files on Windows.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Tools/Demos
 | |
| -----------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Demos of the socketserver module now work with Python 3.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| What's New in Python 3.0 release candidate 2
 | |
| ============================================
 | |
| 
 | |
| *Release date: 05-Nov-2008*
 | |
| 
 | |
| Core and Builtins
 | |
| -----------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #4211: The __path__ attribute of frozen packages is now a list instead
 | |
|   of a string as required by PEP 302.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #3727: Fixed poplib.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #3714: Fixed nntplib by using bytes where appropriate.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #1210: Fixed imaplib and its documentation.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #4233: Changed semantic of ``_fileio.FileIO``'s ``close()`` 
 | |
|   method on file objects with closefd=False. The file descriptor is still
 | |
|   kept open but the file object behaves like a closed file. The ``FileIO``
 | |
|   object also got a new readonly attribute ``closefd``.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #3626: On cygwin, starting python with a non-existent script name
 | |
|   would not display anything if the file name is only 1 character long.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #4176: Fixed a crash when pickling an object which ``__reduce__``
 | |
|   method does not return iterators for the 4th and 5th items.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #3723: Fixed initialization of subinterpreters.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #4213: The file system encoding is now normalized by the
 | |
|   codec subsystem, for example UTF-8 is turned into utf-8.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #4200: Changed the atexit module to store its state in its
 | |
|   PyModuleDef atexitmodule. This fixes a bug with multiple subinterpeters.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #4237: io.FileIO() was raising invalid warnings caused by
 | |
|   insufficient initialization of PyFileIOObject struct members.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #4170: Pickling a collections.defaultdict object would crash the
 | |
|   interpreter.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #4146: Compilation on OpenBSD has been restored.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #3574: compile() incorrectly handled source code encoded as Latin-1.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issues #2384 and #3975: Tracebacks were not correctly printed when the
 | |
|   source file contains a ``coding:`` header: the wrong line was displayed, and
 | |
|   the encoding was not respected.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #3740: Null-initialize module state.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #3946: PyObject_CheckReadBuffer crashed on a memoryview object.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #1688: On Windows, the input() prompt was not correctly displayed if it
 | |
|   contains non-ascii characters.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #3951: Py_USING_MEMORY_DEBUGGER should not be enabled by default.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Library
 | |
| -------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #3664: The pickle module could segfault if a subclass of Pickler fails
 | |
|   to call the base __init__ method.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #3725: telnetlib now works completely in bytes.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #4072: Restore build_py_2to3.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #4014: Don't claim that Python has an Alpha release status, in addition
 | |
|   to claiming it is Mature.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #3187: Add sys.setfilesystemencoding.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #3187: Better support for "undecodable" filenames.  Code by Victor
 | |
|   Stinner, with small tweaks by GvR.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #3965: Allow repeated calls to turtle.Screen, by making it a
 | |
|   true singleton object.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #3911: ftplib.FTP.makeport() could give invalid port numbers.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #3929: When the database cannot be opened, dbm.open() would incorrectly
 | |
|   raise a TypeError: "'tuple' object is not callable" instead of the expected
 | |
|   dbm.error.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #3884: Make the turtle module toplevel again.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #3547: Fixed ctypes structures bitfields of varying integer
 | |
|   sizes.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Extension Modules
 | |
| -----------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #3659: Subclasses of str didn't work as SQL parameters.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Build
 | |
| -----
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #4120: Exclude manifest from extension modules in VS2008.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #4091: Install pythonxy.dll in system32 again.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #4018: Disable "for me" installations on Vista.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #4204: Fixed module build errors on FreeBSD 4.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Tools/Demos
 | |
| -----------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #3717: Fix Demo/embed/demo.c.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #4072: Add a distutils demo for build_py_2to3.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| What's New in Python 3.0 release candidate 1
 | |
| ============================================
 | |
| 
 | |
| *Release date: 17-Sep-2008*
 | |
| 
 | |
| Core and Builtins
 | |
| -----------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #3827: memoryview lost its size attribute in favor of using len(view).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #3813: could not lanch python.exe via symbolic link on cygwin.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #3705: fix crash when given a non-ascii value on the command line for
 | |
|   the "-c" and "-m" parameters. Now the behaviour is as expected under Linux,
 | |
|   although under Windows it fails at a later point.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #3279: Importing site at interpreter was failing silently because the
 | |
|   site module uses the open builtin which was not initialized at the time.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #3660: Corrected a reference leak in str.encode() when the encoder
 | |
|   does not return a bytes object.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #3774: Added a few more checks in PyTokenizer_FindEncoding to handle
 | |
|   error conditions.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #3594: Fix Parser/tokenizer.c:fp_setreadl() to open the file being
 | |
|   tokenized by either a file path or file pointer for the benefit of
 | |
|   PyTokenizer_FindEncoding().
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #3696: Error parsing arguments on OpenBSD <= 4.4 and Cygwin. On
 | |
|   these systems, the mbstowcs() function is slightly buggy and must be
 | |
|   replaced with strlen() for the purpose of counting of number of wide
 | |
|   characters needed to represent the multi-byte character string.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #3697: "Fatal Python error: Cannot recover from stack overflow"
 | |
|   could be easily encountered under Windows in debug mode when exercising
 | |
|   the recursion limit checking code, due to bogus handling of recursion
 | |
|   limit when USE_STACKCHEK was enabled.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue 3639: The _warnings module could segfault the interpreter when
 | |
|   unexpected types were passed in as arguments.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #3712: The memoryview object had a reference leak and didn't support
 | |
|   cyclic garbage collection.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #3668: Fix a memory leak with the "s*" argument parser in
 | |
|   PyArg_ParseTuple and friends, which occurred when the argument for "s*" 
 | |
|   was correctly parsed but parsing of subsequent arguments failed.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #3611: An exception __context__ could be cleared in a complex pattern
 | |
|   involving a __del__ method re-raising an exception.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #2534: speed up isinstance() and issubclass() by 50-70%, so as to 
 | |
|   match Python 2.5 speed despite the __instancecheck__ / __subclasscheck__
 | |
|   mechanism. In the process, fix a bug where isinstance() and issubclass(),
 | |
|   when given a tuple of classes as second argument, were looking up
 | |
|   __instancecheck__ / __subclasscheck__ on the tuple rather than on each
 | |
|   type object.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #3663: Py_None was decref'd when printing SyntaxErrors.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #3651: Fix various memory leaks when using the buffer
 | |
|   interface, or when the "s#" code of PyArg_ParseTuple is given a
 | |
|   bytes object.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #3657: Fix uninitialized memory read when pickling longs.
 | |
|   Found by valgrind.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Apply security patches from Apple.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Fix crashes on memory allocation failure found with failmalloc.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Fix memory leaks found with valgrind and update suppressions file.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Fix compiler warnings in opt mode which would lead to invalid memory reads.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Fix problem using wrong name in decimal module reported by pychecker.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #3650: Fixed a reference leak in bytes.split('x').
 | |
| 
 | |
| - bytes(o) now tries to use o.__bytes__() before using fallbacks.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #1204: The configure script now tests for additional libraries
 | |
|   that may be required when linking against readline.  This fixes issues
 | |
|   with x86_64 builds on some platforms (a few Linux flavors and OpenBSD).
 | |
| 
 | |
| C API
 | |
| -----
 | |
| 
 | |
| - PyObject_Bytes and PyBytes_FromObject were added.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Library
 | |
| -------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #3756: make re.escape() handle bytes as well as str.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #3800: fix filter() related bug in formatter.py.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #874900: fix behaviour of threading module after a fork.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #3535: zipfile couldn't read some zip files larger than 2GB.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #3776: Deprecate the bsddb package for removal in 3.0.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #3762: platform.architecture() fails if python is lanched via
 | |
|   its symbolic link.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #3660: fix a memory leak in the C accelerator of the pickle module.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #3160: the "bdist_wininst" distutils command didn't work.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #1658: tkinter changes dict size during iteration in both
 | |
|     tkinter.BaseWidget and tkinter.scrolledtext.ScrolledText.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The bsddb module (and therefore the dbm.bsd module) has been removed.
 | |
|   It is now maintained outside of the standard library at
 | |
|   http://www.jcea.es/programacion/pybsddb.htm.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue 600362:  Relocated parse_qs() and parse_qsl(), from the cgi module
 | |
|   to the urlparse one.  Added a DeprecationWarning in the old module, it
 | |
|   will be deprecated in the future.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #3719: platform.architecture() fails if there are spaces in the
 | |
|   path to the Python binary.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue 3602: As part of the merge of r66135, make the parameters on
 | |
|   warnings.catch_warnings() keyword-only. Also remove a DeprecationWarning.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The deprecation warnings for the camelCase threading API names were removed.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #3110: multiprocessing fails to compiel on solaris 10 due to missing 
 | |
|   SEM_VALUE_MAX.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Extension Modules
 | |
| -----------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #3782: os.write() must not accept unicode strings.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #2975: When compiling several extension modules with Visual Studio 2008
 | |
|   from the same python interpreter, some environment variables would grow
 | |
|   without limit.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #3643: Added a few more checks to _testcapi to prevent segfaults by
 | |
|   exploitation of poor argument checking.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - bsddb code updated to version 4.7.3pre2. This code is the same than
 | |
|   Python 2.6 one, since the intention is to keep an unified 2.x/3.x codebase.
 | |
|   The Python code is automatically translated using "2to3". Please, do not
 | |
|   update this code in Python 3.0 by hand. Update the 2.6 one and then
 | |
|   do "2to3".
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The _bytesio and _stringio modules are now compiled into the python binary.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #3492 and #3790: Fixed the zlib module and zipimport module uses of
 | |
|   mutable bytearray objects where they should have been using immutable bytes.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #3797: Fixed the dbm, marshal, mmap, ossaudiodev, & winreg modules to
 | |
|   return bytes objects instead of bytearray objects.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| Tools/Demos
 | |
| -----------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Fix Misc/gdbinit so it works.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| Build
 | |
| -----
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #3812: Failed to build python if configure --without-threads.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #3791: Remove the bsddb module from the Windows installer, and the
 | |
|   core bsddb library from the Windows build files.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| What's new in Python 3.0b3?
 | |
| ===========================
 | |
| 
 | |
| *Release date: 20-Aug-2008*
 | |
| 
 | |
| Core and Builtins
 | |
| -----------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #3653: Fix a segfault when sys.excepthook was called with invalid
 | |
|   arguments.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #2394: implement more of the memoryview API, with the caveat that
 | |
|   only one-dimensional contiguous buffers are supported and exercised right
 | |
|   now. Slicing, slice assignment and comparison (equality and inequality)
 | |
|   have been added. Also, the tolist() method has been implemented, but only
 | |
|   for byte buffers. Finally, the API has been updated to return bytes objects
 | |
|   wherever it used to return bytearrays.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #3560: clean up the new C PyMemoryView API so that naming is
 | |
|   internally consistent; add macros PyMemoryView_GET_BASE() and
 | |
|   PyMemoryView_GET_BUFFER() to access useful properties of a memory views
 | |
|   without relying on a particular implementation; remove the ill-named
 | |
|   PyMemoryView() function (PyMemoryView_GET_BUFFER() can be used instead).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - ctypes function pointers that are COM methods have a boolean True
 | |
|   value again.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #1819: function calls with several named parameters are now on
 | |
|   average 35% faster (as measured by pybench).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The undocumented C APIs PyUnicode_AsString() and
 | |
|   PyUnicode_AsStringAndSize() were made private to the interpreter, in
 | |
|   order to be able to refine their interfaces for Python 3.1.
 | |
| 
 | |
|   If you need to access the UTF-8 representation of a Unicode object
 | |
|   as bytes string, please use PyUnicode_AsUTF8String() instead.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #3460: PyUnicode_Join() implementation is 10% to 80% faster thanks
 | |
|   to Python 3.0's stricter semantics which allow to avoid successive
 | |
|   reallocations of the result string (this also affects str.join()).
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| Library
 | |
| -------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #1276: Added temporary aliases for CJK Mac encodings to resolve
 | |
|   a build problem on MacOS with CJK locales.  It adds four temporary
 | |
|   mappings to existing legacy codecs that are virtually compatible
 | |
|   with Mac encodings.  They will be replaced by codecs correctly
 | |
|   implemented in 3.1.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #3614: Corrected a typo in xmlrpc.client, leading to a NameError
 | |
|   "global name 'header' is not defined".
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #2834: update the regular expression library to match the unicode
 | |
|   standards of py3k. In other words, mixing bytes and unicode strings
 | |
|   (be it as pattern, search string or replacement string) raises a TypeError.
 | |
|   Moreover, the re.UNICODE flag is enabled automatically for unicode patterns,
 | |
|   and can be disabled by specifying a new re.ASCII flag; as for bytes
 | |
|   patterns, ASCII matching is the only option and trying to specify re.UNICODE
 | |
|   for such patterns raises a ValueError.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #3300: make urllib.parse.[un]quote() default to UTF-8.
 | |
|   Code contributed by Matt Giuca.  quote() now encodes the input
 | |
|   before quoting, unquote() decodes after unquoting.  There are
 | |
|   new arguments to change the encoding and errors settings.
 | |
|   There are also new APIs to skip the encode/decode steps.
 | |
|   [un]quote_plus() are also affected.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #2235: numbers.Number now blocks inheritance of the default id()
 | |
|   based hash because that hash mechanism is not correct for numeric types.
 | |
|   All concrete numeric types that inherit from Number (rather than just
 | |
|   registering with it) must explicitly provide a hash implementation in
 | |
|   order for their instances to be hashable.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #2676: in the email package, content-type parsing was hanging on
 | |
|   pathological input because of quadratic or exponential behaviour of a
 | |
|   regular expression.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #3476: binary buffered reading through the new "io" library is now
 | |
|   thread-safe.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #1342811: Fix leak in Tkinter.Menu.delete. Commands associated to
 | |
|   menu entries were not deleted.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Remove the TarFileCompat class from tarfile.py.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #2491: os.fdopen is now almost an alias for the built-in open(), and
 | |
|   accepts the same parameters.  It just checks that its first argument is an
 | |
|   integer.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #3394: zipfile.writestr sets external attributes when passed a
 | |
|   file name rather than a ZipInfo instance, so files are extracted with
 | |
|   mode 0600 rather than 000 under Unix.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #2523: Fix quadratic behaviour when read()ing a binary file without
 | |
|   asking for a specific length.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Extension Modules
 | |
| -----------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #3542: Support Unicode strings in _msi module.
 | |
| 
 | |
| What's new in Python 3.0b2?
 | |
| ===========================
 | |
| 
 | |
| *Release date: 17-Jul-2008*
 | |
| 
 | |
| Core and Builtins
 | |
| -----------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #3008: the float type has a new instance method 'float.hex'
 | |
|   and a new class method 'float.fromhex' to convert floating-point
 | |
|   numbers to and from hexadecimal strings, respectively.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #3083: Add alternate (#) formatting for bin, oct, hex output
 | |
|   for str.format().  This adds the prefix 0b, 0o, or 0x, respectively.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #3280: like chr(), the "%c" format now accepts unicode code points
 | |
|   beyond the Basic Multilingual Plane (above 0xffff) on all configurations. On
 | |
|   "narrow Unicode" builds, the result is a string of 2 code units, forming a
 | |
|   UTF-16 surrogate pair.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #3282: str.isprintable() should return False for undefined
 | |
|   Unicode characters.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #3236: Return small longs from PyLong_FromString.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Exception tracebacks now support exception chaining.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Library
 | |
| -------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Removed the sunaudio module. Use sunau instead.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #3554: ctypes.string_at and ctypes.wstring_at did call Python
 | |
|   api functions without holding the GIL, which could lead to a fatal
 | |
|   error when they failed.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #799428: Fix Tkinter.Misc._nametowidget to unwrap Tcl command objects.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Removed "ast" function aliases from the parser module.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #3313: Fixed a crash when a failed dlopen() call does not set
 | |
|   a valid dlerror() message.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #3258: Fixed a crash when a ctypes POINTER type to an
 | |
|   incomplete structure was created.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #2683: Fix inconsistency in subprocess.Popen.communicate(): the
 | |
|   argument now must be a bytes object in any case.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #3145: help("modules whatever") failed when trying to load the source
 | |
|   code of every single module of the standard library, including invalid files
 | |
|   used in the test suite.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The gettext library now consistently uses Unicode strings for message ids
 | |
|   and message strings, and ``ugettext()`` and the like don't exist anymore.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The traceback module has been expanded to handle chained exceptions.
 | |
| 
 | |
| C API
 | |
| -----
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #3247: the function Py_FindMethod was removed. Modern types should
 | |
|   use the tp_methods slot instead.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Tools/Demos
 | |
| -----------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The Mac/Demos directory has been removed.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - All of the Mac scripts have been removed (including BuildApplet.py).
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| What's new in Python 3.0b1?
 | |
| ===========================
 | |
| 
 | |
| *Release date: 18-Jun-2008*
 | |
| 
 | |
| Core and Builtins
 | |
| -----------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #3211: warnings.warn_explicit() did not guard against its 'registry'
 | |
|   argument being anything other than a dict or None. Also fixed a bug in error
 | |
|   handling when 'message' and 'category' were both set to None, triggering a
 | |
|   bus error.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #3100: Corrected a crash on deallocation of a subclassed weakref which
 | |
|   holds the last (strong) reference to its referent.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #2630: implement PEP 3138. repr() now returns printable
 | |
|   Unicode characters unescaped, to get an ASCII-only representation
 | |
|   of an object use ascii().
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #1342: On windows, Python could not start when installed in a
 | |
|   directory with non-ascii characters.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Implement PEP 3121: new module initialization and finalization API.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Removed the already-defunct ``-t`` option.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #2957: Corrected a ValueError "recursion limit exceeded", when
 | |
|   unmarshalling many code objects, which happens when importing a
 | |
|   large .pyc file (~1000 functions).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #2963: fix merging oversight that disabled method cache for
 | |
|   all types.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #2964: fix a missing INCREF in instancemethod_descr_get.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #2895: Don't crash when given bytes objects as keyword names.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #2798: When parsing arguments with PyArg_ParseTuple, the "s"
 | |
|   code now allows any unicode string and returns a utf-8 encoded
 | |
|   buffer, just like the "s#" code already does.  The "z" code was
 | |
|   corrected as well.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #2863: generators now have a ``gen.__name__`` attribute that
 | |
|   equals ``gen.gi_code.co_name``, like ``func.__name___`` that equals
 | |
|   ``func.func_code.co_name``.  The repr() of a generator now also
 | |
|   contains this name.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #2831: enumerate() now has a ``start`` argument.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #2801: fix bug in the float.is_integer method where a
 | |
|   ValueError was sometimes incorrectly raised.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The ``--with-toolbox-glue`` option (and the associated
 | |
|   pymactoolbox.h) have been removed.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #2196: hasattr() now lets exceptions which do not inherit
 | |
|   Exception (KeyboardInterrupt, and SystemExit) propagate instead of
 | |
|   ignoring them.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - #3021 Exception reraising sematics have been significantly improved.  However,
 | |
|   f_exc_type, f_exc_value, and f_exc_traceback cannot be accessed from Python
 | |
|   code anymore.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Three of PyNumberMethods' members, nb_coerce, nb_hex, and nb_oct, have been
 | |
|   removed.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Extension Modules
 | |
| -----------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Renamed ``_winreg`` module to ``winreg``.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Support os.O_ASYNC and fcntl.FASYNC if the constants exist on the
 | |
|   platform.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Support for Windows 9x has been removed from the winsound module.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #2870: cmathmodule.c compile error.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Library
 | |
| -------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The methods ``is_in_tuple()``, ``is_vararg()``, and ``is_keywordarg()`` of
 | |
|   symtable.Symbol have been removed.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch #3133: http.server.CGIHTTPRequestHandler did not work on windows.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - a new ``urllib`` package was created.  It consists of code from
 | |
|   ``urllib``, ``urllib2``, ``urlparse``, and ``robotparser``.  The old
 | |
|   modules have all been removed.  The new package has five submodules:
 | |
|   ``urllib.parse``, ``urllib.request``, ``urllib.response``,
 | |
|   ``urllib.error``, and ``urllib.robotparser``.  The
 | |
|   ``urllib.request.urlopen()`` function uses the url opener from
 | |
|   ``urllib2``.  (Note that the unittests have not been renamed for the
 | |
|   beta, but they will be renamed in the future.)
 | |
| 
 | |
| - rfc822 has been removed in favor of the email package.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - mimetools has been removed in favor of the email package.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch #2849: Remove use of rfc822 module from standard library.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Added C optimized implementation of io.StringIO.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The ``pickle`` module is now automatically use an optimized C
 | |
|   implementation of Pickler and Unpickler when available. The
 | |
|   ``cPickle`` module is no longer needed.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Removed the ``htmllib`` and ``sgmllib`` modules.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The deprecated ``SmartCookie`` and ``SimpleCookie`` classes have
 | |
|   been removed from ``http.cookies``.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The ``commands`` module has been removed. Its getoutput() and
 | |
|   getstatusoutput() functions have been moved to the ``subprocess`` module.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The ``http`` package was created; it contains the old ``httplib``
 | |
|   as ``http.client``, ``Cookie`` as ``http.cookies``, ``cookielib``
 | |
|   as ``http.cookiejar``, and the content of the three ``HTTPServer``
 | |
|   modules as ``http.server``.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The ``xmlrpc`` package was created; it contains the old
 | |
|   ``xmlrpclib`` module as ``xmlrpc.client`` and the content of
 | |
|   the old ``SimpleXMLRPCServer`` and ``DocXMLRPCServer`` modules
 | |
|   as ``xmlrpc.server``.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The ``dbm`` package was created, containing the old modules
 | |
|   ``anydbm`` and ``whichdb`` in its ``__init__.py``, and having
 | |
|   ``dbm.gnu`` (was ``gdbm``), ``dbm.bsd`` (was ``dbhash``),
 | |
|   ``dbm.ndbm`` (was ``dbm``) and ``dbm.dumb`` (was ``dumbdbm``)
 | |
|   as submodules.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The ``repr`` module has been renamed to ``reprlib``.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The ``statvfs`` module has been removed.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #1713041: fix pprint's handling of maximum depth.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #2250: Exceptions raised during evaluation of names in
 | |
|   rlcompleter's ``Completer.complete()`` method are now caught and
 | |
|   ignored.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch #2659: Added ``break_on_hyphens`` option to textwrap's
 | |
|   ``TextWrapper`` class.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #2487: change the semantics of math.ldexp(x, n) when n is too
 | |
|   large to fit in a C long.  ldexp(x, n) now returns a zero (with
 | |
|   suitable sign) if n is large and negative; previously, it raised
 | |
|   OverflowError.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The ``ConfigParser`` module has been renamed to ``configparser``.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #2865: webbrowser.open() works again in a KDE environment.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The ``multifile`` module has been removed.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The ``SocketServer`` module has been renamed to ``socketserver``.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Fixed the ``__all__`` setting on ``collections`` to include
 | |
|   ``UserList`` and ``UserString``.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The sre module has been removed.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The Queue module has been renamed to queue.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The copy_reg module has been renamed to copyreg.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The mhlib module has been removed.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The ihooks module has been removed.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The fpformat module has been removed.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The dircache module has been removed.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The Canvas module has been removed.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The Decimal module gained the magic methods __round__, __ceil__,
 | |
|   __floor__ and __trunc__, to give support for round, math.ceil,
 | |
|   math.floor and math.trunc.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The user module has been removed.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The mutex module has been removed.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The imputil module has been removed.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - os.path.walk has been removed in favor of os.walk.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - pdb gained the "until" command.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The test.test_support module has been renamed to test.support.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The threading module API was renamed to be PEP 8 compliant.  The
 | |
|   old names are still present, but will be removed in the near future.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Tools/Demos
 | |
| -----------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The bgen tool has been removed.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Build
 | |
| -----
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| What's New in Python 3.0a5?
 | |
| ===========================
 | |
| 
 | |
| *Release date: 08-May-2008*
 | |
| 
 | |
| Core and Builtins
 | |
| -----------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Fixed misbehaviour of PyLong_FromSsize_t on systems where
 | |
|   sizeof(size_t) > sizeof(long).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #2221: Corrected a SystemError "error return without exception
 | |
|   set", when the code executed by exec() raises an exception, and
 | |
|   sys.stdout.flush() also raises an error.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #2565: The repr() of type objects now calls them 'class', not
 | |
|   'type' - whether they are builtin types or not.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The command line processing was converted to pass Unicode strings
 | |
|   through as unmodified as possible; as a consequence, the C API
 | |
|   related to command line arguments was changed to use wchar_t.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - All backslashes in raw strings are interpreted literally.  This
 | |
|   means that '\u' and '\U' escapes are not treated specially.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Extension Modules
 | |
| -----------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| Library
 | |
| -------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - ctypes objects now support the PEP3118 buffer interface.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #2682: ctypes callback functions now longer contain a cyclic
 | |
|   reference to themselves.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #2058: Remove the buf attribute and add __slots__ to the
 | |
|   TarInfo class in order to reduce tarfile's memory usage.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #2606: Avoid calling .sort() on a dict_keys object.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The bundled libffi copy is now in sync with the recently released
 | |
|   libffi3.0.5 version, apart from some small changes to
 | |
|   Modules/_ctypes/libffi/configure.ac.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Build
 | |
| -----
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #1496032: On alpha, use -mieee when gcc is the compiler.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - "make install" is now an alias for "make altinstall", to prevent
 | |
|   accidentally overwriting a Python 2.x installation.  Use "make
 | |
|   fullinstall" to force Python 3.0 to be installed as "python".
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #2544: On HP-UX systems, use 'gcc -shared' for linking when
 | |
|   gcc is used as compiler.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| What's New in Python 3.0a4?
 | |
| ===========================
 | |
| 
 | |
| *Release date: 02-Apr-2008*
 | |
| 
 | |
| Core and Builtins
 | |
| -----------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #2301: Don't try decoding the source code into the original
 | |
|   encoding for syntax errors.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Extension Modules
 | |
| -----------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The dl module was removed, use the ctypes module instead.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Use wchar_t functions in _locale module.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Library
 | |
| -------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The class distutils.commands.build_py.build_py_2to3 can be used as a
 | |
|   build_py replacement to automatically run 2to3 on modules that are
 | |
|   going to be installed.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - A new pickle protocol (protocol 3) is added with explicit support
 | |
|   for bytes.  This is the default protocol.  It intentionally cannot
 | |
|   be unpickled by Python 2.x.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - When a pickle written by Python 2.x contains an (8-bit) str
 | |
|   instance, this is now decoded to a (Unicode) str instance.  The
 | |
|   encoding used to do this defaults to ASCII, but can be overridden
 | |
|   via two new keyword arguments to the Unpickler class.  Previously
 | |
|   this would create bytes instances, which is usually wrong: str
 | |
|   instances are often used to pickle attribute names etc., and text is
 | |
|   more common than binary data anyway.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Default to ASCII as the locale.getpreferredencoding, if the POSIX
 | |
|   system doesn't support CODESET and LANG isn't set or doesn't allow
 | |
|   deduction of an encoding.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #1202: zlib.crc32 and zlib.adler32 now return an unsigned
 | |
|   value.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #719888: Updated tokenize to use a bytes API.  generate_tokens
 | |
|   has been renamed tokenize and now works with bytes rather than
 | |
|   strings.  A new detect_encoding function has been added for
 | |
|   determining source file encoding according to PEP-0263.  Token
 | |
|   sequences returned by tokenize always start with an ENCODING token
 | |
|   which specifies the encoding used to decode the file.  This token is
 | |
|   used to encode the output of untokenize back to bytes.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| What's New in Python 3.0a3?
 | |
| ===========================
 | |
| 
 | |
| *Release date: 29-Feb-2008*
 | |
| 
 | |
| Core and Builtins
 | |
| -----------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #2282: io.TextIOWrapper was not overriding seekable() from
 | |
|   io.IOBase.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #2115: Important speedup in setting __slot__ attributes.  Also
 | |
|   prevent a possible crash: an Abstract Base Class would try to access
 | |
|   a slot on a registered virtual subclass.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Fixed repr() and str() of complex numbers with infinity or nan as
 | |
|   real or imaginary part.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Clear all free list during a gc.collect() of the highest generation
 | |
|   in order to allow pymalloc to free more arenas. Python may give back
 | |
|   memory to the OS earlier.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #2045: Fix an infinite recursion triggered when printing a
 | |
|   subclass of collections.defaultdict, if its default_factory is set
 | |
|   to a bound method.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Fixed a minor memory leak in dictobject.c. The content of the free
 | |
|   list was not freed on interpreter shutdown.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Limit free list of method and builtin function objects to 256
 | |
|   entries each.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch #1953: Added ``sys._compact_freelists()`` and the C API
 | |
|   functions ``PyInt_CompactFreeList`` and ``PyFloat_CompactFreeList``
 | |
|   to compact the internal free lists of pre-allocted ints and floats.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #1983: Fixed return type of fork(), fork1() and forkpty() calls.
 | |
|   Python expected the return type int but the fork familie returns
 | |
|   pi_t.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #1678380: Fix a bug that identifies 0j and -0j when they
 | |
|   appear in the same code unit.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #2025: Added tuple.count() and tuple.index() methods to comply
 | |
|   with the collections.Sequence API.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Fixed multiple reinitialization of the Python interpreter. The small
 | |
|   int list in longobject.c has caused a seg fault during the third
 | |
|   finalization.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #1973: bytes.fromhex('') raised SystemError.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #1771: remove cmp parameter from sorted() and list.sort().
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #1969: split and rsplit in bytearray are inconsistent.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - map() no longer accepts None for the first argument.  Use zip()
 | |
|   instead.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #1769: Now int("- 1") is not allowed any more.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Object/longobject.c: long(float('nan')) raises an OverflowError
 | |
|   instead of returning 0.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #1762972: __file__ points to the source file instead of the
 | |
|   pyc/pyo file if the py file exists.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #1393: object_richcompare() returns NotImplemented instead of
 | |
|   False if the objects aren't equal, to give the other side a chance.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #1692: Interpreter was not displaying location of SyntaxError.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Improve some exception messages when Windows fails to load an
 | |
|   extension module.  Now we get for example '%1 is not a valid Win32
 | |
|   application' instead of 'error code 193'.  Also use Unicode strings
 | |
|   to deal with non-English locales.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #1587: Added instancemethod wrapper for PyCFunctions. The
 | |
|   Python C API has gained a new type *PyInstanceMethod_Type* and the
 | |
|   functions *PyInstanceMethod_Check(o)*, *PyInstanceMethod_New(func)*
 | |
|   and *PyInstanceMethod_Function(im)*.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Constants gc.DEBUG_OBJECT and gc.DEBUG_INSTANCE have been removed
 | |
|   from the gc module; gc.DEBUG_COLLECTABLE or gc.DEBUG_UNCOLLECTABLE
 | |
|   are now enough to print the corresponding list of objects considered
 | |
|   by the garbage collector.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #1573: Improper use of the keyword-only syntax makes the
 | |
|   parser crash.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #1564: The set implementation should special-case PyUnicode
 | |
|   instead of PyString.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch #1031213: Decode source line in SyntaxErrors back to its
 | |
|   original source encoding.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - inspect.getsource() includes the decorators again.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #1713: posixpath.ismount() claims symlink to a mountpoint is a
 | |
|   mountpoint.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Fix utf-8-sig incremental decoder, which didn't recognise a BOM when
 | |
|   the first chunk fed to the decoder started with a BOM, but was
 | |
|   longer than 3 bytes.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Extension Modules
 | |
| -----------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Code for itertools ifilter(), imap(), and izip() moved to bultins
 | |
|   and renamed to filter(), map(), and zip().  Also, renamed
 | |
|   izip_longest() to zip_longest() and ifilterfalse() to filterfalse().
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #1762972: Readded the reload() function as imp.reload().
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #2111: mmap segfaults when trying to write a block opened with
 | |
|   PROT_READ.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #2063: correct order of utime and stime in os.times() result
 | |
|   on Windows.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Library
 | |
| -------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Weakref dictionaries now inherit from MutableMapping.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Created new UserDict class in collections module.  This one inherits
 | |
|   from and complies with the MutableMapping ABC.  Also, moved
 | |
|   UserString and UserList to the collections module.  The
 | |
|   MutableUserString class was removed.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Removed UserDict.DictMixin.  Replaced all its uses with
 | |
|   collections.MutableMapping.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #1703: getpass() should flush after writing prompt.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #1585: IDLE uses non-existent xrange() function.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #1578: Problems in win_getpass.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Build
 | |
| -----
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Renamed --enable-unicode configure flag to --with-wide-unicode,
 | |
|   since Unicode strings can't be disabled anymore.
 | |
| 
 | |
| C API
 | |
| -----
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Issue #1629: Renamed Py_Size, Py_Type and Py_Refcnt to Py_SIZE,
 | |
|   Py_TYPE and Py_REFCNT.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - New API PyImport_ImportModuleNoBlock(), works like
 | |
|   PyImport_ImportModule() but won't block on the import lock
 | |
|   (returning an error instead).
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| What's New in Python 3.0a2?
 | |
| ===========================
 | |
| 
 | |
| *Release date: 07-Dec-2007*
 | |
| 
 | |
| (Note: this list is incomplete.)
 | |
| 
 | |
| Core and Builtins
 | |
| -----------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - str8 now has the same construction signature as bytes.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Comparisons between str and str8 now return False/True for ==/!=.
 | |
|   sqlite3 returns str8 when recreating on object from it's __conform__
 | |
|   value.  The struct module returns str8 for all string-related
 | |
|   formats.  This was true before this change, but becomes more
 | |
|   apparent thanks to string comparisons always being False.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Replaced `PyFile_FromFile()` with `PyFile_FromFd(fd, name. mode,
 | |
|   buffer, encoding, newline)`.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Fixed `imp.find_module()` to obey the -*- coding: -*- header.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Changed `__file__` and `co_filename` to unicode. The path names are decoded
 | |
|   with `Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding` and a new API method
 | |
|   `PyUnicode_DecodeFSDefault(char*)` was added.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - io.open() and _fileio.FileIO have grown a new argument closefd. A
 | |
|   false value disables the closing of the file descriptor.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Added a new option -b to issues warnings (-bb for errors) about
 | |
|   certain operations between bytes/buffer and str like str(b'') and
 | |
|   comparison.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The standards streams sys.stdin, stdout and stderr may be None when
 | |
|   the when the C runtime library returns an invalid file descriptor
 | |
|   for the streams (fileno(stdin) < 0). For now this happens only for
 | |
|   Windows GUI apps and scripts started with `pythonw.exe`.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Added PCbuild9 directory for VS 2008.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Renamed structmember.h WRITE_RESTRICTED to PY_WRITE_RESTRICTED to
 | |
|   work around a name clash with VS 2008 on Windows.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Unbound methods are gone for good. ClassObject.method returns an
 | |
|   ordinary function object, instance.method still returns a bound
 | |
|   method object.  The API of bound methods is cleaned up, too. The
 | |
|   im_class attribute is removed and im_func + im_self are renamed to
 | |
|   __func__ and __self__. The factory PyMethod_New takes only func and
 | |
|   instance as argument.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - intobject.h is no longer included by Python.h. The remains were
 | |
|   moved to longobject.h. It still exists to define several aliases
 | |
|   from PyInt to PyLong functions.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Removed sys.maxint, use sys.maxsize instead.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Extension Modules
 | |
| -----------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The `hotshot` profiler has been removed; use `cProfile` instead.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Library
 | |
| -------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - When loading an external file using testfile(), the passed-in
 | |
|   encoding argument was being ignored if __loader__ is defined and
 | |
|   forcing the source to be UTF-8.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The methods `os.tmpnam()`, `os.tempnam()` and `os.tmpfile()` have
 | |
|   been removed in favor of the tempfile module.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Removed the 'new' module.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Removed all types from the 'types' module that are easily accessable
 | |
|   through builtins.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| What's New in Python 3.0a1?
 | |
| ===========================
 | |
| 
 | |
| *Release date: 31-Aug-2007*
 | |
| 
 | |
| Core and Builtins
 | |
| -----------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - PEP 3131: Support non-ASCII identifiers.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - PEP 3120: Change default encoding to UTF-8.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - PEP 3123: Use proper C inheritance for PyObject.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Removed the __oct__ and __hex__ special methods and added a bin()
 | |
|   builtin function.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - PEP 3127: octal literals now start with "0o". Old-style octal
 | |
|   literals are invalid. There are binary literals with a prefix of
 | |
|   "0b".  This also affects int(x, 0).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - None, True, False are now keywords.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - PEP 3119: isinstance() and issubclass() can be overridden.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Remove BaseException.message.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Remove tuple parameter unpacking (PEP 3113).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Remove the f_restricted attribute from frames.  This naturally leads
 | |
|   to the removal of PyEval_GetRestricted() and PyFrame_IsRestricted().
 | |
| 
 | |
| - PEP 3132 was accepted. That means that you can do ``a, *b =
 | |
|   range(5)`` to assign 0 to a and [1, 2, 3, 4] to b.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - range() now returns an iterator rather than a list.  Floats are not
 | |
|   allowed.  xrange() is no longer defined.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch #1660500: hide iteration variable in list comps, add set comps
 | |
|   and use common code to handle compilation of iterative expressions.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - By default, != returns the opposite of ==, unless the latter returns
 | |
|   NotImplemented.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch #1680961: sys.exitfunc has been removed and replaced with a
 | |
|   private C-level API.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - PEP 3115: new metaclasses: the metaclass is now specified as a
 | |
|   keyword arg in the class statement, which can now use the full
 | |
|   syntax of a parameter list. Also, the metaclass can implement a
 | |
|   __prepare__ function which will be called to create the dictionary
 | |
|   for the new class namespace.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The long-deprecated argument "pend" of PyFloat_FromString() has been
 | |
|   removed.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The dir() function has been extended to call the __dir__() method on
 | |
|   its argument, if it exists. If not, it will work like before. This
 | |
|   allows customizing the output of dir() in the presence of a
 | |
|   __getattr__().
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Removed support for __members__ and __methods__.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Removed indexing/slicing on BaseException.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - input() became raw_input(): the name input() now implements the
 | |
|   functionality formerly known as raw_input(); the name raw_input() is
 | |
|   no longer defined.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Classes listed in an 'except' clause must inherit from
 | |
|   BaseException.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - PEP 3106: dict.iterkeys(), .iteritems(), .itervalues() are now gone;
 | |
|   and .keys(), .items(), .values() return dict views, which behave
 | |
|   like sets.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - PEP 3105: print is now a function.  Also (not in the PEP) the
 | |
|   'softspace' attribute of files is now gone (since print() doesn't
 | |
|   use it).  A side effect of this change is that you can get
 | |
|   incomplete output lines in interactive sessions:
 | |
| 
 | |
|   >>> print(42, end="")
 | |
|   42>>>
 | |
| 
 | |
|   We may be able to fix this after the I/O library rewrite.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - PEP 3102: keyword-only arguments.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Int/Long unification is complete.  The 'long' built-in type and
 | |
|   literals with trailing 'L' or 'l' have been removed.  Performance
 | |
|   may be sub-optimal (haven't really benchmarked).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - 'except E, V' must now be spelled as 'except E as V' and deletes V
 | |
|   at the end of the except clause; V must be a simple name.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Added function annotations per PEP 3107.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Added nonlocal declaration from PEP 3104:
 | |
| 
 | |
|   >>> def f(x):
 | |
|   ...     def inc():
 | |
|   ...         nonlocal x
 | |
|   ...         x += 1
 | |
|   ...         return x
 | |
|   ...     return inc
 | |
|   ...
 | |
|   >>> inc = f(0)
 | |
|   >>> inc()
 | |
|   1
 | |
|   >>> inc()
 | |
|   2
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Moved intern() to sys.intern().
 | |
| 
 | |
| - exec is now a function.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Renamed nb_nonzero to nb_bool and __nonzero__ to __bool__.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Classic classes are a thing of the past.  All classes are new style.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Exceptions *must* derive from BaseException.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Integer division always returns a float.  The -Q option is no more.
 | |
|   All the following are gone:
 | |
| 
 | |
|   * PyNumber_Divide and PyNumber_InPlaceDivide
 | |
|   * __div__, __rdiv__, and __idiv__
 | |
|   * nb_divide, nb_inplace_divide
 | |
|   * operator.div, operator.idiv, operator.__div__, operator.__idiv__
 | |
|     (Only __truediv__ and __floordiv__ remain, not sure how to handle
 | |
|     them if we want to re-use __div__ and friends.  If we do, it will
 | |
|     make it harder to write code for both 2.x and 3.x.)
 | |
| 
 | |
| - 'as' and 'with' are keywords.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Absolute import is the default behavior for 'import foo' etc.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Removed support for syntax: backticks (ie, `x`), <>.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Removed these Python builtins: apply(), callable(), coerce(),
 | |
|   execfile(), file(), reduce(), reload().
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Removed these Python methods: {}.has_key.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Removed these opcodes: BINARY_DIVIDE, INPLACE_DIVIDE, UNARY_CONVERT.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Remove C API support for restricted execution.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - zip(), map() and filter() now return iterators, behaving like their
 | |
|   itertools counterparts.  This also affect map()'s behavior on
 | |
|   sequences of unequal length -- it now stops after the shortest one
 | |
|   is exhausted.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Additions: set literals, set comprehensions, ellipsis literal.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Added class decorators per PEP 3129.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| Extension Modules
 | |
| -----------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Removed the imageop module.  Obsolete long with its unit tests
 | |
|   becoming useless from the removal of rgbimg and imgfile.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Removed these attributes from the operator module: div, idiv,
 | |
|   __div__, __idiv__, isCallable, sequenceIncludes.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Removed these attributes from the sys module: exc_clear(), exc_type,
 | |
|   exc_value, exc_traceback.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| Library
 | |
| -------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Removed the compiler package.  Use of the _ast module and (an
 | |
|   eventual) AST -> bytecode mechanism.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Removed these modules: audiodev, Bastion, bsddb185, exceptions,
 | |
|   linuxaudiodev, md5, MimeWriter, mimify, popen2, rexec, sets, sha,
 | |
|   stringold, strop, sunaudiodev, timing, xmllib.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Moved the toaiff module to Tools/Demos.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Removed obsolete IRIX modules: al/AL, cd/CD, cddb, cdplayer, cl/CL,
 | |
|   DEVICE, ERRNO, FILE, fl/FL, flp, fm, GET, gl/GL, GLWS, IN, imgfile,
 | |
|   IOCTL, jpeg, panel, panelparser, readcd, sgi, sv/SV, torgb, WAIT.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Removed obsolete functions: commands.getstatus(), os.popen*().
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Removed functions in the string module that are also string methods;
 | |
|   Remove string.{letters, lowercase, uppercase}.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Removed support for long obsolete platforms: plat-aix3, plat-irix5.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Removed xmlrpclib.SlowParser.  It was based on xmllib.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch #1680961: atexit has been reimplemented in C.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Add new codecs for UTF-32, UTF-32-LE and UTF-32-BE.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Build
 | |
| -----
 | |
| 
 | |
| C API
 | |
| -----
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Removed these Python slots: __coerce__, __div__, __idiv__, __rdiv__.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Removed these C APIs: PyNumber_Coerce(), PyNumber_CoerceEx(),
 | |
|   PyMember_Get, PyMember_Set.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Removed these C slots/fields: nb_divide, nb_inplace_divide.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Removed these macros: staticforward, statichere, PyArg_GetInt,
 | |
|   PyArg_NoArgs, _PyObject_Del.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Removed these typedefs: intargfunc, intintargfunc, intobjargproc,
 | |
|   intintobjargproc, getreadbufferproc, getwritebufferproc,
 | |
|   getsegcountproc, getcharbufferproc, memberlist.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Tests
 | |
| -----
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Removed test.testall as test.regrtest replaces it.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Documentation
 | |
| -------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| Mac
 | |
| ---
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The cfmfile module was removed.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Platforms
 | |
| ---------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Support for BeOS and AtheOS was removed (according to PEP 11).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Support for RiscOS, Irix, Tru64 was removed (alledgedly).
 | |
| 
 | |
| Tools/Demos
 | |
| -----------
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| What's New in Python 2.5 release candidate 1?
 | |
| =============================================
 | |
| 
 | |
| *Release date: 17-AUG-2006*
 | |
| 
 | |
| Core and builtins
 | |
| -----------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Unicode objects will no longer raise an exception when being
 | |
|   compared equal or unequal to a string and a UnicodeDecodeError
 | |
|   exception occurs, e.g. as result of a decoding failure.
 | |
| 
 | |
|   Instead, the equal (==) and unequal (!=) comparison operators will
 | |
|   now issue a UnicodeWarning and interpret the two objects as
 | |
|   unequal. The UnicodeWarning can be filtered as desired using
 | |
|   the warning framework, e.g. silenced completely, turned into an
 | |
|   exception, logged, etc.
 | |
| 
 | |
|   Note that compare operators other than equal and unequal will still
 | |
|   raise UnicodeDecodeError exceptions as they've always done.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Fix segfault when doing string formatting on subclasses of long.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Fix bug related to __len__ functions using values > 2**32 on 64-bit machines
 | |
|   with new-style classes.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Fix bug related to __len__ functions returning negative values with
 | |
|   classic classes.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch #1538606, Fix __index__() clipping.  There were some problems
 | |
|   discovered with the API and how integers that didn't fit into Py_ssize_t
 | |
|   were handled.  This patch attempts to provide enough alternatives
 | |
|   to effectively use __index__.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #1536021: __hash__ may now return long int; the final hash
 | |
|   value is obtained by invoking hash on the long int.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #1536786: buffer comparison could emit a RuntimeWarning.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #1535165: fixed a segfault in input() and raw_input() when
 | |
|   sys.stdin is closed.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - On Windows, the PyErr_Warn function is now exported from
 | |
|   the Python dll again.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #1191458: tracing over for loops now produces a line event
 | |
|   on each iteration.  Fixing this problem required changing the .pyc
 | |
|   magic number.  This means that .pyc files generated before 2.5c1
 | |
|   will be regenerated.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #1333982: string/number constants were inappropriately stored
 | |
|   in the byte code and co_consts even if they were not used, ie
 | |
|   immediately popped off the stack.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Fixed a reference-counting problem in property().
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| Library
 | |
| -------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Fix a bug in the ``compiler`` package that caused invalid code to be
 | |
|   generated for generator expressions.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The distutils version has been changed to 2.5.0. The change to
 | |
|   keep it programmatically in sync with the Python version running
 | |
|   the code (introduced in 2.5b3) has been reverted. It will continue
 | |
|   to be maintained manually as static string literal.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - If the Python part of a ctypes callback function returns None,
 | |
|   and this cannot be converted to the required C type, an exception is
 | |
|   printed with PyErr_WriteUnraisable.  Before this change, the C
 | |
|   callback returned arbitrary values to the calling code.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The __repr__ method of a NULL ctypes.py_object() no longer raises
 | |
|   an exception.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - uuid.UUID now has a bytes_le attribute. This returns the UUID in
 | |
|   little-endian byte order for Windows. In addition, uuid.py gained some
 | |
|   workarounds for clocks with low resolution, to stop the code yielding
 | |
|   duplicate UUIDs.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch #1540892: site.py Quitter() class attempts to close sys.stdin
 | |
|   before raising SystemExit, allowing IDLE to honor quit() and exit().
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #1224621: make tabnanny recognize IndentationErrors raised by tokenize.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch #1536071: trace.py should now find the full module name of a
 | |
|   file correctly even on Windows.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - logging's atexit hook now runs even if the rest of the module has
 | |
|   already been cleaned up.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #1112549, fix DoS attack on cgi.FieldStorage.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #1531405, format_exception no longer raises an exception if
 | |
|   str(exception) raised an exception.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Fix a bug in the ``compiler`` package that caused invalid code to be
 | |
|   generated for nested functions.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| Extension Modules
 | |
| -----------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch #1511317: don't crash on invalid hostname (alias) info.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch #1535500: fix segfault in BZ2File.writelines and make sure it
 | |
|   raises the correct exceptions.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch # 1536908: enable building ctypes on OpenBSD/AMD64.  The
 | |
|   '-no-stack-protector' compiler flag for OpenBSD has been removed.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch #1532975 was applied, which fixes Bug #1533481: ctypes now
 | |
|   uses the _as_parameter_ attribute when objects are passed to foreign
 | |
|   function calls.  The ctypes version number was changed to 1.0.1.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #1530559, struct.pack raises TypeError where it used to convert.
 | |
|   Passing float arguments to struct.pack when integers are expected
 | |
|   now triggers a DeprecationWarning.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| Tests
 | |
| -----
 | |
| 
 | |
| - test_socketserver should now work on cygwin and not fail sporadically
 | |
|   on other platforms.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - test_mailbox should now work on cygwin versions 2006-08-10 and later.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #1535182: really test the xreadlines() method of bz2 objects.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - test_threading now skips testing alternate thread stack sizes on
 | |
|   platforms that don't support changing thread stack size.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| Documentation
 | |
| -------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch #1534922: unittest docs were corrected and enhanced.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| Build
 | |
| -----
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #1535502, build _hashlib on Windows, and use masm assembler
 | |
|   code in OpenSSL.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #1534738, win32 debug version of _msi should be _msi_d.pyd.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #1530448, ctypes build failure on Solaris 10 was fixed.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| C API
 | |
| -----
 | |
| 
 | |
| - New API for Unicode rich comparisons: PyUnicode_RichCompare()
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #1069160.  Internal correctness changes were made to
 | |
|   ``PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc()``.  A test case was added, and
 | |
|   the documentation was changed to state that the return value
 | |
|   is always 1 (normal) or 0 (if the specified thread wasn't found).
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| What's New in Python 2.5 beta 3?
 | |
| ================================
 | |
| 
 | |
| *Release date: 03-AUG-2006*
 | |
| 
 | |
| Core and builtins
 | |
| -----------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - _PyWeakref_GetWeakrefCount() now returns a Py_ssize_t; it previously
 | |
|   returned a long (see PEP 353).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #1515471: string.replace() accepts character buffers again.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Add PyErr_WarnEx() so C code can pass the stacklevel to warnings.warn().
 | |
|   This provides the proper warning for struct.pack().
 | |
|   PyErr_Warn() is now deprecated in favor of PyErr_WarnEx().
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch #1531113: Fix augmented assignment with yield expressions.
 | |
|   Also fix a SystemError when trying to assign to yield expressions.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #1529871: The speed enhancement patch #921466 broke Python's compliance
 | |
|   with PEP 302.  This was fixed by adding an ``imp.NullImporter`` type that is
 | |
|   used in ``sys.path_importer_cache`` to cache non-directory paths and avoid
 | |
|   excessive filesystem operations during imports.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #1521947: When checking for overflow, ``PyOS_strtol()`` used some
 | |
|   operations on signed longs that are formally undefined by C.
 | |
|   Unfortunately, at least one compiler now cares about that, so complicated
 | |
|   the code to make that compiler happy again.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #1524310: Properly report errors from FindNextFile in os.listdir.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch #1232023: Stop including current directory in search
 | |
|   path on Windows.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Fix some potential crashes found with failmalloc.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Fix warnings reported by Klocwork's static analysis tool.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #1512814, Fix incorrect lineno's when code within a function
 | |
|   had more than 255 blank lines.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch #1521179: Python now accepts the standard options ``--help`` and
 | |
|   ``--version`` as well as ``/?`` on Windows.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #1520864: unpacking singleton tuples in a 'for' loop (for x, in) works
 | |
|   again.  Fixing this problem required changing the .pyc magic number.
 | |
|   This means that .pyc files generated before 2.5b3 will be regenerated.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #1524317:  Compiling Python ``--without-threads`` failed.
 | |
|   The Python core compiles again, and, in a build without threads, the
 | |
|   new ``sys._current_frames()`` returns a dictionary with one entry,
 | |
|   mapping the faux "thread id" 0 to the current frame.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #1525447: build on MacOS X on a case-sensitive filesystem.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| Library
 | |
| -------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Fix #1693149.  Now you can pass several modules separated by
 | |
|   comma to trace.py in the same --ignore-module option.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Correction of patch #1455898: In the mbcs decoder, set final=False
 | |
|   for stream decoder, but final=True for the decode function.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - os.urandom no longer masks unrelated exceptions like SystemExit or
 | |
|   KeyboardInterrupt.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #1525866: Don't copy directory stat times in
 | |
|   shutil.copytree on Windows
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #1002398: The documentation for os.path.sameopenfile now correctly
 | |
|   refers to file descriptors, not file objects.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The renaming of the xml package to xmlcore, and the import hackery done
 | |
|   to make it appear at both names, has been removed.  Bug #1511497,
 | |
|   #1513611, and probably others.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #1441397: The compiler module now recognizes module and function
 | |
|   docstrings correctly as it did in Python 2.4.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #1529297:  The rewrite of doctest for Python 2.4 unintentionally
 | |
|   lost that tests are sorted by name before being run.  This rarely
 | |
|   matters for well-written tests, but can create baffling symptoms if
 | |
|   side effects from one test to the next affect outcomes.  ``DocTestFinder``
 | |
|   has been changed to sort the list of tests it returns.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The distutils version has been changed to 2.5.0, and is now kept
 | |
|   in sync with sys.version_info[:3].
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #978833: Really close underlying socket in _socketobject.close.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #1459963: urllib and urllib2 now normalize HTTP header names with
 | |
|   title().
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch #1525766: In pkgutil.walk_packages, correctly pass the onerror callback
 | |
|   to recursive calls and call it with the failing package name.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #1525817: Don't truncate short lines in IDLE's tool tips.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch #1515343: Fix printing of deprecated string exceptions with a
 | |
|   value in the traceback module.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Resync optparse with Optik 1.5.3: minor tweaks for/to tests.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch #1524429: Use repr() instead of backticks in Tkinter again.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #1520914: Change time.strftime() to accept a zero for any position in its
 | |
|   argument tuple.  For arguments where zero is illegal, the value is forced to
 | |
|   the minimum value that is correct.  This is to support an undocumented but
 | |
|   common way people used  to fill in inconsequential information in the time
 | |
|   tuple pre-2.4.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch #1220874: Update the binhex module for Mach-O.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The email package has improved RFC 2231 support, specifically for
 | |
|   recognizing the difference between encoded (name*0*=<blah>) and non-encoded
 | |
|   (name*0=<blah>) parameter continuations.  This may change the types of
 | |
|   values returned from email.message.Message.get_param() and friends.
 | |
|   Specifically in some cases where non-encoded continuations were used,
 | |
|   get_param() used to return a 3-tuple of (None, None, string) whereas now it
 | |
|   will just return the string (since non-encoded continuations don't have
 | |
|   charset and language parts).
 | |
| 
 | |
|   Also, whereas % values were decoded in all parameter continuations, they are
 | |
|   now only decoded in encoded parameter parts.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #1517990: IDLE keybindings on MacOS X now work correctly
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #1517996: IDLE now longer shows the default Tk menu when a
 | |
|   path browser, class browser or debugger is the frontmost window on MacOS X
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch #1520294: Support for getset and member descriptors in types.py,
 | |
|   inspect.py, and pydoc.py.  Specifically, this allows for querying the type
 | |
|   of an object against these built-in types and more importantly, for getting
 | |
|   their docstrings printed in the interactive interpreter's help() function.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| Extension Modules
 | |
| -----------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch #1519025 and bug #926423: If a KeyboardInterrupt occurs during
 | |
|   a socket operation on a socket with a timeout, the exception will be
 | |
|   caught correctly.  Previously, the exception was not caught.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch #1529514: The _ctypes extension is now compiled on more
 | |
|   openbsd target platforms.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The ``__reduce__()`` method of the new ``collections.defaultdict`` had
 | |
|   a memory leak, affecting pickles and deep copies.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #1471938: Fix curses module build problem on Solaris 8; patch by
 | |
|   Paul Eggert.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch #1448199: Release interpreter lock in _winreg.ConnectRegistry.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch #1521817: Index range checking on ctypes arrays containing
 | |
|   exactly one element enabled again.  This allows iterating over these
 | |
|   arrays, without the need to check the array size before.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #1521375: When the code in ctypes.util.find_library was
 | |
|   run with root privileges, it could overwrite or delete
 | |
|   /dev/null in certain cases; this is now fixed.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #1467450: On Mac OS X 10.3, RTLD_GLOBAL is now used as the
 | |
|   default mode for loading shared libraries in ctypes.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Because of a misspelled preprocessor symbol, ctypes was always
 | |
|   compiled without thread support; this is now fixed.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - pybsddb Bug #1527939: bsddb module DBEnv dbremove and dbrename
 | |
|   methods now allow their database parameter to be None as the
 | |
|   sleepycat API allows.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #1526460: Fix socketmodule compile on NetBSD as it has a different
 | |
|   bluetooth API compared with Linux and FreeBSD.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Tests
 | |
| -----
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #1501330: Change test_ossaudiodev to be much more tolerant in terms of
 | |
|   how long the test file should take to play.  Now accepts taking 2.93 secs
 | |
|   (exact time) +/- 10% instead of the hard-coded 3.1 sec.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch #1529686: The standard tests ``test_defaultdict``, ``test_iterlen``,
 | |
|   ``test_uuid`` and ``test_email_codecs`` didn't actually run any tests when
 | |
|   run via ``regrtest.py``. Now they do.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Build
 | |
| -----
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #1439538: Drop usage of test -e in configure as it is not portable.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Mac
 | |
| ---
 | |
| 
 | |
| - PythonLauncher now works correctly when the path to the script contains
 | |
|   characters that are treated specially by the shell (such as quotes).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #1527397: PythonLauncher now launches scripts with the working directory
 | |
|   set to the directory that contains the script instead of the user home
 | |
|   directory. That latter was an implementation accident and not what users
 | |
|   expect.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| What's New in Python 2.5 beta 2?
 | |
| ================================
 | |
| 
 | |
| *Release date: 11-JUL-2006*
 | |
| 
 | |
| Core and builtins
 | |
| -----------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #1441486: The literal representation of -(sys.maxint - 1)
 | |
|   again evaluates to a int object, not a long.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #1501934: The scope of global variables that are locally assigned
 | |
|   using augmented assignment is now correctly determined.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #927248: Recursive method-wrapper objects can now safely
 | |
|   be released.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #1417699: Reject locale-specific decimal point in float()
 | |
|   and atof().
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #1511381: codec_getstreamcodec() in codec.c is corrected to
 | |
|   omit a default "error" argument for NULL pointer.  This allows
 | |
|   the parser to take a codec from cjkcodecs again.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #1519018: 'as' is now validated properly in import statements.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - On 64 bit systems, int literals that use less than 64 bits are
 | |
|   now ints rather than longs.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #1512814, Fix incorrect lineno's when code at module scope
 | |
|   started after line 256.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - New function ``sys._current_frames()`` returns a dict mapping thread
 | |
|   id to topmost thread stack frame.  This is for expert use, and is
 | |
|   especially useful for debugging application deadlocks.  The functionality
 | |
|   was previously available in Fazal Majid's ``threadframe`` extension
 | |
|   module, but it wasn't possible to do this in a wholly threadsafe way from
 | |
|   an extension.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Library
 | |
| -------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #1257728: Mention Cygwin in distutils error message about a missing
 | |
|   VS 2003.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch #1519566: Update turtle demo, make begin_fill idempotent.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #1508010: msvccompiler now requires the DISTUTILS_USE_SDK
 | |
|   environment variable to be set in order to the SDK environment
 | |
|   for finding the compiler, include files, etc.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #1515998: Properly generate logical ids for files in bdist_msi.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - warnings.py now ignores ImportWarning by default
 | |
| 
 | |
| - string.Template() now correctly handles tuple-values. Previously,
 | |
|   multi-value tuples would raise an exception and single-value tuples would
 | |
|   be treated as the value they contain, instead.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #822974: Honor timeout in telnetlib.{expect,read_until}
 | |
|   even if some data are received.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #1267547: Put proper recursive setup.py call into the
 | |
|   spec file generated by bdist_rpm.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #1514693: Update turtle's heading when switching between
 | |
|   degrees and radians.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Reimplement turtle.circle using a polyline, to allow correct
 | |
|   filling of arcs.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #1514703: Only setup canvas window in turtle when the canvas
 | |
|   is created.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #1513223: .close() of a _socketobj now releases the underlying
 | |
|   socket again, which then gets closed as it becomes unreferenced.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #1504333: Make sgmllib support angle brackets in quoted
 | |
|   attribute values.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #853506: Fix IPv6 address parsing in unquoted attributes in
 | |
|   sgmllib ('[' and ']' were not accepted).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Fix a bug in the turtle module's end_fill function.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #1510580: The 'warnings' module improperly required that a Warning
 | |
|   category be either a types.ClassType and a subclass of Warning.  The proper
 | |
|   check is just that it is a subclass with Warning as the documentation states.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The compiler module now correctly compiles the new try-except-finally
 | |
|   statement (bug #1509132).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The wsgiref package is now installed properly on Unix.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - A bug was fixed in logging.config.fileConfig() which caused a crash on
 | |
|   shutdown when fileConfig() was called multiple times.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The sqlite3 module did cut off data from the SQLite database at the first
 | |
|   null character before sending it to a custom converter. This has been fixed
 | |
|   now.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Extension Modules
 | |
| -----------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - #1494314: Fix a regression with high-numbered sockets in 2.4.3. This
 | |
|   means that select() on sockets > FD_SETSIZE (typically 1024) work again.
 | |
|   The patch makes sockets use poll() internally where available.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Assigning None to pointer type fields in ctypes structures possible
 | |
|   overwrote the wrong fields, this is fixed now.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Fixed a segfault in _ctypes when ctypes.wintypes were imported
 | |
|   on non-Windows platforms.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #1518190: The ctypes.c_void_p constructor now accepts any
 | |
|   integer or long, without range checking.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch #1517790: It is now possible to use custom objects in the ctypes
 | |
|   foreign function argtypes sequence as long as they provide a from_param
 | |
|   method, no longer is it required that the object is a ctypes type.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The '_ctypes' extension module now works when Python is configured
 | |
|   with the --without-threads option.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #1513646: os.access on Windows now correctly determines write
 | |
|   access, again.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #1512695: cPickle.loads could crash if it was interrupted with
 | |
|   a KeyboardInterrupt.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #1296433: parsing XML with a non-default encoding and
 | |
|   a CharacterDataHandler could crash the interpreter in pyexpat.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch #1516912: improve Modules support for OpenVMS.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Build
 | |
| -----
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Automate Windows build process for the Win64 SSL module.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - 'configure' now detects the zlib library the same way as distutils.
 | |
|   Previously, the slight difference could cause compilation errors of the
 | |
|   'zlib' module on systems with more than one version of zlib.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The MSI compileall step was fixed to also support a TARGETDIR
 | |
|   with spaces in it.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #1517388: sqlite3.dll is now installed on Windows independent
 | |
|   of Tcl/Tk.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #1513032: 'make install' failed on FreeBSD 5.3 due to lib-old
 | |
|   trying to be installed even though it's empty.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Tests
 | |
| -----
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Call os.waitpid() at the end of tests that spawn child processes in order
 | |
|   to minimize resources (zombies).
 | |
| 
 | |
| Documentation
 | |
| -------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Cover ImportWarning, PendingDeprecationWarning and simplefilter() in the
 | |
|   documentation for the warnings module.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch #1509163: MS Toolkit Compiler no longer available.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch #1504046: Add documentation for xml.etree.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| What's New in Python 2.5 beta 1?
 | |
| ================================
 | |
| 
 | |
| *Release date: 20-JUN-2006*
 | |
| 
 | |
| Core and builtins
 | |
| -----------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch #1507676: Error messages returned by invalid abstract object operations
 | |
|   (such as iterating over an integer) have been improved and now include the
 | |
|   type of the offending object to help with debugging.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #992017: A classic class that defined a __coerce__() method that returned
 | |
|   its arguments swapped would infinitely recurse and segfault the interpreter.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Fix the socket tests so they can be run concurrently.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Removed 5 integers from C frame objects (PyFrameObject).
 | |
|   f_nlocals, f_ncells, f_nfreevars, f_stack_size, f_restricted.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #532646: object.__call__() will continue looking for the __call__
 | |
|   attribute on objects until one without one is found.  This leads to recursion
 | |
|   when you take a class and set its __call__ attribute to an instance of the
 | |
|   class.  Originally fixed for classic classes, but this fix is for new-style.
 | |
|   Removes the infinite_rec_3 crasher.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The string and unicode methods startswith() and endswith() now accept
 | |
|   a tuple of prefixes/suffixes to look for. Implements RFE #1491485.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Buffer objects, at the C level, never used the char buffer
 | |
|   implementation even when the char buffer for the wrapped object was
 | |
|   explicitly requested (originally returned the read or write buffer).
 | |
|   Now a TypeError is raised if the char buffer is not present but is
 | |
|   requested.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch #1346214: Statements like "if 0: suite" are now again optimized
 | |
|   away like they were in Python 2.4.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Builtin exceptions are now full-blown new-style classes instead of
 | |
|   instances pretending to be classes, which speeds up exception handling
 | |
|   by about 80% in comparison to 2.5a2.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch #1494554: Update unicodedata.numeric and unicode.isnumeric to
 | |
|   Unicode 4.1.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch #921466: sys.path_importer_cache is now used to cache valid and
 | |
|   invalid file paths for the built-in import machinery which leads to
 | |
|   fewer open calls on startup.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch #1442927: ``long(str, base)`` is now up to 6x faster for non-power-
 | |
|   of-2 bases.  The largest speedup is for inputs with about 1000 decimal
 | |
|   digits.  Conversion from non-power-of-2 bases remains quadratic-time in
 | |
|   the number of input digits (it was and remains linear-time for bases
 | |
|   2, 4, 8, 16 and 32).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #1334662: ``int(string, base)`` could deliver a wrong answer
 | |
|   when ``base`` was not 2, 4, 8, 10, 16 or 32, and ``string`` represented
 | |
|   an integer close to ``sys.maxint``.  This was repaired by patch
 | |
|   #1335972, which also gives a nice speedup.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch #1337051: reduced size of frame objects.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - PyErr_NewException now accepts a tuple of base classes as its
 | |
|   "base" parameter.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch #876206: function call speedup by retaining allocated frame
 | |
|   objects.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #1462152: file() now checks more thoroughly for invalid mode
 | |
|   strings and removes a possible "U" before passing the mode to the
 | |
|   C library function.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch #1488312, Fix memory alignment problem on SPARC in unicode
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #1487966: Fix SystemError with conditional expression in assignment
 | |
| 
 | |
| - WindowsError now has two error code attributes: errno, which carries
 | |
|   the error values from errno.h, and winerror, which carries the error
 | |
|   values from winerror.h. Previous versions put the winerror.h values
 | |
|   (from GetLastError()) into the errno attribute.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch #1475845: Raise IndentationError for unexpected indent.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch #1479181: split open() and file() from being aliases for each other.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch #1497053 & bug #1275608: Exceptions occurring in ``__eq__()``
 | |
|   methods were always silently ignored by dictionaries when comparing keys.
 | |
|   They are now passed through (except when using the C API function
 | |
|   ``PyDict_GetItem()``, whose semantics did not change).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #1456209: In some obscure cases it was possible for a class with a
 | |
|   custom ``__eq__()`` method to confuse dict internals when class instances
 | |
|   were used as a dict's keys and the ``__eq__()`` method mutated the dict.
 | |
|   No, you don't have any code that did this ;-)
 | |
| 
 | |
| Extension Modules
 | |
| -----------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #1295808: expat symbols should be namespaced in pyexpat
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch #1462338: Upgrade pyexpat to expat 2.0.0
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Change binascii.hexlify to accept a read-only buffer instead of only a char
 | |
|   buffer and actually follow its documentation.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Fixed a potentially invalid memory access of CJKCodecs' shift-jis decoder.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch #1478788 (modified version): The functional extension module has
 | |
|   been renamed to _functools and a functools Python wrapper module added.
 | |
|   This provides a home for additional function related utilities that are
 | |
|   not specifically about functional programming. See PEP 309.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch #1493701: performance enhancements for struct module.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch #1490224: time.altzone is now set correctly on Cygwin.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch #1435422: zlib's compress and decompress objects now have a
 | |
|   copy() method.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch #1454481: thread stack size is now tunable at runtime for thread
 | |
|   enabled builds on Windows and systems with Posix threads support.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - On Win32, os.listdir now supports arbitrarily-long Unicode path names
 | |
|   (up to the system limit of 32K characters).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Use Win32 API to implement os.{access,chdir,chmod,mkdir,remove,rename,rmdir,utime}.
 | |
|   As a result, these functions now raise WindowsError instead of OSError.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - ``time.clock()`` on Win64 should use the high-performance Windows
 | |
|   ``QueryPerformanceCounter()`` now (as was already the case on 32-bit
 | |
|   Windows platforms).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Calling Tk_Init twice is refused if the first call failed as that
 | |
|   may deadlock.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - bsddb: added the DB_ARCH_REMOVE flag and fixed db.DBEnv.log_archive() to
 | |
|   accept it without potentially using an uninitialized pointer.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - bsddb: added support for the DBEnv.log_stat() and DBEnv.lsn_reset() methods
 | |
|   assuming BerkeleyDB >= 4.0 and 4.4 respectively.  [pybsddb project SF
 | |
|   patch numbers 1494885 and 1494902]
 | |
| 
 | |
| - bsddb: added an interface for the BerkeleyDB >= 4.3 DBSequence class.
 | |
|   [pybsddb project SF patch number 1466734]
 | |
| 
 | |
| - bsddb: fix DBCursor.pget() bug with keyword argument names when no data
 | |
|   parameter is supplied.  [SF pybsddb bug #1477863]
 | |
| 
 | |
| - bsddb: the __len__ method of a DB object has been fixed to return correct
 | |
|   results.  It could previously incorrectly return 0 in some cases.
 | |
|   Fixes SF bug 1493322 (pybsddb bug 1184012).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - bsddb: the bsddb.dbtables Modify method now raises the proper error and
 | |
|   aborts the db transaction safely when a modifier callback fails.
 | |
|   Fixes SF python patch/bug #1408584.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - bsddb: multithreaded DB access using the simple bsddb module interface
 | |
|   now works reliably.  It has been updated to use automatic BerkeleyDB
 | |
|   deadlock detection and the bsddb.dbutils.DeadlockWrap wrapper to retry
 | |
|   database calls that would previously deadlock. [SF python bug #775414]
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch #1446489: add support for the ZIP64 extensions to zipfile.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch #1506645: add Python wrappers for the curses functions
 | |
|   is_term_resized, resize_term and resizeterm.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Library
 | |
| -------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch #815924: Restore ability to pass type= and icon= in tkMessageBox
 | |
|   functions.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch #812986: Update turtle output even if not tracing.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch #1494750: Destroy master after deleting children in
 | |
|   Tkinter.BaseWidget.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch #1096231: Add ``default`` argument to Tkinter.Wm.wm_iconbitmap.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch #763580: Add name and value arguments to Tkinter variable
 | |
|   classes.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #1117556: SimpleHTTPServer now tries to find and use the system's
 | |
|   mime.types file for determining MIME types.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #1339007: Shelf objects now don't raise an exception in their
 | |
|   __del__ method when initialization failed.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch #1455898: The MBCS codec now supports the incremental mode for
 | |
|   double-byte encodings.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - ``difflib``'s ``SequenceMatcher.get_matching_blocks()`` was changed to
 | |
|   guarantee that adjacent triples in the return list always describe
 | |
|   non-adjacent blocks.  Previously, a pair of matching blocks could end
 | |
|   up being described by multiple adjacent triples that formed a partition
 | |
|   of the matching pair.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #1498146: fix optparse to handle Unicode strings in option help,
 | |
|   description, and epilog.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #1366250: minor optparse documentation error.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #1361643: fix textwrap.dedent() so it handles tabs appropriately;
 | |
|   clarify docs.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The wsgiref package has been added to the standard library.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The functions update_wrapper() and wraps() have been added to the functools
 | |
|   module. These make it easier to copy relevant metadata from the original
 | |
|   function when writing wrapper functions.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The optional ``isprivate`` argument to ``doctest.testmod()``, and the
 | |
|   ``doctest.is_private()`` function, both deprecated in 2.4, were removed.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch #1359618: Speed up charmap encoder by using a trie structure
 | |
|   for lookup.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The functions in the ``pprint`` module now sort dictionaries by key
 | |
|   before computing the display.  Before 2.5, ``pprint`` sorted a dictionary
 | |
|   if and only if its display required more than one line, although that
 | |
|   wasn't documented.  The new behavior increases predictability; e.g.,
 | |
|   using ``pprint.pprint(a_dict)`` in a doctest is now reliable.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch #1497027: try HTTP digest auth before basic auth in urllib2
 | |
|   (thanks for J. J. Lee).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch #1496206: improve urllib2 handling of passwords with respect to
 | |
|   default HTTP and HTTPS ports.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch #1080727: add "encoding" parameter to doctest.DocFileSuite.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch #1281707: speed up gzip.readline.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch #1180296: Two new functions were added to the locale module:
 | |
|   format_string() to get the effect of  "format % items" but locale-aware,
 | |
|   and currency() to format a monetary number with currency sign.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch #1486962: Several bugs in the turtle Tk demo module were fixed
 | |
|   and several features added, such as speed and geometry control.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch #1488881: add support for external file objects in bz2 compressed
 | |
|   tarfiles.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch #721464: pdb.Pdb instances can now be given explicit stdin and
 | |
|   stdout arguments, making it possible to redirect input and output
 | |
|   for remote debugging.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch #1484695: Update the tarfile module to version 0.8. This fixes
 | |
|   a couple of issues, notably handling of long file names using the
 | |
|   GNU LONGNAME extension.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch #1478292. ``doctest.register_optionflag(name)`` shouldn't create a
 | |
|   new flag when ``name`` is already the name of an option flag.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #1385040: don't allow "def foo(a=1, b): pass" in the compiler
 | |
|   package.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch #1472854: make the rlcompleter.Completer class usable on non-
 | |
|   UNIX platforms.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch #1470846: fix urllib2 ProxyBasicAuthHandler.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #1472827: correctly escape newlines and tabs in attribute values in
 | |
|   the saxutils.XMLGenerator class.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| Build
 | |
| -----
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #1502728: Correctly link against librt library on HP-UX.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - OpenBSD 3.9 is supported now.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch #1492356: Port to Windows CE.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug/Patch #1481770: Use .so extension for shared libraries on HP-UX for ia64.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch #1471883: Add --enable-universalsdk.
 | |
| 
 | |
| C API
 | |
| -----
 | |
| 
 | |
| Tests
 | |
| -----
 | |
| 
 | |
| Tools
 | |
| -----
 | |
| 
 | |
| Documentation
 | |
| -------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| What's New in Python 2.5 alpha 2?
 | |
| =================================
 | |
| 
 | |
| *Release date: 27-APR-2006*
 | |
| 
 | |
| Core and builtins
 | |
| -----------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #1465834: 'bdist_wininst preinstall script support' was fixed
 | |
|   by converting these apis from macros into exported functions again:
 | |
| 
 | |
|     PyParser_SimpleParseFile PyParser_SimpleParseString PyRun_AnyFile
 | |
|     PyRun_AnyFileEx PyRun_AnyFileFlags PyRun_File PyRun_FileEx
 | |
|     PyRun_FileFlags PyRun_InteractiveLoop PyRun_InteractiveOne
 | |
|     PyRun_SimpleFile PyRun_SimpleFileEx PyRun_SimpleString
 | |
|     PyRun_String Py_CompileString
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Under COUNT_ALLOCS, types are not necessarily immortal anymore.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - All uses of PyStructSequence_InitType have been changed to initialize
 | |
|   the type objects only once, even if the interpreter is initialized
 | |
|   multiple times.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #1454485, array.array('u') could crash the interpreter.  This was
 | |
|   due to PyArgs_ParseTuple(args, 'u#', ...) trying to convert buffers (strings)
 | |
|   to unicode when it didn't make sense.  'u#' now requires a unicode string.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Py_UNICODE is unsigned.  It was always documented as unsigned, but
 | |
|   due to a bug had a signed value in previous versions.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch #837242: ``id()`` of any Python object always gives a positive
 | |
|   number now, which might be a long integer. ``PyLong_FromVoidPtr`` and
 | |
|   ``PyLong_AsVoidPtr`` have been changed accordingly.  Note that it has
 | |
|   never been correct to implement a ``__hash()__`` method that returns the
 | |
|   ``id()`` of an object:
 | |
| 
 | |
|       def __hash__(self):
 | |
|           return id(self)  # WRONG
 | |
| 
 | |
|   because a hash result must be a (short) Python int but it was always
 | |
|   possible for ``id()`` to return a Python long.  However, because ``id()``
 | |
|   could return negative values before, on a 32-bit box an ``id()`` result
 | |
|   was always usable as a hash value before this patch.  That's no longer
 | |
|   necessarily so.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Python on OS X 10.3 and above now uses dlopen() (via dynload_shlib.c)
 | |
|   to load extension modules and now provides the dl module. As a result,
 | |
|   sys.setdlopenflags() now works correctly on these systems. (SF patch
 | |
|   #1454844)
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch #1463867: enhanced garbage collection to allow cleanup of cycles
 | |
|   involving generators that have paused outside of any ``try`` or ``with``
 | |
|   blocks.  (In 2.5a1, a paused generator that was part of a reference
 | |
|   cycle could not be garbage collected, regardless of whether it was
 | |
|   paused in a ``try`` or ``with`` block.)
 | |
| 
 | |
| Extension Modules
 | |
| -----------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch #1191065: Fix preprocessor problems on systems where recvfrom
 | |
|   is a macro.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #1467952: os.listdir() now correctly raises an error if readdir()
 | |
|   fails with an error condition.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Fixed bsddb.db.DBError derived exceptions so they can be unpickled.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #1117761: bsddb.*open() no longer raises an exception when using
 | |
|   the cachesize parameter.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #1149413: bsddb.*open() no longer raises an exception when using
 | |
|   a temporary db (file=None) with the 'n' flag to truncate on open.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #1332852: bsddb module minimum BerkeleyDB version raised to 3.3
 | |
|   as older versions cause excessive test failures.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch #1062014: AF_UNIX sockets under Linux have a special
 | |
|   abstract namespace that is now fully supported.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Library
 | |
| -------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #1223937: subprocess.CalledProcessError reports the exit status
 | |
|   of the process using the returncode attribute, instead of
 | |
|   abusing errno.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch #1475231: ``doctest`` has a new ``SKIP`` option, which causes
 | |
|   a doctest to be skipped (the code is not run, and the expected output
 | |
|   or exception is ignored).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Fixed contextlib.nested to cope with exceptions being raised and
 | |
|   caught inside exit handlers.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Updated optparse module to Optik 1.5.1 (allow numeric constants in
 | |
|   hex, octal, or binary; add ``append_const`` action; keep going if
 | |
|   gettext cannot be imported; added ``OptionParser.destroy()`` method;
 | |
|   added ``epilog`` for better help generation).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #1473760: ``tempfile.TemporaryFile()`` could hang on Windows, when
 | |
|   called from a thread spawned as a side effect of importing a module.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The pydoc module now supports documenting packages contained in
 | |
|   .zip or .egg files.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The pkgutil module now has several new utility functions, such
 | |
|   as ``walk_packages()`` to support working with packages that are either
 | |
|   in the filesystem or zip files.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The mailbox module can now modify and delete messages from
 | |
|   mailboxes, in addition to simply reading them.  Thanks to Gregory
 | |
|   K. Johnson for writing the code, and to the 2005 Google Summer of
 | |
|   Code for funding his work.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The ``__del__`` method of class ``local`` in module ``_threading_local``
 | |
|   returned before accomplishing any of its intended cleanup.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch #790710: Add breakpoint command lists in pdb.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch #1063914: Add Tkinter.Misc.clipboard_get().
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch #1191700: Adjust column alignment in bdb breakpoint lists.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - SimpleXMLRPCServer relied on the fcntl module, which is unavailable on
 | |
|   Windows. Bug #1469163.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The warnings, linecache, inspect, traceback, site, and doctest modules
 | |
|   were updated to work correctly with modules imported from zipfiles or
 | |
|   via other PEP 302 __loader__ objects.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch #1467770: Reduce usage of subprocess._active to processes which
 | |
|   the application hasn't waited on.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch #1462222: Fix Tix.Grid.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Fix exception when doing glob.glob('anything*/')
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The pstats.Stats class accepts an optional stream keyword argument to
 | |
|   direct output to an alternate file-like object.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Build
 | |
| -----
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The Makefile now has a reindent target, which runs reindent.py on
 | |
|   the library.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch #1470875: Building Python with MS Free Compiler
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch #1161914: Add a python-config script.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch #1324762:Remove ccpython.cc; replace --with-cxx with
 | |
|   --with-cxx-main. Link with C++ compiler only if --with-cxx-main was
 | |
|   specified. (Can be overridden by explicitly setting LINKCC.) Decouple
 | |
|   CXX from --with-cxx-main, see description in README.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch #1429775: Link extension modules with the shared libpython.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Fixed a libffi build problem on MIPS systems.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - ``PyString_FromFormat``, ``PyErr_Format``, and ``PyString_FromFormatV``
 | |
|   now accept formats "%u" for unsigned ints, "%lu" for unsigned longs,
 | |
|   and "%zu" for unsigned integers of type ``size_t``.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Tests
 | |
| -----
 | |
| 
 | |
| - test_contextlib now checks contextlib.nested can cope with exceptions
 | |
|   being raised and caught inside exit handlers.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - test_cmd_line now checks operation of the -m and -c command switches
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The test_contextlib test in 2.5a1 wasn't actually run unless you ran
 | |
|   it separately and by hand.  It also wasn't cleaning up its changes to
 | |
|   the current Decimal context.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - regrtest.py now has a -M option to run tests that test the new limits of
 | |
|   containers, on 64-bit architectures. Running these tests is only sensible
 | |
|   on 64-bit machines with more than two gigabytes of memory. The argument
 | |
|   passed is the maximum amount of memory for the tests to use.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Tools
 | |
| -----
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Added the Python benchmark suite pybench to the Tools/ directory;
 | |
|   contributed by Marc-Andre Lemburg.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Documentation
 | |
| -------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch #1473132: Improve docs for ``tp_clear`` and ``tp_traverse``.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - PEP 343: Added Context Types section to the library reference
 | |
|   and attempted to bring other PEP 343 related documentation into
 | |
|   line with the implementation and/or python-dev discussions.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #1337990: clarified that ``doctest`` does not support examples
 | |
|   requiring both expected output and an exception.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| What's New in Python 2.5 alpha 1?
 | |
| =================================
 | |
| 
 | |
| *Release date: 05-APR-2006*
 | |
| 
 | |
| Core and builtins
 | |
| -----------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - PEP 338: -m command line switch now delegates to runpy.run_module
 | |
|   allowing it to support modules in packages and zipfiles
 | |
| 
 | |
| - On Windows, .DLL is not an accepted file name extension for
 | |
|   extension modules anymore; extensions are only found if they
 | |
|   end in .PYD.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #1421664: sys.stderr.encoding is now set to the same value as
 | |
|   sys.stdout.encoding.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - __import__ accepts keyword arguments.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch #1460496: round() now accepts keyword arguments.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Fixed bug #1459029 - unicode reprs were double-escaped.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch #1396919: The system scope threads are reenabled on FreeBSD
 | |
|   5.4 and later versions.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #1115379: Compiling a Unicode string with an encoding declaration
 | |
|   now gives a SyntaxError.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Previously, Python code had no easy way to access the contents of a
 | |
|   cell object. Now, a ``cell_contents`` attribute has been added
 | |
|   (closes patch #1170323).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch #1123430: Python's small-object allocator now returns an arena to
 | |
|   the system ``free()`` when all memory within an arena becomes unused
 | |
|   again.  Prior to Python 2.5, arenas (256KB chunks of memory) were never
 | |
|   freed.  Some applications will see a drop in virtual memory size now,
 | |
|   especially long-running applications that, from time to time, temporarily
 | |
|   use a large number of small objects.  Note that when Python returns an
 | |
|   arena to the platform C's ``free()``, there's no guarantee that the
 | |
|   platform C library will in turn return that memory to the operating system.
 | |
|   The effect of the patch is to stop making that impossible, and in tests it
 | |
|   appears to be effective at least on Microsoft C and gcc-based systems.
 | |
|   Thanks to Evan Jones for hard work and patience.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch #1434038: property() now uses the getter's docstring if there is
 | |
|   no "doc" argument given. This makes it possible to legitimately use
 | |
|   property() as a decorator to produce a read-only property.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - PEP 357, patch 1436368: add an __index__ method to int/long and a matching
 | |
|   nb_index slot to the PyNumberMethods struct.  The slot is consulted instead
 | |
|   of requiring an int or long in slicing and a few other contexts, enabling
 | |
|   other objects (e.g. Numeric Python's integers) to be used as slice indices.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Fixed various bugs reported by Coverity's Prevent tool.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - PEP 352, patch #1104669: Make exceptions new-style objects.  Introduced the
 | |
|   new exception base class, BaseException, which has a new message attribute.
 | |
|   KeyboardInterrupt and SystemExit to directly inherit from BaseException now.
 | |
|   Raising a string exception now raises a DeprecationWarning.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch #1438387, PEP 328: relative and absolute imports. Imports can now be
 | |
|   explicitly relative, using 'from .module import name' to mean 'from the same
 | |
|   package as this module is in. Imports without dots still default to the
 | |
|   old relative-then-absolute, unless 'from __future__ import
 | |
|   absolute_import' is used.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Properly check if 'warnings' raises an exception (usually when a filter set
 | |
|   to "error" is triggered) when raising a warning for raising string
 | |
|   exceptions.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - CO_GENERATOR_ALLOWED is no longer defined. This behavior is the default.
 | |
|   The name was removed from Include/code.h.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - PEP 308: conditional expressions were added: (x if cond else y).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch 1433928:
 | |
|   - The copy module now "copies" function objects (as atomic objects).
 | |
|   - dict.__getitem__ now looks for a __missing__ hook before raising
 | |
|     KeyError.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - PEP 343: with statement implemented. Needs ``from __future__ import
 | |
|   with_statement``. Use of 'with' as a variable will generate a warning.
 | |
|   Use of 'as' as a variable will also generate a warning (unless it's
 | |
|   part of an import statement).
 | |
|   The following objects have __context__ methods:
 | |
|   - The built-in file type.
 | |
|   - The thread.LockType type.
 | |
|   - The following types defined by the threading module:
 | |
|     Lock, RLock, Condition, Semaphore, BoundedSemaphore.
 | |
|   - The decimal.Context class.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Fix the encodings package codec search function to only search
 | |
|   inside its own package. Fixes problem reported in patch #1433198.
 | |
| 
 | |
|   Note: Codec packages should implement and register their own
 | |
|   codec search function. PEP 100 has the details.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - PEP 353: Using ``Py_ssize_t`` as the index type.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - ``PYMALLOC_DEBUG`` builds now add ``4*sizeof(size_t)`` bytes of debugging
 | |
|   info to each allocated block, since the ``Py_ssize_t`` changes (PEP 353)
 | |
|   now allow Python to make use of memory blocks exceeding 2**32 bytes for
 | |
|   some purposes on 64-bit boxes.  A ``PYMALLOC_DEBUG`` build was limited
 | |
|   to 4-byte allocations before.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch #1400181, fix unicode string formatting to not use the locale.
 | |
|   This is how string objects work.  u'%f' could use , instead of .
 | |
|   for the decimal point.  Now both strings and unicode always use periods.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #1244610, #1392915, fix build problem on OpenBSD 3.7 and 3.8.
 | |
|   configure would break checking curses.h.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #959576: The pwd module is now built in. This allows Python to be
 | |
|   built on UNIX platforms without $HOME set.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #1072182, fix some potential problems if characters are signed.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #889500, fix line number on SyntaxWarning for global declarations.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #1378022, UTF-8 files with a leading BOM crashed the interpreter.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Support for converting hex strings to floats no longer works.
 | |
|   This was not portable.  float('0x3') now raises a ValueError.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch #1382163: Expose Subversion revision number to Python.  New C API
 | |
|   function Py_GetBuildNumber().  New attribute sys.subversion.  Build number
 | |
|   is now displayed in interactive prompt banner.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Implementation of PEP 341 - Unification of try/except and try/finally.
 | |
|   "except" clauses can now be written together with a "finally" clause in
 | |
|   one try statement instead of two nested ones.  Patch #1355913.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #1379994: Builtin unicode_escape and raw_unicode_escape codec
 | |
|   now encodes backslash correctly.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch #1350409: Work around signal handling bug in Visual Studio 2005.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #1281408: Py_BuildValue now works correctly even with unsigned longs
 | |
|   and long longs.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - SF Bug #1350188, "setdlopenflags" leads to crash upon "import"
 | |
|   It was possible for dlerror() to return a NULL pointer, so
 | |
|   it will now use a default error message in this case.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Replaced most Unicode charmap codecs with new ones using the
 | |
|   new Unicode translate string feature in the built-in charmap
 | |
|   codec; the codecs were created from the mapping tables available
 | |
|   at ftp.unicode.org and contain a few updates (e.g. the Mac OS
 | |
|   encodings now include a mapping for the Apple logo)
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Added a few more codecs for Mac OS encodings
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Sped up some Unicode operations.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - A new AST parser implementation was completed. The abstract
 | |
|   syntax tree is available for read-only (non-compile) access
 | |
|   to Python code; an _ast module was added.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - SF bug #1167751: fix incorrect code being produced for generator expressions.
 | |
|   The following code now raises a SyntaxError:  foo(a = i for i in range(10))
 | |
| 
 | |
| - SF Bug #976608: fix SystemError when mtime of an imported file is -1.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - SF Bug #887946: fix segfault when redirecting stdin from a directory.
 | |
|   Provide a warning when a directory is passed on the command line.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Fix segfault with invalid coding.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - SF bug #772896: unknown encoding results in MemoryError.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - All iterators now have a Boolean value of True.  Formerly, some iterators
 | |
|   supported a __len__() method which evaluated to False when the iterator
 | |
|   was empty.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - On 64-bit platforms, when __len__() returns a value that cannot be
 | |
|   represented as a C int, raise OverflowError.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - test__locale is skipped on OS X < 10.4 (only partial locale support is
 | |
|   present).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - SF bug #893549: parsing keyword arguments was broken with a few format
 | |
|   codes.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Changes donated by Elemental Security to make it work on AIX 5.3
 | |
|   with IBM's 64-bit compiler (SF patch #1284289).  This also closes SF
 | |
|   bug #105470: test_pwd fails on 64bit system (Opteron).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Changes donated by Elemental Security to make it work on HP-UX 11 on
 | |
|   Itanium2 with HP's 64-bit compiler (SF patch #1225212).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Disallow keyword arguments for type constructors that don't use them
 | |
|   (fixes bug #1119418).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Forward UnicodeDecodeError into SyntaxError for source encoding errors.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - SF bug #900092: When tracing (e.g. for hotshot), restore 'return' events for
 | |
|   exceptions that cause a function to exit.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The implementation of set() and frozenset() was revised to use its
 | |
|   own internal data structure.  Memory consumption is reduced by 1/3
 | |
|   and there are modest speed-ups as well.  The API is unchanged.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - SF bug #1238681:  freed pointer is used in longobject.c:long_pow().
 | |
| 
 | |
| - SF bug #1229429: PyObject_CallMethod failed to decrement some
 | |
|   reference counts in some error exit cases.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - SF bug #1185883:  Python's small-object memory allocator took over
 | |
|   a block managed by the platform C library whenever a realloc specified
 | |
|   a small new size.  However, there's no portable way to know then how
 | |
|   much of the address space following the pointer is valid, so there's no
 | |
|   portable way to copy data from the C-managed block into Python's
 | |
|   small-object space without risking a memory fault.  Python's small-object
 | |
|   realloc now leaves such blocks under the control of the platform C
 | |
|   realloc.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - SF bug #1232517: An overflow error was not detected properly when
 | |
|   attempting to convert a large float to an int in os.utime().
 | |
| 
 | |
| - SF bug #1224347: hex longs now print with lowercase letters just
 | |
|   like their int counterparts.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - SF bug #1163563: the original fix for bug #1010677 ("thread Module
 | |
|   Breaks PyGILState_Ensure()") broke badly in the case of multiple
 | |
|   interpreter states; back out that fix and do a better job (see
 | |
|   http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2005-June/054258.html
 | |
|   for a longer write-up of the problem).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - SF patch #1180995: marshal now uses a binary format by default when
 | |
|   serializing floats.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - SF patch #1181301: on platforms that appear to use IEEE 754 floats,
 | |
|   the routines that promise to produce IEEE 754 binary representations
 | |
|   of floats now simply copy bytes around.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - bug #967182: disallow opening files with 'wU' or 'aU' as specified by PEP
 | |
|   278.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - patch #1109424: int, long, float, complex, and unicode now check for the
 | |
|   proper magic slot for type conversions when subclassed.  Previously the
 | |
|   magic slot was ignored during conversion.  Semantics now match the way
 | |
|   subclasses of str always behaved.  int/long/float, conversion of an instance
 | |
|   to the base class has been moved to the proper nb_* magic slot and out of
 | |
|   PyNumber_*().
 | |
|   Thanks Walter Dörwald.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Descriptors defined in C with a PyGetSetDef structure, where the setter is
 | |
|   NULL, now raise an AttributeError when attempting to set or delete the
 | |
|   attribute.  Previously a TypeError was raised, but this was inconsistent
 | |
|   with the equivalent pure-Python implementation.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - It is now safe to call PyGILState_Release() before
 | |
|   PyEval_InitThreads() (note that if there is reason to believe there
 | |
|   are multiple threads around you still must call PyEval_InitThreads()
 | |
|   before using the Python API; this fix is for extension modules that
 | |
|   have no way of knowing if Python is multi-threaded yet).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Typing Ctrl-C whilst raw_input() was waiting in a build with threads
 | |
|   disabled caused a crash.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #1165306: instancemethod_new allowed the creation of a method
 | |
|   with im_class == im_self == NULL, which caused a crash when called.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Move exception finalisation later in the shutdown process - this
 | |
|   fixes the crash seen in bug #1165761
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Added two new builtins, any() and all().
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Defining a class with empty parentheses is now allowed
 | |
|   (e.g., ``class C(): pass`` is no longer a syntax error).
 | |
|   Patch #1176012 added support to the 'parser' module and 'compiler' package
 | |
|   (thanks to logistix for that added support).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch #1115086: Support PY_LONGLONG in structmember.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #1155938: new style classes did not check that __init__() was
 | |
|   returning None.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch #802188: Report characters after line continuation character
 | |
|   ('\') with a specific error message.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #723201: Raise a TypeError for passing bad objects to 'L' format.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #1124295: the __name__ attribute of file objects was
 | |
|   inadvertently made inaccessible in restricted mode.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #1074011: closing sys.std{out,err} now causes a flush() and
 | |
|   an ferror() call.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - min() and max() now support key= arguments with the same meaning as in
 | |
|   list.sort().
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The peephole optimizer now performs simple constant folding in expressions:
 | |
|       (2+3) --> (5).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - set and frozenset objects can now be marshalled.  SF #1098985.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #1077106: Poor argument checking could cause memory corruption
 | |
|   in calls to os.read().
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The parser did not complain about future statements in illegal
 | |
|   positions.  It once again reports a syntax error if a future
 | |
|   statement occurs after anything other than a doc string.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Change the %s format specifier for str objects so that it returns a
 | |
|   unicode instance if the argument is not an instance of basestring and
 | |
|   calling __str__ on the argument returns a unicode instance.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch #1413181:  changed ``PyThreadState_Delete()`` to forget about the
 | |
|   current thread state when the auto-GIL-state machinery knows about
 | |
|   it (since the thread state is being deleted, continuing to remember it
 | |
|   can't help, but can hurt if another thread happens to get created with
 | |
|   the same thread id).
 | |
| 
 | |
| Extension Modules
 | |
| -----------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch #1380952: fix SSL objects timing out on consecutive read()s
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch #1309579: wait3 and wait4 were added to the posix module.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch #1231053: The audioop module now supports encoding/decoding of alaw.
 | |
|   In addition, the existing ulaw code was updated.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - RFE #567972: Socket objects' family, type and proto properties are
 | |
|   now exposed via new attributes.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Everything under lib-old was removed.  This includes the following modules:
 | |
|     Para, addpack, cmp, cmpcache, codehack, dircmp, dump, find, fmt, grep,
 | |
|     lockfile, newdir, ni, packmail, poly, rand, statcache, tb, tzparse,
 | |
|     util, whatsound, whrandom, zmod
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The following modules were removed:  regsub, reconvert, regex, regex_syntax.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - re and sre were swapped, so help(re) provides full help.  importing sre
 | |
|   is deprecated.  The undocumented re.engine variable no longer exists.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #1448490: Fixed a bug that ISO-2022 codecs could not handle
 | |
|   SS2 (single-shift 2) escape sequences correctly.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The unicodedata module was updated to the 4.1 version of the Unicode
 | |
|   database. The 3.2 version is still available as unicodedata.db_3_2_0
 | |
|   for applications that require this specific version (such as IDNA).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The timing module is no longer built by default.  It was deprecated
 | |
|   in PEP 4 in Python 2.0 or earlier.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch 1433928: Added a new type, defaultdict, to the collections module.
 | |
|   This uses the new __missing__ hook behavior added to dict (see above).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #854823: socketmodule now builds on Sun platforms even when
 | |
|   INET_ADDRSTRLEN is not defined.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch #1393157: os.startfile() now has an optional argument to specify
 | |
|   a "command verb" to invoke on the file.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #876637, prevent stack corruption when socket descriptor
 | |
|   is larger than FD_SETSIZE.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch #1407135, bug #1424041: harmonize mmap behavior of anonymous memory.
 | |
|   mmap.mmap(-1, size) now returns anonymous memory in both Unix and Windows.
 | |
|   mmap.mmap(0, size) should not be used on Windows for anonymous memory.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch #1422385: The nis module now supports access to domains other
 | |
|   than the system default domain.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Use Win32 API to implement os.stat/fstat. As a result, subsecond timestamps
 | |
|   are reported, the limit on path name lengths is removed, and stat reports
 | |
|   WindowsError now (instead of OSError).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Add bsddb.db.DBEnv.set_tx_timestamp allowing time based database recovery.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #1413192, fix seg fault in bsddb if a transaction was deleted
 | |
|   before the env.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch #1103116: Basic AF_NETLINK support.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #1402308, (possible) segfault when using mmap.mmap(-1, ...)
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #1400822, _curses over{lay,write} doesn't work when passing 6 ints.
 | |
|   Also fix ungetmouse() which did not accept arguments properly.
 | |
|   The code now conforms to the documented signature.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #1400115, Fix segfault when calling curses.panel.userptr()
 | |
|   without prior setting of the userptr.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Fix 64-bit problems in bsddb.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch #1365916: fix some unsafe 64-bit mmap methods.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #1290333: Added a workaround for cjkcodecs' _codecs_cn build
 | |
|   problem on AIX.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #869197: os.setgroups rejects long integer arguments
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #1346533, select.poll() doesn't raise an error if timeout > sys.maxint
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #1344508, Fix UNIX mmap leaking file descriptors
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch #1338314, Bug #1336623: fix tarfile so it can extract
 | |
|   REGTYPE directories from tarfiles written by old programs.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch #1407992, fixes broken bsddb module db associate when using
 | |
|   BerkeleyDB 3.3, 4.0 or 4.1.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Get bsddb module to build with BerkeleyDB version 4.4
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Get bsddb module to build with BerkeleyDB version 3.2
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch #1309009, Fix segfault in pyexpat when the XML document is in latin_1,
 | |
|   but Python incorrectly assumes it is in UTF-8 format
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Fix parse errors in the readline module when compiling without threads.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch #1288833: Removed thread lock from socket.getaddrinfo on
 | |
|   FreeBSD 5.3 and later versions which got thread-safe getaddrinfo(3).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patches #1298449 and #1298499: Add some missing checks for error
 | |
|   returns in cStringIO.c.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch #1297028: fix segfault if call type on MultibyteCodec,
 | |
|   MultibyteStreamReader, or MultibyteStreamWriter
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Fix memory leak in posix.access().
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch #1213831: Fix typo in unicodedata._getcode.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #1007046: os.startfile() did not accept unicode strings encoded in
 | |
|   the file system encoding.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch #756021: Special-case socket.inet_aton('255.255.255.255') for
 | |
|   platforms that don't have inet_aton().
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #1215928: Fix bz2.BZ2File.seek() for 64-bit file offsets.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #1191043: Fix bz2.BZ2File.(x)readlines for files containing one
 | |
|   line without newlines.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #728515: mmap.resize() now resizes the file on Unix as it did
 | |
|   on Windows.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch #1180695: Add nanosecond stat resolution, and st_gen,
 | |
|   st_birthtime for FreeBSD.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch #1231069: The fcntl.ioctl function now uses the 'I' code for
 | |
|   the request code argument, which results in more C-like behaviour
 | |
|   for large or negative values.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #1234979: For the argument of thread.Lock.acquire, the Windows
 | |
|   implementation treated all integer values except 1 as false.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #1194181: bz2.BZ2File didn't handle mode 'U' correctly.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch #1212117: os.stat().st_flags is now accessible as a attribute
 | |
|   if available on the platform.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch #1103951: Expose O_SHLOCK and O_EXLOCK in the posix module if
 | |
|   available on the platform.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #1166660: The readline module could segfault if hook functions
 | |
|   were set in a different thread than that which called readline.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - collections.deque objects now support a remove() method.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - operator.itemgetter() and operator.attrgetter() now support retrieving
 | |
|   multiple fields.  This provides direct support for sorting on multiple
 | |
|   keys (primary, secondary, etc).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - os.access now supports Unicode path names on non-Win32 systems.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patches #925152, #1118602: Avoid reading after the end of the buffer
 | |
|   in pyexpat.GetInputContext.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patches #749830, #1144555: allow UNIX mmap size to default to current
 | |
|   file size.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Added functional.partial().  See PEP309.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch #1093585: raise a ValueError for negative history items in readline.
 | |
|   {remove_history,replace_history}
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The spwd module has been added, allowing access to the shadow password
 | |
|   database.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - stat_float_times is now True.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - array.array objects are now picklable.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - the cPickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
 | |
|   args tuple returned by __reduce__().
 | |
| 
 | |
| - itertools.islice() now accepts None for the start and step arguments.
 | |
|   This allows islice() to work more readily with slices:
 | |
|       islice(s.start, s.stop, s.step)
 | |
| 
 | |
| - datetime.datetime() now has a strptime class method which can be used to
 | |
|   create datetime object using a string and format.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch #1117961: Replace the MD5 implementation from RSA Data Security Inc
 | |
|   with the implementation from http://sourceforge.net/projects/libmd5-rfc/.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Library
 | |
| -------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch #1388073: Numerous __-prefixed attributes of unittest.TestCase have
 | |
|   been renamed to have only a single underscore prefix.  This was done to
 | |
|   make subclassing easier.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - PEP 338: new module runpy defines a run_module function to support
 | |
|   executing modules which provide access to source code or a code object
 | |
|   via the PEP 302 import mechanisms.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The email module's parsedate_tz function now sets the daylight savings
 | |
|   flag to -1 (unknown) since it can't tell from the date whether it should
 | |
|   be set.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch #624325: urlparse.urlparse() and urlparse.urlsplit() results
 | |
|   now sport attributes that provide access to the parts of the result.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch #1462498: sgmllib now handles entity and character references
 | |
|   in attribute values.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Added the sqlite3 package. This is based on pysqlite2.1.3, and provides
 | |
|   a DB-API interface in the standard library. You'll need sqlite 3.0.8 or
 | |
|   later to build this - if you have an earlier version, the C extension
 | |
|   module will not be built.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #1460340: ``random.sample(dict)`` failed in various ways.  Dicts
 | |
|   aren't officially supported here, and trying to use them will probably
 | |
|   raise an exception some day.  But dicts have been allowed, and "mostly
 | |
|   worked", so support for them won't go away without warning.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #1445068: getpass.getpass() can now be given an explicit stream
 | |
|   argument to specify where to write the prompt.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch #1462313, bug #1443328: the pickle modules now can handle classes
 | |
|   that have __private names in their __slots__.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #1250170: mimetools now handles socket.gethostname() failures gracefully.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - patch #1457316: "setup.py upload" now supports --identity to select the
 | |
|   key to be used for signing the uploaded code.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Queue.Queue objects now support .task_done() and .join() methods
 | |
|   to make it easier to monitor when daemon threads have completed
 | |
|   processing all enqueued tasks.  Patch #1455676.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - popen2.Popen objects now preserve the command in a .cmd attribute.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Added the ctypes ffi package.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - email 4.0 package now integrated.  This is largely the same as the email 3.0
 | |
|   package that was included in Python 2.3, except that PEP 8 module names are
 | |
|   now used (e.g. mail.message instead of email.Message).  The MIME classes
 | |
|   have been moved to a subpackage (e.g. email.mime.text instead of
 | |
|   email.MIMEText).  The old names are still supported for now.  Several
 | |
|   deprecated Message methods have been removed and lots of bugs have been
 | |
|   fixed.  More details can be found in the email package documentation.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patches #1436130/#1443155: codecs.lookup() now returns a CodecInfo object
 | |
|   (a subclass of tuple) that provides incremental decoders and encoders
 | |
|   (a way to use stateful codecs without the stream API). Python functions
 | |
|   codecs.getincrementaldecoder() and codecs.getincrementalencoder() as well
 | |
|   as C functions PyCodec_IncrementalEncoder() and PyCodec_IncrementalDecoder()
 | |
|   have been added.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch #1359365: Calling next() on a closed StringIO.String object raises
 | |
|   a ValueError instead of a StopIteration now (like file and cString.String do).
 | |
|   cStringIO.StringIO.isatty() will raise a ValueError now if close() has been
 | |
|   called before (like file and StringIO.StringIO do).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - A regrtest option -w was added to re-run failed tests in verbose mode.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch #1446372: quit and exit can now be called from the interactive
 | |
|   interpreter to exit.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The function get_count() has been added to the gc module, and gc.collect()
 | |
|   grew an optional 'generation' argument.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - A library msilib to generate Windows Installer files, and a distutils
 | |
|   command bdist_msi have been added.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - PEP 343: new module contextlib.py defines decorator @contextmanager
 | |
|   and helpful context managers nested() and closing().
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The compiler package now supports future imports after the module docstring.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #1413790: zipfile now sanitizes absolute archive names that are
 | |
|   not allowed by the specs.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch #1215184: FileInput now can be given an opening hook which can
 | |
|   be used to control how files are opened.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch #1212287: fileinput.input() now has a mode parameter for
 | |
|   specifying the file mode input files should be opened with.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch #1215184: fileinput now has a fileno() function for getting the
 | |
|   current file number.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch #1349274: gettext.install() now optionally installs additional
 | |
|   translation functions other than _() in the builtins namespace.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch #1337756: fileinput now accepts Unicode filenames.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch #1373643: The chunk module can now read chunks larger than
 | |
|   two gigabytes.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch #1417555: SimpleHTTPServer now returns Last-Modified headers.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #1430298: It is now possible to send a mail with an empty
 | |
|   return address using smtplib.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #1432260: The names of lambda functions are now properly displayed
 | |
|   in pydoc.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch #1412872: zipfile now sets the creator system to 3 (Unix)
 | |
|   unless the system is Win32.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch #1349118: urllib now supports user:pass@ style proxy
 | |
|   specifications, raises IOErrors when proxies for unsupported protocols
 | |
|   are defined, and uses the https proxy on https redirections.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #902075: urllib2 now supports 'host:port' style proxy specifications.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #1407902: Add support for sftp:// URIs to urlparse.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #1371247: Update Windows locale identifiers in locale.py.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #1394565: SimpleHTTPServer now doesn't choke on query parameters
 | |
|   any more.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #1403410: The warnings module now doesn't get confused
 | |
|   when it can't find out the module name it generates a warning for.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch #1177307: Added a new codec utf_8_sig for UTF-8 with a BOM signature.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch #1157027: cookielib mishandles RFC 2109 cookies in Netscape mode
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch #1117398: cookielib.LWPCookieJar and .MozillaCookieJar now raise
 | |
|   LoadError as documented, instead of IOError.  For compatibility,
 | |
|   LoadError subclasses IOError.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Added the hashlib module.  It provides secure hash functions for MD5 and
 | |
|   SHA1, 224, 256, 384, and 512.  Note that recent developments make the
 | |
|   historic MD5 and SHA1 unsuitable for cryptographic-strength applications.
 | |
|   In <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2005-December/058850.html>
 | |
|   Ronald L. Rivest offered this advice for Python:
 | |
| 
 | |
|       "The consensus of researchers in this area (at least as
 | |
|       expressed at the NIST Hash Function Workshop 10/31/05),
 | |
|       is that SHA-256 is a good choice for the time being, but
 | |
|       that research should continue, and other alternatives may
 | |
|       arise from this research.  The larger SHA's also seem OK."
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Added a subset of Fredrik Lundh's ElementTree package.  Available
 | |
|   modules are xml.etree.ElementTree, xml.etree.ElementPath, and
 | |
|   xml.etree.ElementInclude, from ElementTree 1.2.6.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch #1162825: Support non-ASCII characters in IDLE window titles.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #1365984: urllib now opens "data:" URLs again.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch #1314396: prevent deadlock for threading.Thread.join() when an exception
 | |
|   is raised within the method itself on a previous call (e.g., passing in an
 | |
|   illegal argument)
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #1340337: change time.strptime() to always return ValueError when there
 | |
|   is an error in the format string.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch #754022: Greatly enhanced webbrowser.py (by Oleg Broytmann).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #729103: pydoc.py: Fix docother() method to accept additional
 | |
|   "parent" argument.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch #1300515: xdrlib.py: Fix pack_fstring() to really use null bytes
 | |
|   for padding.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #1296004: httplib.py: Limit maximal amount of data read from the
 | |
|   socket to avoid a MemoryError on Windows.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch #1166948: locale.py: Prefer LC_ALL, LC_CTYPE and LANG over LANGUAGE
 | |
|   to get the correct encoding.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch #1166938: locale.py: Parse LANGUAGE as a colon separated list of
 | |
|   languages.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch #1268314: Cache lines in StreamReader.readlines for performance.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #1290505: Fix clearing the regex cache for time.strptime().
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #1167128: Fix size of a symlink in a tarfile to be 0.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch #810023: Fix off-by-one bug in urllib.urlretrieve reporthook
 | |
|   functionality.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #1163178: Make IDNA return an empty string when the input is empty.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch #848017: Make Cookie more RFC-compliant. Use CRLF as default output
 | |
|   separator and do not output trailing semicolon.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch #1062060: urllib.urlretrieve() now raises a new exception, named
 | |
|   ContentTooShortException, when the actually downloaded size does not
 | |
|   match the Content-Length header.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #1121494: distutils.dir_utils.mkpath now accepts Unicode strings.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #1178484: Return complete lines from codec stream readers
 | |
|   even if there is an exception in later lines, resulting in
 | |
|   correct line numbers for decoding errors in source code.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #1192315: Disallow negative arguments to clear() in pdb.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch #827386: Support absolute source paths in msvccompiler.py.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch #1105730: Apply the new implementation of commonprefix in posixpath
 | |
|   to ntpath, macpath, os2emxpath and riscospath.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Fix a problem in Tkinter introduced by SF patch #869468: delete bogus
 | |
|   __hasattr__ and __delattr__ methods on class Tk that were breaking
 | |
|   Tkdnd.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #1015140: disambiguated the term "article id" in nntplib docs and
 | |
|   docstrings to either "article number" or "message id".
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #1238170: threading.Thread.__init__ no longer has "kwargs={}" as a
 | |
|   parameter, but uses the usual "kwargs=None".
 | |
| 
 | |
| - textwrap now processes text chunks at O(n) speed instead of O(n**2).
 | |
|   Patch #1209527 (Contributed by Connelly).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - urllib2 has now an attribute 'httpresponses' mapping from HTTP status code
 | |
|   to W3C name (404 -> 'Not Found'). RFE #1216944.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #1177468: Don't cache the /dev/urandom file descriptor for os.urandom,
 | |
|   as this can cause problems with apps closing all file descriptors.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #839151: Fix an attempt to access sys.argv in the warnings module;
 | |
|   it can be missing in embedded interpreters
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #1155638: Fix a bug which affected HTTP 0.9 responses in httplib.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #1100201: Cross-site scripting was possible on BaseHTTPServer via
 | |
|   error messages.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #1108948: Cookie.py produced invalid JavaScript code.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The tokenize module now detects and reports indentation errors.
 | |
|   Bug #1224621.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The tokenize module has a new untokenize() function to support a full
 | |
|   roundtrip from lexed tokens back to Python source code.  In addition,
 | |
|   the generate_tokens() function now accepts a callable argument that
 | |
|   terminates by raising StopIteration.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #1196315: fix weakref.WeakValueDictionary constructor.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #1213894: os.path.realpath didn't resolve symlinks that were the first
 | |
|   component of the path.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch #1120353: The xmlrpclib module provides better, more transparent,
 | |
|   support for datetime.{datetime,date,time} objects.  With use_datetime set
 | |
|   to True, applications shouldn't have to fiddle with the DateTime wrapper
 | |
|   class at all.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - distutils.commands.upload was added to support uploading distribution
 | |
|   files to PyPI.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - distutils.commands.register now encodes the data as UTF-8 before posting
 | |
|   them to PyPI.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - decimal operator and comparison methods now return NotImplemented
 | |
|   instead of raising a TypeError when interacting with other types.  This
 | |
|   allows other classes to implement __radd__ style methods and have them
 | |
|   work as expected.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #1163325:  Decimal infinities failed to hash.  Attempting to
 | |
|   hash a NaN raised an InvalidOperation instead of a TypeError.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch #918101: Add tarfile open mode r|* for auto-detection of the
 | |
|   stream compression; add, for symmetry reasons, r:* as a synonym of r.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch #1043890: Add extractall method to tarfile.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch #1075887: Don't require MSVC in distutils if there is nothing
 | |
|   to build.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch #1103407: Properly deal with tarfile iterators when untarring
 | |
|   symbolic links on Windows.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch #645894: Use getrusage for computing the time consumption in
 | |
|   profile.py if available.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch #1046831: Use get_python_version where appropriate in sysconfig.py.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch #1117454: Remove code to special-case cookies without values
 | |
|   in LWPCookieJar.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch #1117339: Add cookielib special name tests.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch #1112812: Make bsddb/__init__.py more friendly for modulefinder.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch #1110248: SYNC_FLUSH the zlib buffer for GZipFile.flush.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch #1107973: Allow to iterate over the lines of a tarfile.ExFileObject.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch #1104111: Alter setup.py --help and --help-commands.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch #1121234: Properly cleanup _exit and tkerror commands.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch #1049151: xdrlib now unpacks booleans as True or False.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Fixed bug in a NameError bug in cookielib.  Patch #1116583.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Applied a security fix to SimpleXMLRPCserver (PSF-2005-001).  This
 | |
|   disables recursive traversal through instance attributes, which can
 | |
|   be exploited in various ways.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #1222790: in SimpleXMLRPCServer, set the reuse-address and close-on-exec
 | |
|   flags on the HTTP listening socket.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #792570: SimpleXMLRPCServer had problems if the request grew too large.
 | |
|   Fixed by reading the HTTP body in chunks instead of one big socket.read().
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patches #893642, #1039083: add allow_none, encoding arguments to
 | |
|   constructors of SimpleXMLRPCServer and CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #1110478: Revert os.environ.update to do putenv again.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #1103844: fix distutils.install.dump_dirs() with negated options.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - os.{SEEK_SET, SEEK_CUR, SEEK_END} have been added for convenience.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Enhancements to the csv module:
 | |
| 
 | |
|   + Dialects are now validated by the underlying C code, better
 | |
|     reflecting its capabilities, and improving its compliance with
 | |
|     PEP 305.
 | |
|   + Dialect parameter parsing has been re-implemented to improve error
 | |
|     reporting.
 | |
|   + quotechar=None and quoting=QUOTE_NONE now work the way PEP 305
 | |
|     dictates.
 | |
|   + the parser now removes the escapechar prefix from escaped characters.
 | |
|   + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the writer now tests for numeric
 | |
|     types, rather than any object that can be represented as a numeric.
 | |
|   + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the reader now casts unquoted fields
 | |
|     to floats.
 | |
|   + reader now allows \r characters to be quoted (previously it only allowed
 | |
|     \n to be quoted).
 | |
|   + writer doublequote handling improved.
 | |
|   + Dialect classes passed to the module are no longer instantiated by
 | |
|     the module before being parsed (the former validation scheme required
 | |
|     this, but the mechanism was unreliable).
 | |
|   + The dialect registry now contains instances of the internal
 | |
|     C-coded dialect type, rather than references to python objects.
 | |
|   + the internal c-coded dialect type is now immutable.
 | |
|   + register_dialect now accepts the same keyword dialect specifications
 | |
|     as the reader and writer, allowing the user to register dialects
 | |
|     without first creating a dialect class.
 | |
|   + a configurable limit to the size of parsed fields has been added -
 | |
|     previously, an unmatched quote character could result in the entire
 | |
|     file being read into the field buffer before an error was reported.
 | |
|   + A new module method csv.field_size_limit() has been added that sets
 | |
|     the parser field size limit (returning the former limit). The initial
 | |
|     limit is 128kB.
 | |
|   + A line_num attribute has been added to the reader object, which tracks
 | |
|     the number of lines read from the source iterator. This is not
 | |
|     the same as the number of records returned, as records can span
 | |
|     multiple lines.
 | |
|   + reader and writer objects were not being registered with the cyclic-GC.
 | |
|     This has been fixed.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - _DummyThread objects in the threading module now delete self.__block that is
 | |
|   inherited from _Thread since it uses up a lock allocated by 'thread'.  The
 | |
|   lock primitives tend to be limited in number and thus should not be wasted on
 | |
|   a _DummyThread object.  Fixes bug #1089632.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The imghdr module now detects Exif files.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - StringIO.truncate() now correctly adjusts the size attribute.
 | |
|   (Bug #951915).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - locale.py now uses an updated locale alias table (built using
 | |
|   Tools/i18n/makelocalealias.py, a tool to parse the X11 locale
 | |
|   alias file); the encoding lookup was enhanced to use Python's
 | |
|   encoding alias table.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - moved deprecated modules to Lib/lib-old:  whrandom, tzparse, statcache.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - the pickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
 | |
|   args tuple returned by __reduce__().
 | |
| 
 | |
| - optparse now optionally imports gettext.  This allows its use in setup.py.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - the pickle module no longer uses the deprecated bin parameter.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - the shelve module no longer uses the deprecated binary parameter.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - the pstats module no longer uses the deprecated ignore() method.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - the filecmp module no longer uses the deprecated use_statcache argument.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - unittest.TestCase.run() and unittest.TestSuite.run() can now be successfully
 | |
|   extended or overridden by subclasses.  Formerly, the subclassed method would
 | |
|   be ignored by the rest of the module.  (Bug #1078905).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - heapq.nsmallest() and heapq.nlargest() now support key= arguments with
 | |
|   the same meaning as in list.sort().
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #1076985: ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` now calls ``read()`` only
 | |
|   once when a size argument is given. This prevents a buffer overflow in the
 | |
|   tokenizer with very long source lines.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #1083110: ``zlib.decompress.flush()`` would segfault if called
 | |
|   immediately after creating the object, without any intervening
 | |
|   ``.decompress()`` calls.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The reconvert.quote function can now emit triple-quoted strings.  The
 | |
|   reconvert module now has some simple documentation.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - ``UserString.MutableString`` now supports negative indices in
 | |
|   ``__setitem__`` and ``__delitem__``
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #1149508: ``textwrap`` now handles hyphenated numbers (eg. "2004-03-05")
 | |
|   correctly.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Partial fixes for SF bugs #1163244 and #1175396: If a chunk read by
 | |
|   ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` has a trailing "\r", read one more
 | |
|   character even if the user has passed a size parameter to get a proper
 | |
|   line ending. Remove the special handling of a "\r\n" that has been split
 | |
|   between two lines.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #1251300: On UCS-4 builds the "unicode-internal" codec will now complain
 | |
|   about illegal code points. The codec now supports PEP 293 style error
 | |
|   handlers.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #1235646: ``codecs.StreamRecoder.next()`` now reencodes the data it reads
 | |
|   from the input stream, so that the output is a byte string in the correct
 | |
|   encoding instead of a unicode string.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #1202493: Fixing SRE parser to handle '{}' as perl does, rather than
 | |
|   considering it exactly like a '*'.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #1245379: Add "unicode-1-1-utf-7" as an alias for "utf-7" to
 | |
|   ``encodings.aliases``.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - ` uu.encode()`` and ``uu.decode()`` now support unicode filenames.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch #1413711: Certain patterns of differences were making difflib
 | |
|   touch the recursion limit.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #947906: An object oriented interface has been added to the calendar
 | |
|   module. It's possible to generate HTML calendar now and the module can be
 | |
|   called as a script (e.g. via ``python -mcalendar``). Localized month and
 | |
|   weekday names can be ouput (even if an exotic encoding is used) using
 | |
|   special classes that use unicode.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Build
 | |
| -----
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Fix test_float, test_long, and test_struct failures on Tru64 with gcc
 | |
|   by using -mieee gcc option.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch #1432345: Make python compile on DragonFly.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Build support for Win64-AMD64 was added.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch #1428494: Prefer linking against ncursesw over ncurses library.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch #881820: look for openpty and forkpty also in libbsd.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The sources of zlib are now part of the Python distribution (zlib 1.2.3).
 | |
|   The zlib module is now built in on Windows.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Use -xcode=pic32 for CCSHARED on Solaris with SunPro.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #1189330: configure did not correctly determine the necessary
 | |
|   value of LINKCC if python was built with GCC 4.0.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Upgrade Windows build to zlib 1.2.3 which eliminates a potential security
 | |
|   vulnerability in zlib 1.2.1 and 1.2.2.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - EXTRA_CFLAGS has been introduced as an environment variable to hold compiler
 | |
|   flags that change binary compatibility.  Changes were also made to
 | |
|   distutils.sysconfig to also use the environment variable when used during
 | |
|   compilation of the interpreter and of C extensions through distutils.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - SF patch 1171735: Darwin 8's headers are anal about POSIX compliance,
 | |
|   and linking has changed (prebinding is now deprecated, and libcc_dynamic
 | |
|   no longer exists). This configure patch makes things right.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #1158607: Build with --disable-unicode again.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - spwdmodule.c is built only if either HAVE_GETSPNAM or HAVE_HAVE_GETSPENT is
 | |
|   defined.  Discovered as a result of not being able to build on OS X.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - setup.py now uses the directories specified in LDFLAGS using the -L option
 | |
|   and in CPPFLAGS using the -I option for adding library and include
 | |
|   directories, respectively, for compiling extension modules against.  This has
 | |
|   led to the core being compiled using the values in CPPFLAGS.  It also removes
 | |
|   the need for the special-casing of both DarwinPorts and Fink for darwin since
 | |
|   the proper directories can be specified in LDFLAGS (``-L/sw/lib`` for Fink,
 | |
|   ``-L/opt/local/lib`` for DarwinPorts) and CPPFLAGS (``-I/sw/include`` for
 | |
|   Fink, ``-I/opt/local/include`` for DarwinPorts).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Test in configure.in that checks for tzset no longer dependent on tm->tm_zone
 | |
|   to exist in the struct (not required by either ISO C nor the UNIX 2 spec).
 | |
|   Tests for sanity in tzname when HAVE_TZNAME defined were also defined.
 | |
|   Closes bug #1096244.  Thanks Gregory Bond.
 | |
| 
 | |
| C API
 | |
| -----
 | |
| 
 | |
| - ``PyMem_{Del, DEL}`` and ``PyMem_{Free, FREE}`` no longer map to
 | |
|   ``PyObject_{Free, FREE}``.  They map to the system ``free()`` now.  If memory
 | |
|   is obtained via the ``PyObject_`` family, it must be released via the
 | |
|   ``PyObject_`` family, and likewise for the ``PyMem_`` family.  This has
 | |
|   always been officially true, but when Python's small-object allocator was
 | |
|   introduced, an attempt was made to cater to a few extension modules
 | |
|   discovered at the time that obtained memory via ``PyObject_New`` but
 | |
|   released it via ``PyMem_DEL``.  It's years later, and if such code still
 | |
|   exists it will fail now (probably with segfaults, but calling wrong
 | |
|   low-level memory management functions can yield many symptoms).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Added a C API for set and frozenset objects.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Removed PyRange_New().
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch #1313939: PyUnicode_DecodeCharmap() accepts a unicode string as the
 | |
|   mapping argument now. This string is used as a mapping table. Byte values
 | |
|   greater than the length of the string and 0xFFFE are treated as undefined
 | |
|   mappings.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| Tests
 | |
| -----
 | |
| 
 | |
| - In test_os, st_?time is now truncated before comparing it with ST_?TIME.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch #1276356: New resource "urlfetch" is implemented.  This enables
 | |
|   even impatient people to run tests that require remote files.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| Documentation
 | |
| -------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #1402224: Add warning to dl docs about crashes.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #1396471: Document that Windows' ftell() can return invalid
 | |
|   values for text files with UNIX-style line endings.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #1274828: Document os.path.splitunc().
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #1190204: Clarify which directories are searched by site.py.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #1193849: Clarify os.path.expanduser() documentation.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #1243192: re.UNICODE and re.LOCALE affect \d, \D, \s and \S.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #755617: Document the effects of os.chown() on Windows.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch #1180012: The documentation for modulefinder is now in the library reference.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch #1213031: Document that os.chown() accepts argument values of -1.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #1190563: Document os.waitpid() return value with WNOHANG flag.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #1175022: Correct the example code for property().
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Document the IterableUserDict class in the UserDict module.
 | |
|   Closes bug #1166582.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Remove all latent references for "Macintosh" that referred to semantics for
 | |
|   Mac OS 9 and change to reflect the state for OS X.
 | |
|   Closes patch #1095802.  Thanks Jack Jansen.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Mac
 | |
| ---
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| New platforms
 | |
| -------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - FreeBSD 7 support is added.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| Tools/Demos
 | |
| -----------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Created Misc/Vim/vim_syntax.py to auto-generate a python.vim file in that
 | |
|   directory for syntax highlighting in Vim.  Vim directory was added and placed
 | |
|   vimrc to it (was previous up a level).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Added two new files to Tools/scripts: pysource.py, which recursively
 | |
|   finds Python source files, and findnocoding.py, which finds Python
 | |
|   source files that need an encoding declaration.
 | |
|   Patch #784089, credits to Oleg Broytmann.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #1072853: pindent.py used an uninitialized variable.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch #1177597: Correct Complex.__init__.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Fixed a display glitch in Pynche, which could cause the right arrow to
 | |
|   wiggle over by a pixel.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| What's New in Python 2.4 final?
 | |
| ===============================
 | |
| 
 | |
| *Release date: 30-NOV-2004*
 | |
| 
 | |
| Core and builtins
 | |
| -----------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug 875692: Improve signal handling, especially when using threads, by
 | |
|   forcing an early re-execution of PyEval_EvalFrame() "periodic" code when
 | |
|   things_to_do is not cleared by Py_MakePendingCalls().
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| What's New in Python 2.4 (release candidate 1)
 | |
| ==============================================
 | |
| 
 | |
| *Release date: 18-NOV-2004*
 | |
| 
 | |
| Core and builtins
 | |
| -----------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug 1061968:  Fixes in 2.4a3 to address thread bug 1010677 reintroduced
 | |
|   the years-old thread shutdown race bug 225673.  Numeric history lesson
 | |
|   aside, all bugs in all three reports are fixed now.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| Library
 | |
| -------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug 1052242: If exceptions are raised by an atexit handler function an
 | |
|   attempt is made to execute the remaining handlers.  The last exception
 | |
|   raised is re-raised.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - ``doctest``'s new support for adding ``pdb.set_trace()`` calls to
 | |
|   doctests was broken in a dramatic but shallow way.  Fixed.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug 1065388:  ``calendar``'s ``day_name``, ``day_abbr``, ``month_name``,
 | |
|   and ``month_abbr`` attributes emulate sequences of locale-correct
 | |
|   spellings of month and day names.  Because the locale can change at
 | |
|   any time, the correct spelling is recomputed whenever one of these is
 | |
|   indexed.  In the worst case, the index may be a slice object, so these
 | |
|   recomputed every day or month name each time they were indexed.  This is
 | |
|   much slower than necessary in the usual case, when the index is just an
 | |
|   integer.  In that case, only the single spelling needed is recomputed
 | |
|   now; and, when the index is a slice object, only the spellings needed
 | |
|   by the slice are recomputed now.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch 1061679: Added ``__all__`` to pickletools.py.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Build
 | |
| -----
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug 1034277 / Patch 1035255: Remove compilation of core against CoreServices
 | |
|   and CoreFoundation on OS X.  Involved removing PyMac_GetAppletScriptFile()
 | |
|   which has no known users.  Thanks Bob Ippolito.
 | |
| 
 | |
| C API
 | |
| -----
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The PyRange_New() function is deprecated.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| What's New in Python 2.4 beta 2?
 | |
| ================================
 | |
| 
 | |
| *Release date: 03-NOV-2004*
 | |
| 
 | |
| License
 | |
| -------
 | |
| 
 | |
| The Python Software Foundation changed the license under which Python
 | |
| is released, to remove Python version numbers.  There were no other
 | |
| changes to the license.  So, for example, wherever the license for
 | |
| Python 2.3 said "Python 2.3", the new license says "Python".  The
 | |
| intent is to make it possible to refer to the PSF license in a more
 | |
| durable way.  For example, some people say they're confused by that
 | |
| the Open Source Initiative's entry for the Python Software Foundation
 | |
| License::
 | |
| 
 | |
|       http://www.opensource.org/licenses/PythonSoftFoundation.php
 | |
| 
 | |
| says "Python 2.1.1" all over it, wondering whether it applies only
 | |
| to Python 2.1.1.
 | |
| 
 | |
| The official name of the new license is the Python Software Foundation
 | |
| License Version 2.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Core and builtins
 | |
| -----------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #1055820 Cyclic garbage collection was not protecting against that
 | |
|   calling a live weakref to a piece of cyclic trash could resurrect an
 | |
|   insane mutation of the trash if any Python code ran during gc (via
 | |
|   running a dead object's __del__ method, running another callback on a
 | |
|   weakref to a dead object, or via any Python code run in any other thread
 | |
|   that managed to obtain the GIL while a __del__ or callback was running
 | |
|   in the thread doing gc).  The most likely symptom was "impossible"
 | |
|   ``AttributeError`` exceptions, appearing seemingly at random, on weakly
 | |
|   referenced objects.  The cure was to clear all weakrefs to unreachable
 | |
|   objects before allowing any callbacks to run.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #1054139 _PyString_Resize() now invalidates its cached hash value.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Extension Modules
 | |
| -----------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #1048870:  the compiler now generates distinct code objects for
 | |
|   functions with identical bodies.  This was producing confusing
 | |
|   traceback messages which pointed to the function where the code
 | |
|   object was first defined rather than the function being executed.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Library
 | |
| -------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch #1056967 changes the semantics of Template.safe_substitute() so that
 | |
|   no ValueError is raised on an 'invalid' match group.  Now the delimiter is
 | |
|   returned.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #1052503 pdb.runcall() was not passing along keyword arguments.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #902037: XML.sax.saxutils.prepare_input_source() now combines relative
 | |
|   paths with a base path before checking os.path.isfile().
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The whichdb module can now be run from the command line.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #1045381: time.strptime() can now infer the date using %U or %W (week of
 | |
|   the year) when the day of the week and year are also specified.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #1048816: fix bug in Ctrl-K at start of line in curses.textpad.Textbox
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #1017553: fix bug in tarfile.filemode()
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch #737473: fix bug that old source code is shown in tracebacks even if
 | |
|   the source code is updated and reloaded.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Build
 | |
| -----
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch #1044395: --enable-shared is allowed in FreeBSD also.
 | |
| 
 | |
| What's New in Python 2.4 beta 1?
 | |
| ================================
 | |
| 
 | |
| *Release date: 15-OCT-2004*
 | |
| 
 | |
| Core and builtins
 | |
| -----------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch #975056: Restartable signals were not correctly disabled on
 | |
|   BSD systems. Consistently use PyOS_setsig() instead of signal().
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The internal portable implementation of thread-local storage (TLS), used
 | |
|   by the ``PyGILState_Ensure()``/``PyGILState_Release()`` API, was not
 | |
|   thread-correct.  This could lead to a variety of problems, up to and
 | |
|   including segfaults.  See bug 1041645 for an example.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Added a command line option, -m module, which searches sys.path for the
 | |
|   module and then runs it.  (Contributed by Nick Coghlan.)
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The bytecode optimizer now folds tuples of constants into a single
 | |
|   constant.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - SF bug #513866:  Float/long comparison anomaly.  Prior to 2.4b1, when
 | |
|   an integer was compared to a float, the integer was coerced to a float.
 | |
|   That could yield spurious overflow errors (if the integer was very
 | |
|   large), and to anomalies such as
 | |
|   ``long(1e200)+1 == 1e200 == long(1e200)-1``.  Coercion to float is no
 | |
|   longer performed, and cases like ``long(1e200)-1 < 1e200``,
 | |
|   ``long(1e200)+1 > 1e200`` and ``(1 << 20000) > 1e200`` are computed
 | |
|   correctly now.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Extension modules
 | |
| -----------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - ``collections.deque`` objects didn't play quite right with garbage
 | |
|   collection, which could lead to a segfault in a release build, or
 | |
|   an assert failure in a debug build.  Also, added overflow checks,
 | |
|   better detection of mutation during iteration, and shielded deque
 | |
|   comparisons from unusual subclass overrides of the __iter__() method.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Library
 | |
| -------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch 1046644: distutils build_ext grew two new options - --swig for
 | |
|   specifying the swig executable to use, and --swig-opts to specify
 | |
|   options to pass to swig. --swig-opts="-c++" is the new way to spell
 | |
|   --swig-cpp.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch 983206: distutils now obeys environment variable LDSHARED, if
 | |
|   it is set.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Added Peter Astrand's subprocess.py module.  See PEP 324 for details.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - time.strptime() now properly escapes timezones and all other locale-specific
 | |
|   strings for regex-specific symbols.  Was breaking under Japanese Windows when
 | |
|   the timezone was specified as "Tokyo (standard time)".
 | |
|   Closes bug #1039270.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Updates for the email package:
 | |
| 
 | |
|   + email.Utils.formatdate() grew a 'usegmt' argument for HTTP support.
 | |
|   + All deprecated APIs that in email 2.x issued warnings have been removed:
 | |
|     _encoder argument to the MIMEText constructor, Message.add_payload(),
 | |
|     Utils.dump_address_pair(), Utils.decode(), Utils.encode()
 | |
|   + New deprecations: Generator.__call__(), Message.get_type(),
 | |
|     Message.get_main_type(), Message.get_subtype(), the 'strict' argument to
 | |
|     the Parser constructor.  These will be removed in email 3.1.
 | |
|   + Support for Python earlier than 2.3 has been removed (see PEP 291).
 | |
|   + All defect classes have been renamed to end in 'Defect'.
 | |
|   + Some FeedParser fixes; also a MultipartInvariantViolationDefect will be
 | |
|     added to messages that claim to be multipart but really aren't.
 | |
|   + Updates to documentation.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - re's findall() and finditer() functions now take an optional flags argument
 | |
|   just like the compile(), search(), and match() functions.  Also, documented
 | |
|   the previously existing start and stop parameters for the findall() and
 | |
|   finditer() methods of regular expression objects.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - rfc822 Messages now support iterating over the headers.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The (undocumented) tarfile.Tarfile.membernames has been removed;
 | |
|   applications should use the getmember function.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - httplib now offers symbolic constants for the HTTP status codes.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - SF bug #1028306:  Trying to compare a ``datetime.date`` to a
 | |
|   ``datetime.datetime`` mistakenly compared only the year, month and day.
 | |
|   Now it acts like a mixed-type comparison:  ``False`` for ``==``,
 | |
|   ``True`` for ``!=``, and raises ``TypeError`` for other comparison
 | |
|   operators.  Because datetime is a subclass of date, comparing only the
 | |
|   base class (date) members can still be done, if that's desired, by
 | |
|   forcing using of the approprate date method; e.g.,
 | |
|   ``a_date.__eq__(a_datetime)`` is true if and only if the year, month
 | |
|   and day members of ``a_date`` and ``a_datetime`` are equal.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - bdist_rpm now supports command line options --force-arch,
 | |
|   {pre,post}-install,  {pre,post}-uninstall, and
 | |
|   {prep,build,install,clean,verify}-script.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - SF patch #998993: The UTF-8 and the UTF-16 stateful decoders now support
 | |
|   decoding incomplete input (when the input stream is temporarily exhausted).
 | |
|   ``codecs.StreamReader`` now implements buffering, which enables proper
 | |
|   readline support for the UTF-16 decoders. ``codecs.StreamReader.read()``
 | |
|   has a new argument ``chars`` which specifies the number of characters to
 | |
|   return. ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` and
 | |
|   ``codecs.StreamReader.readlines()`` have a new argument ``keepends``.
 | |
|   Trailing "\n"s will be stripped from the lines if ``keepends`` is false.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The documentation for doctest is greatly expanded, and now covers all
 | |
|   the new public features (of which there are many).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - ``doctest.master`` was put back in, and ``doctest.testmod()`` once again
 | |
|   updates it.  This isn't good, because every ``testmod()`` call
 | |
|   contributes to bloating the "hidden" state of ``doctest.master``, but
 | |
|   some old code apparently relies on it.  For now, all we can do is
 | |
|   encourage people to stitch doctests together via doctest's unittest
 | |
|   integration features instead.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - httplib now handles ipv6 address/port pairs.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - SF bug #1017864: ConfigParser now correctly handles default keys,
 | |
|   processing them with ``ConfigParser.optionxform`` when supplied,
 | |
|   consistent with the handling of config file entries and runtime-set
 | |
|   options.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - SF bug #997050: Document, test, & check for non-string values in
 | |
|   ConfigParser.  Moved the new string-only restriction added in
 | |
|   rev. 1.65 to the SafeConfigParser class, leaving existing
 | |
|   ConfigParser & RawConfigParser behavior alone, and documented the
 | |
|   conditions under which non-string values work.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Build
 | |
| -----
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Building on darwin now includes /opt/local/include and /opt/local/lib for
 | |
|   building extension modules.  This is so as to include software installed as
 | |
|   a DarwinPorts port <http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/>
 | |
| 
 | |
| - pyport.h now defines a Py_IS_NAN macro.  It works as-is when the
 | |
|   platform C computes true for ``x != x`` if and only if X is a NaN.
 | |
|   Other platforms can override the default definition with a platform-
 | |
|   specific spelling in that platform's pyconfig.h.  You can also override
 | |
|   pyport.h's default Py_IS_INFINITY definition now.
 | |
| 
 | |
| C API
 | |
| -----
 | |
| 
 | |
| - SF patch 1044089:  New function ``PyEval_ThreadsInitialized()`` returns
 | |
|   non-zero if PyEval_InitThreads() has been called.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The undocumented and unused extern int ``_PyThread_Started`` was removed.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The C API calls ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
 | |
|   are two of the very few advertised as being safe to call without holding
 | |
|   the GIL.  However, this wasn't true in a debug build, as bug 1041645
 | |
|   demonstrated.  In a debug build, Python redirects the ``PyMem`` family
 | |
|   of calls to Python's small-object allocator, to get the benefit of
 | |
|   its extra debugging capabilities.  But Python's small-object allocator
 | |
|   isn't threadsafe, relying on the GIL to avoid the expense of doing its
 | |
|   own locking.  ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
 | |
|   call the platform ``malloc()`` directly now, regardless of build type.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - PyLong_AsUnsignedLong[Mask] now support int objects as well.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - SF patch #998993: ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF8Stateful`` and
 | |
|   ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF16Stateful`` have been added, which implement stateful
 | |
|   decoding.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Tests
 | |
| -----
 | |
| 
 | |
| - test__locale ported to unittest
 | |
| 
 | |
| Mac
 | |
| ---
 | |
| 
 | |
| - ``plistlib`` now supports non-dict root objects.  There is also a new
 | |
|   interface for reading and writing plist files: ``readPlist(pathOrFile)``
 | |
|   and ``writePlist(rootObject, pathOrFile)``
 | |
| 
 | |
| Tools/Demos
 | |
| -----------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The text file comparison scripts ``ndiff.py`` and ``diff.py`` now
 | |
|   read the input files in universal-newline mode.  This spares them
 | |
|   from consuming a great deal of time to deduce the useless result that,
 | |
|   e.g., a file with Windows line ends and a file with Linux line ends
 | |
|   have no lines in common.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
 | |
| =================================
 | |
| 
 | |
| *Release date: 02-SEP-2004*
 | |
| 
 | |
| Core and builtins
 | |
| -----------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - SF patch #1007189: ``from ... import ...`` statements now allow the name
 | |
|   list to be surrounded by parentheses.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Some speedups for long arithmetic, thanks to Trevor Perrin.  Gradeschool
 | |
|   multiplication was sped a little by optimizing the C code.  Gradeschool
 | |
|   squaring was sped by about a factor of 2, by exploiting that about half
 | |
|   the digit products are duplicates in a square.  Because exponentiation
 | |
|   uses squaring often, this also speeds long power.  For example, the time
 | |
|   to compute 17**1000000 dropped from about 14 seconds to 9 on my box due
 | |
|   to this much.  The cutoff for Karatsuba multiplication was raised,
 | |
|   since gradeschool multiplication got quicker, and the cutoff was
 | |
|   aggressively small regardless.  The exponentiation algorithm was switched
 | |
|   from right-to-left to left-to-right, which is more efficient for small
 | |
|   bases.  In addition, if the exponent is large, the algorithm now does
 | |
|   5 bits (instead of 1 bit) at a time.  That cut the time to compute
 | |
|   17**1000000 on my box in half again, down to about 4.5 seconds.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - OverflowWarning is no longer generated.  PEP 237 scheduled this to
 | |
|   occur in Python 2.3, but since OverflowWarning was disabled by default,
 | |
|   nobody realized it was still being generated.  On the chance that user
 | |
|   code is still using them, the Python builtin OverflowWarning, and
 | |
|   corresponding C API PyExc_OverflowWarning, will exist until Python 2.5.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Py_InitializeEx has been added.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Fix the order of application of decorators.  The proper order is bottom-up;
 | |
|   the first decorator listed is the last one called.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - SF patch #1005778.  Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
 | |
|   calling list.index().  This could happen if a rich comparison function
 | |
|   modified the list.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
 | |
|   functions is now writable.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
 | |
|   carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
 | |
|   to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall().  It is still the case
 | |
|   that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Subclasses of string can no longer be interned.  The semantics of
 | |
|   interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
 | |
|   example -- and had bugs.  Explicitly interning a subclass of string
 | |
|   via intern() will raise a TypeError.  Internal operations that attempt
 | |
|   to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug 1003935:  xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors.  Documented
 | |
|   what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Extension modules
 | |
| -----------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - difflib now supports HTML side-by-side diff.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - os.urandom has been added for systems that support sources of random
 | |
|   data.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch 1012740:  truncate() on a writable cStringIO now resets the
 | |
|   position to the end of the stream.  This is consistent with the original
 | |
|   StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was
 | |
|   supposed to have been truncated away.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Added socket.socketpair().
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Added CurrentByteIndex, CurrentColumnNumber, CurrentLineNumber
 | |
|   members to xml.parsers.expat.XMLParser object.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The mpz, rotor, and xreadlines modules, all deprecated in earlier
 | |
|   versions of Python, have now been removed.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Library
 | |
| -------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch #934356: if a module defines __all__, believe that rather than using
 | |
|   heuristics for filtering out imported names.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch #941486: added os.path.lexists(), which returns True for broken
 | |
|   symlinks, unlike os.path.exists().
 | |
| 
 | |
| - the random module now uses os.urandom() for seeding if it is available.
 | |
|   Added a new generator based on os.urandom().
 | |
| 
 | |
| - difflib and diff.py can now generate HTML.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - bdist_rpm now includes version and release in the BuildRoot, and
 | |
|   replaces - by ``_`` in version and release.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - distutils build/build_scripts now has an -e option to specify the
 | |
|   path to the Python interpreter for installed scripts.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - PEP 292 classes Template and SafeTemplate are added to the string module.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
 | |
|   Percivall.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
 | |
|   the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
 | |
|   font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
 | |
|   which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
 | |
|   than creating a new one.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
 | |
|   latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
 | |
|   Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
 | |
|   and exponent.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module.  The sys.exitfunc
 | |
|   attribute will be kept around for backwards compatibility and atexit
 | |
|   will just become the one preferred way to do it.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
 | |
|   to the readline module.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
 | |
|   of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
 | |
|   frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
 | |
|   path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
 | |
|   contains symlinks.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
 | |
|   file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
 | |
|   so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
 | |
|   reached through a symlink.  Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - doctest refactoring continued.  See the docs for details.  As part of
 | |
|   this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
 | |
|   deprecated:  the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
 | |
|   isprivate argument to testmod().  The Tester class supplied a feeble
 | |
|   "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
 | |
|   you were doing.  The newer doctest features for unittest integration
 | |
|   already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
 | |
|   new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
 | |
|   hand.  The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
 | |
|   start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default.  If
 | |
|   you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
 | |
|   to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
 | |
|   any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
 | |
| 
 | |
| Tools/Demos
 | |
| -----------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
 | |
|   Control-V works the same as Control-v.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Build
 | |
| -----
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Backward incompatibility:  longintrepr.h now triggers a compile-time
 | |
|   error if SHIFT (the number of bits in a Python long "digit") isn't
 | |
|   divisible by 5.  This new requirement allows simple code for the new
 | |
|   5-bits-at-a-time long_pow() implementation.  If necessary, the
 | |
|   restriction could be removed (by complicating long_pow(), or by
 | |
|   falling back to the 1-bit-at-a-time algorithm), but there are no
 | |
|   plans to do so.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - bug #991962: When building with --disable-toolbox-glue on Darwin no
 | |
|   attempt to build Mac-specific modules occurs.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
 | |
|   processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
 | |
|   GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
 | |
|   GNU/k*BSD systems.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings
 | |
|   found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64.
 | |
| 
 | |
| C API
 | |
| -----
 | |
| 
 | |
| ..
 | |
| 
 | |
| Documentation
 | |
| -------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - patch #1005936, bug #1009373: fix index entries which contain
 | |
|   an underscore when viewed with Acrobat.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if
 | |
|   it contains symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment
 | |
|   since 1992, but is now in the library reference as well.
 | |
| 
 | |
| New platforms
 | |
| -------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - FreeBSD 6 is now supported.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Tests
 | |
| -----
 | |
| 
 | |
| ..
 | |
| 
 | |
| Windows
 | |
| -------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
 | |
|   the default 1MB to 2MB.  Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
 | |
|   bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
 | |
|   within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
 | |
|   able to suffer undetected C stack overflows.  The standard test program
 | |
|   test_compiler was one such program.  If a Python process on Windows
 | |
|   "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
 | |
|   kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
 | |
|   the problem.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Mac
 | |
| ---
 | |
| 
 | |
| ..
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
 | |
| =================================
 | |
| 
 | |
| *Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
 | |
| 
 | |
| Core and builtins
 | |
| -----------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch #980695:  Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
 | |
|   of the form s=s+t and s+=t.  This will vary across implementations.
 | |
|   Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
 | |
|   sensitive code.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
 | |
|   implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so::
 | |
| 
 | |
|      @staticmethod
 | |
|      def foo(bar):
 | |
| 
 | |
|   (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
 | |
| 
 | |
| - When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
 | |
|   in sys.modules.  Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
 | |
|   succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
 | |
|   of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
 | |
|   Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
 | |
|   initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
 | |
|   trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
 | |
|   arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent).  Now subsequent
 | |
|   imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
 | |
|   source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
 | |
|   attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
 | |
| 
 | |
|   This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
 | |
|   working before by accident.  In the Python source, the only case of
 | |
|   breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
 | |
|   module remaining in sys.modules.  Cases are also known where tests
 | |
|   deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
 | |
|   sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
 | |
|   unconditional del sys.modules[M].
 | |
| 
 | |
| - u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
 | |
|   obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords().  Analogous to
 | |
|   PyArg_VaParse().  Both are now documented.  Thanks Greg Chapman.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
 | |
|   methods on string and unicode objects.  Added unicode.decode()
 | |
|   which was missing for no apparent reason.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
 | |
|   signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
 | |
|   It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
 | |
|   types that support garbage collection.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Compiler now treats None as a constant.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
 | |
|   __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked.  Returning an invalid type
 | |
|   will cause a TypeError to be raised.  This matches the behavior of
 | |
|   Jython.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs.  str.split
 | |
|   and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
 | |
|   the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
 | |
|   module.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
 | |
|   now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore.  This
 | |
|   allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Extension modules
 | |
| -----------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Library
 | |
| -------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
 | |
|   TIS-620
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
 | |
|   many new features were added.  Full docs will appear later.  For now
 | |
|   the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
 | |
|   The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
 | |
|   (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
 | |
|   output).  New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
 | |
|   output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
 | |
|   diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
 | |
|   normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
 | |
|   ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
 | |
|   and localtime().  If None is provided, the current time is used (the
 | |
|   same as when the argument is omitted).
 | |
|   [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
 | |
| 
 | |
| - nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
 | |
|   schemes are offered.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #1001053.  wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
 | |
|   underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method).  This is
 | |
|   needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
 | |
|   use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #993394.  Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
 | |
|   raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
 | |
|   when dummy_threading is being used.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #857297/Patch #916874.  Fix an error when extracting a hard link
 | |
|   from a tarfile.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch #846659.  Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
 | |
|   GNU longname/longlink creation.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted.  The built-in fcntl module
 | |
|   has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
 | |
|   1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
 | |
|   a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
 | |
|   iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #788520.  Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
 | |
|   implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
 | |
|   Queue was introduced).  A minor semantic change is that the Full and
 | |
|   Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
 | |
|   queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
 | |
|   course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
 | |
|   thread sees those exceptions, though).  Before, the exceptions could
 | |
|   also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
 | |
|   to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
 | |
|   by some other method in progress).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
 | |
|   case of comparing two empty lists.  This affected both context_diff() and
 | |
|   unified_diff(),
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
 | |
|   returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop.  Thanks
 | |
|   AM Kuchling.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
 | |
|   drive letter and the rest of the path.  Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
 | |
|   as well.  Thanks Paul Moore.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB.  The packed data
 | |
|   for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
 | |
|   instead of unsigned.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec.  The other conditions are
 | |
|   no longer part of the public API.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
 | |
|   which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
 | |
|   string methods of the same name).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
 | |
|   SF patch 945642.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - doctest unittest integration improvements:
 | |
| 
 | |
|   o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
 | |
| 
 | |
|   o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
 | |
|     DocTestSuites.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
 | |
|   that provide thread-local data.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
 | |
|   no longer returns spurious empty fields.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
 | |
|   which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
 | |
|   as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
 | |
| 
 | |
| - optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1.  Changes:
 | |
| 
 | |
|   - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
 | |
|     "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
 | |
|     that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
 | |
| 
 | |
|   - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
 | |
|     now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
 | |
|     allows generation of nicer help when using custom types.  Can
 | |
|     be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
 | |
| 
 | |
|   - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
 | |
|     options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
 | |
| 
 | |
|   - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
 | |
|     that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
 | |
|     set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
 | |
|     HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
 | |
| 
 | |
|   - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
 | |
|     targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext().  (If
 | |
|     you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
 | |
|     -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
 | |
|     http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
 | |
| 
 | |
|   - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
 | |
|     wrapping help output.
 | |
| 
 | |
|   - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
 | |
|     to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
 | |
|     (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
 | |
| 
 | |
| C API
 | |
| -----
 | |
| 
 | |
| - PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx():  if an
 | |
|   error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
 | |
|   entry from sys.modules.  All ways of loading modules eventually call
 | |
|   one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
 | |
|   ways of loading modules.  In rare cases, a module loader may wish
 | |
|   to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
 | |
|   code cannot be executed.  In such cases, the module loader must
 | |
|   arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
 | |
|   PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
 | |
|   module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
 | |
|   its visible semantics have not changed.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
 | |
|   thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
 | |
| 
 | |
| Documentation
 | |
| -------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
 | |
| 
 | |
|   - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
 | |
|     assigning their values
 | |
| 
 | |
|   - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
 | |
| 
 | |
|   - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Tests
 | |
| -----
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
 | |
|   platforms that use the Makefile.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - SF patch 995225:  The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
 | |
|   CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
 | |
|   test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
 | |
| =================================
 | |
| 
 | |
| *Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
 | |
| 
 | |
| Core and builtins
 | |
| -----------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
 | |
|   weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
 | |
|   class.  There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
 | |
|   objects now (one object instead of three).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
 | |
|   Windows DLLs.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #215126.  The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
 | |
|   accept any mapping type.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
 | |
|   a new .pyc magic.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
 | |
|   have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
 | |
|   be there.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
 | |
|   the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
 | |
|   the LC_NUMERIC category.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #952807:  Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
 | |
|   datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
 | |
|   objects.  Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
 | |
|   These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
 | |
|   TR11.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
 | |
|   common cases.  Fixes bug  #942952.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289).  Coded by Jiwon Seo.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
 | |
|   new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
 | |
|   "a,b,c=1,2,3".  Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
 | |
|   and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
 | |
|   Fixes bug  #858016 .
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
 | |
|   and having them reveal their length.  Also optimized the
 | |
|   methods:  keys(), values(), and items().
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
 | |
|   the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
 | |
|   improves their performance (about 35%).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
 | |
|   comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
 | |
|   underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
 | |
|   intermediate sequences.  Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
 | |
|   needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
 | |
|   advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
 | |
|   realloc().  Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
 | |
|   list comprehensions, and the list constructor (when the input iterable
 | |
|   length is not known).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme.  For larger lists,
 | |
|   overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%.  Now, it is a constant 12%.
 | |
|   For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements.  Now,
 | |
|   the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
 | |
|   utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed.  Speeds up list
 | |
|   instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
 | |
|   as the dict() constructor.  This now includes item lists and/or
 | |
|   keyword arguments.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
 | |
|   interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
 | |
|   only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
 | |
|   weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
 | |
|   cases.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
 | |
|   assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
 | |
|   would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object.  Since
 | |
|   GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
 | |
|   invalid.  In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
 | |
|   creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
 | |
|   has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
 | |
|   cyclic trash, a memory error can occur.  This consistently created a
 | |
|   segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
 | |
|   a release build.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - input() built-in function now respects compiler flags such as
 | |
|   __future__ statements.  SF patch 876178.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply().  apply() remains
 | |
|   deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
 | |
|   collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules.  The
 | |
|   call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
 | |
|   of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
 | |
|   callbacks to execute sanely.  The most common symptom was a sequence
 | |
|   of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
 | |
|   by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
 | |
|   of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
 | |
|   destroyed.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
 | |
|   and left shifts.  (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
 | |
|   This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
 | |
|   PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
 | |
|   'L'.  The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
 | |
|   changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
 | |
|   implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
 | |
|   hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
 | |
|   methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
 | |
|   character other than a space.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
 | |
|   by the function object or by the method object, the function
 | |
|   object's attribute usually wins.  Christian Tismer pointed out that
 | |
|   that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
 | |
|   methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
 | |
|   really more appropriate than the function's attribute.  So from now
 | |
|   on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
 | |
|   attributes with the same name.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548:  if a weakref with a callback,
 | |
|   its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
 | |
|   cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
 | |
|   in which they were torn down was unpredictable.  It was possible for
 | |
|   the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
 | |
|   segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
 | |
|   resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
 | |
|   later.  In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
 | |
|   had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects.  It does now.  When
 | |
|   weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
 | |
|   weakrefs are cleared first.  The callbacks don't trigger then,
 | |
|   preventing the problems.  If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
 | |
|   as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
 | |
|   that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829:  if cyclic garbage collection
 | |
|   happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
 | |
|   instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
 | |
|   in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
 | |
|   This has been repaired.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Added two built-in types, set() and frozenset().
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Added a reversed() built-in function that returns a reverse iterator
 | |
|   over a sequence.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Added a sorted() built-in function that returns a new sorted list
 | |
|   from any iterable.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments:  cmp, key, and reverse.
 | |
|   The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
 | |
|   comparison key from the original record:  mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
 | |
|   The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
 | |
|   sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed.  In addition,
 | |
|   the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
 | |
|   starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
 | |
|   records with equal keys is unchanged).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
 | |
|   usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
 | |
|   unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
 | |
|   lead to a seg fault.  The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
 | |
|   non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
 | |
|   freelist.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
 | |
|   '%f'.  This has always been documented but never implemented.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
 | |
|   number.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
 | |
|   a TypeError exception.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0.  SF patch
 | |
|   820195.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
 | |
|   When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
 | |
|   will now just hit the recursion limit.  See SF patch 825639.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - str and unicode built-in types now have an rsplit() method that is
 | |
|   same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
 | |
|   working towards the beginning.  See SF feature request 801847.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2.  Failure
 | |
|   to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
 | |
|   fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
 | |
|   the data and the data length.  Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
 | |
|   method is called as necessary.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
 | |
|   close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
 | |
|   the first call.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| Extension modules
 | |
| -----------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
 | |
|   getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
 | |
|   ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
 | |
|   timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type.  There's no chance
 | |
|   that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
 | |
|   cases.  This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime().  Assorted
 | |
|   fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
 | |
|   were also protected.  Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
 | |
| 
 | |
| - the weakref module now supports additional objects:  array.array,
 | |
|   sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
 | |
|   fewer false positives.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error .  Also added
 | |
|   socket.error to the socket module's C API.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
 | |
|   nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - array objects now support the copy module.  Also, their resizing
 | |
|   scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects.  This improves
 | |
|   the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
 | |
|   Also, array.array() and array.extend() now accept any iterable argument
 | |
|   for repeated appends without needing to create another temporary array.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
 | |
|   the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
 | |
|   Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines().  Saves memory and
 | |
|   makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
 | |
|   are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
 | |
|   platform's C library implementation of strftime().  Can possibly
 | |
|   break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
 | |
|   problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0).  Fixes bug
 | |
|   #897625.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
 | |
|   system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
 | |
|   offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
 | |
|   and pops on either side of the deque.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
 | |
|   improved performance:  Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
 | |
|   itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
 | |
|   functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
 | |
|   other functions that expect a function argument.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - os.getsid was added.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
 | |
|   struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd.  (The old name
 | |
|   is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - readline.clear_history was added.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - curses module now supports use_default_colors().  [patch #739124]
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
 | |
|   seed.  Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
 | |
|   that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
 | |
|   with k random bits.  This method is now an optional part of the API
 | |
|   for user defined generators.  Any generator that defines genrandbits()
 | |
|   can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53.  Formerly,
 | |
|   randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
 | |
|   SF bug #812202).  Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
 | |
|   issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
 | |
|   into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
 | |
|   It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
 | |
|   the Unix uniq filter.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
 | |
|   iterators from a single iterable.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
 | |
|   of raising a TypeError exception.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
 | |
|   as parameter.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Library
 | |
| -------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Added a new module: cProfile, a C profiler with the same interface as the
 | |
|   profile module.  cProfile avoids some of the drawbacks of the hotshot
 | |
|   profiler and provides a bit more information than the other two profilers.
 | |
|   Based on "lsprof" (patch #1212837).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #1266283: The new function "lexists" is now in os.path.__all__.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree().  This affects
 | |
|   the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
 | |
|   handler can now also be os.listdir.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
 | |
|   interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
 | |
|   original exception.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
 | |
|   "netloc" portion of a URL.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
 | |
|   Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive.  Thanks Robin Becker.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #823209:  cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
 | |
|   API matches math.log().
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
 | |
|   that generate a -debuginfo.rpm
 | |
| 
 | |
| - os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
 | |
|   on cygwin and mingw32.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - refactored site.py into functions.  Also wrote regression tests for the
 | |
|   module.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
 | |
|   installation scheme for all platforms.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
 | |
|   looping forever.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
 | |
|   addition to CVS and RCS directories.  .svn directories hold
 | |
|   administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Added a new module: cookielib.  Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
 | |
|   clients.  Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
 | |
|   urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
 | |
|   Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
 | |
|   for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
 | |
|   type pattern with the same value exists.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
 | |
|   when run from the command prompt).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
 | |
|   not taken into consideration when caching value.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
 | |
|   default sort).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Added global runctx function to profile module
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
 | |
|   first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
 | |
|   This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
 | |
|   packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
 | |
|   package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
 | |
|   accordingly.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
 | |
|   decoding standards.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - urllib2 now supports processors.  A processor is a handler that
 | |
|   implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method.  These methods are
 | |
|   called for all requests.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
 | |
|   they are passed to the compiler.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
 | |
|   indent, width and depth.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
 | |
|   and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
 | |
|   compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
 | |
| 
 | |
| - imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
 | |
|   os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
 | |
|   for better performance.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
 | |
| 
 | |
| - traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
 | |
|   a string).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
 | |
|   optional.  If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
 | |
|   list of fieldnames.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
 | |
|   using "a long string".encode('bz2')
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
 | |
|   empty lists.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
 | |
|   mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
 | |
|   and shelves.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
 | |
|   arguments.  This was an omission in the initial implementation.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
 | |
|   CHARSET fields better.  It also includes a patch to parameter
 | |
|   parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - sets.py now runs under Py2.2.  In addition, the argument restrictions
 | |
|   for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
 | |
|   allow any iterable.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
 | |
|   recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
 | |
|   patterns.  The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
 | |
|   and removed in Py2.4.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Tools/Demos
 | |
| -----------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
 | |
|   makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
 | |
|   It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile.  This provides better symmetry with
 | |
|   db2pickle.  The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
 | |
|   destination in situations where both files are given.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
 | |
|   modules determined to be part of the core distribution.  The documentation
 | |
|   base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
 | |
|   be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
 | |
|   silent and dangerous change from previous releases.  It once again
 | |
|   opens input files in binary mode by default.  The -t and -b flags
 | |
|   remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
 | |
|   now.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
 | |
|   in effect
 | |
| 
 | |
| - py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
 | |
|   C-c C-h
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
 | |
|   -d option was given.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Build
 | |
| -----
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
 | |
|   build under OS X.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
 | |
|   --enable-profiling.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
 | |
|   is configured --with-tsc.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
 | |
|   on AMD64.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
 | |
|   getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
 | |
|   removed.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
 | |
|   supported (see PEP 11).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
 | |
|   (see PEP 11).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
 | |
|   sizeof(char) must be 1.
 | |
| 
 | |
| C API
 | |
| -----
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
 | |
|   containing type-check macros and constructors.  See new docs in the
 | |
|   Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
 | |
|   timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
 | |
|   checking.  Declared in new header file timefuncs.h.  It would be
 | |
|   good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
 | |
|   generator objects.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
 | |
|   functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
 | |
|   runtime dynamic embedding of Python.  See patch #938302, by Bob
 | |
|   Ippolito.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
 | |
|   underlying array of PyObject pointers.  Useful for high speed looping.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
 | |
|   even if already defined by a slot wrapper.  This allows a __contains__
 | |
|   method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot.  This
 | |
|   is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
 | |
|   whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
 | |
|   PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
 | |
|   about 10% faster.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
 | |
|   Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
 | |
|   variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
 | |
|   the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue().  PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
 | |
|   is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
 | |
| 
 | |
| Windows
 | |
| -------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
 | |
|   values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056).  The fix is
 | |
|   uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
 | |
|   as appropriate, followed by a size check.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
 | |
|   (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
 | |
|   the truncate() call was an input operation.  SF bug 801631.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| What's New in Python 2.3 final?
 | |
| ===============================
 | |
| 
 | |
| *Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
 | |
| 
 | |
| IDLE
 | |
| ----
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug 778400:  IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
 | |
|   This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
 | |
|   the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
 | |
|   context-menu actions.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - IDLE displays a new message upon startup:  some "personal firewall"
 | |
|   kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
 | |
|   own when any program opens a socket.  IDLE does use sockets, talking
 | |
|   on the computer's internal loopback interface.  This connection is not
 | |
|   visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
 | |
|   from the Internet.  So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
 | |
|   asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
 | |
|   and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
 | |
|   place.  If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
 | |
| =============================================
 | |
| 
 | |
| *Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
 | |
| 
 | |
| Core and builtins
 | |
| -----------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
 | |
|   data bytes before the zip compatible archive.  Zipfiles containing a
 | |
|   comment at the end are still unsupported.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Extension modules
 | |
| -----------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
 | |
|   fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
 | |
|   than once.  This has been fixed.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
 | |
|   with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
 | |
|   caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
 | |
|   call.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Library
 | |
| -------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
 | |
|   uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
 | |
|   fix a locale related bug in the test suite.  Although another patch
 | |
|   was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
 | |
|   restored.
 | |
| 
 | |
| IDLE
 | |
| ----
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Calltips patches.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Build
 | |
| -----
 | |
| 
 | |
| - For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
 | |
|   on Panther (OSX 10.3).
 | |
| 
 | |
| C API
 | |
| -----
 | |
| 
 | |
| Windows
 | |
| -------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
 | |
|   was set, making temp file creation impossible.  Repaired.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Mac
 | |
| ---
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Various fixes to pimp.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
 | |
|   more problems than it solves.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
 | |
| =============================================
 | |
| 
 | |
| *Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
 | |
| 
 | |
| Core and builtins
 | |
| -----------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
 | |
|   by sys.setcheckinterval().
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
 | |
|   fixed.  Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
 | |
|   reporting an error.  SF patch 763201.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
 | |
|   module.  In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
 | |
|   earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
 | |
|   not be found on the file system.  Fixes SF bug 771097.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
 | |
|   builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - It is not possible to create subclasses of built-in types like str
 | |
|   and tuple that define an itemsize.  Earlier releases of Python 2.3
 | |
|   allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build.  SF bug
 | |
|   770247.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Extension modules
 | |
| -----------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
 | |
|   defining __delitem__.  Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
 | |
|   contained within the _strptime module.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
 | |
|   not consistent with the object's repr slot.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
 | |
|   character or block devices.  SF patch 708374.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
 | |
|   the find_class attribute, if present.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
 | |
| 
 | |
|   bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
 | |
|   (SF bug 763298).
 | |
| 
 | |
|   The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
 | |
|   a level instead of a boolean flag.  The new level 2 means that in
 | |
|   addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
 | |
|   an exception.
 | |
| 
 | |
|   A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Library
 | |
| -------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
 | |
| 
 | |
| - doctest now examines all docstrings by default.  Previously, it would
 | |
|   skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
 | |
|   naming convention).  The old default created too much of a risk that
 | |
|   user tests were being skipped inadvertently.  Note, this change could
 | |
|   break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
 | |
|   failing tests in the docstrings of private functions.  The breakage
 | |
|   is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
 | |
|   or Tester().
 | |
| 
 | |
| - There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed.  It's vital
 | |
|   that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
 | |
|   and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
 | |
|   dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
 | |
|   database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
 | |
|   prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
 | |
|   get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised.  The race
 | |
|   has been repaired.  A sync() method was also added so that shelve
 | |
|   can guarantee data is written to disk.
 | |
| 
 | |
|   The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes.  That they
 | |
|   weren't before was an oversight.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
 | |
|   auth_header.  The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
 | |
|   when there are no lines.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
 | |
|   which could occur with Tk 8.4
 | |
| 
 | |
| - SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
 | |
|   to child processes.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
 | |
|   xmlrpclib.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
 | |
|   responses.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
 | |
|   generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
 | |
|   -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
 | |
|   is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
 | |
|   used as patterns.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
 | |
|   of varying sizes.  Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
 | |
|   than Tk 8.3.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Tools/Demos
 | |
| -----------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The trace.py script has been removed.  It is now in the standard library.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Build
 | |
| -----
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
 | |
|   patch 764560).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
 | |
|   __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined.  configure now defines it as
 | |
|   needed.
 | |
| 
 | |
| C API
 | |
| -----
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
 | |
|   API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Windows
 | |
| -------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
 | |
|   checked error returns from Windows functions correctly.  As a result,
 | |
|   it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
 | |
|   _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
 | |
|   on the order of thousands when it happens).  In these cases, the
 | |
|   Python exception ::
 | |
| 
 | |
|       thread.error: can't start new thread
 | |
| 
 | |
|   is raised now.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
 | |
|   use.  The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
 | |
|   instead of from DLL teardown.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Mac
 | |
| ---
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way.  It was
 | |
|   previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
 | |
|   of "APPL."  Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
 | |
|   specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
 | |
|   the executable in the bundle.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
 | |
|   on Panther.
 | |
| 
 | |
| What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
 | |
| ================================
 | |
| 
 | |
| *Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
 | |
| 
 | |
| Core and builtins
 | |
| -----------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
 | |
|   string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
 | |
|   interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
 | |
|   with the -i option.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments.  Similar
 | |
|   changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
 | |
|   for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys".  This
 | |
|   wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
 | |
|   instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
 | |
|   thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
 | |
|   mutated it.  It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
 | |
|   present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
 | |
|   referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
 | |
|   invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
 | |
|   set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
 | |
|   the search to those keys with the same hash code.  All of these are
 | |
|   considered to be bugs.  A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
 | |
|   that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
 | |
|   code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
 | |
|   compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
 | |
|   embedded in a lambda expression.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - SF bug 705231:  builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
 | |
|   raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
 | |
|   in some cases.  The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
 | |
|   if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
 | |
|   is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
 | |
|   return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method.  This
 | |
|   matches the restriction on classic classes.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
 | |
|   the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
 | |
|   It's writable again.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
 | |
|   tuple.  By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
 | |
|   instead of going through __getitem__.  If __getitem__ access is
 | |
|   preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
 | |
|   garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
 | |
|   occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Extension modules
 | |
| -----------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
 | |
|   timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
 | |
|   user code.  In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
 | |
|   exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
 | |
|   specific exceptions like AttributeError.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
 | |
|   collection.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
 | |
|   especially likely on Windows.  The strings returned are now guaranteed
 | |
|   unique within a single program run.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
 | |
|   dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
 | |
|   to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
 | |
|   properly subclassable.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
 | |
|   Fixes SF bug #730685.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
 | |
|   /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2.  This is true
 | |
|   for many BSD-derived systems.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| Library
 | |
| -------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
 | |
|   doctest.py.  These are already being used in Zope3.  The two
 | |
|   primary ones:
 | |
| 
 | |
|   doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
 | |
|   in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
 | |
|   on that file.  This is great when a doctest fails.
 | |
| 
 | |
|   doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
 | |
|   TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
 | |
|   runs all the doctests in the module.  This allows writing tests in
 | |
|   doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
 | |
|   in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
 | |
|   framework features (which doctest lacks).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
 | |
|   output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
 | |
|   consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
 | |
|   for "0" and "False".  This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
 | |
|   The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
 | |
|   constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
 | |
|   argument.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions.  Previously,
 | |
|   a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
 | |
|   in the archive.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
 | |
|   LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
 | |
|   569574).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
 | |
|   SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib.  The old Tools/idle is
 | |
|   no more.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Added a new module: trace (documentation missing).  This module used
 | |
|   to be distributed in Tools/scripts.  It uses sys.settrace() to trace
 | |
|   code execution -- either function calls or individual lines.  It can
 | |
|   generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
 | |
|   code coverage.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
 | |
|   that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
 | |
|   module.  A function registered with the threading module will
 | |
|   be used for all threads it creates.  The new trace module uses this
 | |
|   to provide tracing for code running in threads.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
 | |
|   Taschuk.  Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
 | |
|   didn't work.  (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
 | |
|   Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - difflib.py has two new functions:  context_diff() and unified_diff().
 | |
| 
 | |
| - More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
 | |
|   GET.  This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
 | |
|   HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
 | |
|   an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
 | |
|   handling.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
 | |
|   __doc__ of data descriptors.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
 | |
|   in socket.py.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
 | |
|   have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
 | |
|   inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
 | |
|   opener with proxy support.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - random.Random objects can now be pickled.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Tools/Demos
 | |
| -----------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
 | |
|   providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
 | |
|   files.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Build
 | |
| -----
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
 | |
|   different root directory.
 | |
| 
 | |
| C API
 | |
| -----
 | |
| 
 | |
| - PyType_Ready():  If a type declares that it participates in gc
 | |
|   (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
 | |
|   tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
 | |
|   a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
 | |
|   Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
 | |
|   segfault.  In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
 | |
|   slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
 | |
|   (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised:  since the type is a base
 | |
|   type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
 | |
|   is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
 | |
|   from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception.  It is
 | |
|   intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
 | |
|   from Python.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| New platforms
 | |
| -------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| None this time.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Tests
 | |
| -----
 | |
| 
 | |
| - test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
 | |
|   side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
 | |
| 
 | |
| Windows
 | |
| -------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
 | |
|   drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
 | |
|   wizard.  People with machines where C: is not the system drive
 | |
|   usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
 | |
|   instead.  We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
 | |
|   where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
 | |
|   suggests their system drive.  Note that you can always select the
 | |
|   directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
 | |
|   that's what it's for.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Mac
 | |
| ---
 | |
| 
 | |
| - There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
 | |
|   automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
 | |
|   goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
 | |
|   supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
 | |
| - The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
 | |
|   toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
 | |
| - The Package Manager can now update itself.
 | |
| 
 | |
| SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
 | |
| ------------------------------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| 430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
 | |
| 598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
 | |
| 622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
 | |
| 661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
 | |
| 683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
 | |
| 697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
 | |
| 713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
 | |
| 724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
 | |
| 727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
 | |
| 729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
 | |
| 730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
 | |
| 731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
 | |
| 732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
 | |
| 733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
 | |
| 735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
 | |
| 740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
 | |
| 744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
 | |
| 745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
 | |
| 747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
 | |
| 749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
 | |
| 751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
 | |
| 753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
 | |
| 755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
 | |
| 757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
 | |
| 760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
 | |
| ================================
 | |
| 
 | |
| *Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
 | |
| 
 | |
| Core and builtins
 | |
| -----------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
 | |
|   PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - New built-in function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
 | |
|   items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
 | |
|   and cannot be strings).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
 | |
|   raising an exception.  This is consistent with calling the
 | |
|   constructors for the other built-in types -- called without argument
 | |
|   they all return the false value of that type.  (SF patch #724135)
 | |
| 
 | |
| - In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
 | |
|   from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
 | |
|   few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
 | |
|   Python itself.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
 | |
|   the referenced object, if it has one.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__.  See
 | |
|   the thread started at
 | |
|   http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
 | |
| 
 | |
| - list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
 | |
|   interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
 | |
|   list.  This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
 | |
|   placed on a list index.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
 | |
|   larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
 | |
|   fits.  E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
 | |
|   [1267650600228229401496703205376L].  (SF patch #707427.)
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
 | |
|   between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
 | |
|   getattr hooks.  If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
 | |
|   but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
 | |
|   only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
 | |
|   unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
 | |
|   a segfault could happen.  That's been repaired.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
 | |
|   value to return if the key is not in the dict.  If a default is not
 | |
|   given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
 | |
|   Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
 | |
|   [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
 | |
| 
 | |
| - sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
 | |
|   Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception.  This is
 | |
|   rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
 | |
|   referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2].  (SF patch
 | |
|   #693195.)
 | |
| 
 | |
| - On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
 | |
|   if the key value was larger than 2**32.  See SF bug #689659.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
 | |
|   variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
 | |
|   unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
 | |
|   interpreter executions, would fail.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
 | |
|   TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
 | |
|   of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Extension modules
 | |
| -----------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
 | |
|   for converting between string and packed representation of IP
 | |
|   addresses.  There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
 | |
|   True iff the current Python has IPv6 support.  See SF patch #658327.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
 | |
|   to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
 | |
|   recursion limit.  (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
 | |
|   and Greg Chapman.)
 | |
| 
 | |
| - New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
 | |
|   recursively.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
 | |
|   directly referenced by obj.  In effect, it exposes what the object's
 | |
|   tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
 | |
|   leaks.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The iconv module has been removed from this release.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
 | |
|   (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
 | |
|   pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
 | |
|   propagate.  The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
 | |
|   could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
 | |
|   away from the original float.  This has been fixed.  See SF bug
 | |
|   #705836.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
 | |
|   function, if supported.  (SF patch #675422.)
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
 | |
|   on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
 | |
|   See SF bug #692416.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
 | |
|   mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
 | |
|   Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
 | |
|   Added chain() and cycle().
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
 | |
|   is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
 | |
|   has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
 | |
|   platforms which have dup(2).  The makefile() method is built directly
 | |
|   on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
 | |
|   timeouts to work properly.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Library
 | |
| -------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
 | |
|   os.path.walk().  See os module docs for details.  os.path.walk()
 | |
|   isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
 | |
|   future release.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
 | |
|   for querying platform dependent features.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
 | |
|   pickle protocol versions.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
 | |
|   which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
 | |
|   (already supported by the body() method).  (SF patch #720468)
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
 | |
|   the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
 | |
|   'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
 | |
|   modules.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
 | |
|   HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
 | |
|   codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
 | |
|   arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
 | |
|   return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'.  This gives the desired
 | |
|   result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
 | |
|   MS Office extensions.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
 | |
|   SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
 | |
|   execution speed of expressions and statements.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
 | |
|   of raising TypeError.  If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
 | |
|   x == y is False, and x != y is True.  This is akin to the change made
 | |
|   for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
 | |
|   about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that.  See also SF bug
 | |
|   report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
 | |
|   it now returns Unicode strings.  (This behavior was added earlier
 | |
|   to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
 | |
|   in core.setup().  Previously you could supply one or the other, but
 | |
|   not both of them.  (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
 | |
| 
 | |
| - New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
 | |
|   including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
 | |
|   commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Tools/Demos
 | |
| -----------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
 | |
|   See the module docstring for details.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Build
 | |
| -----
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
 | |
|   preprocessor directives that start in column 1.  (SF bug #691793.)
 | |
| 
 | |
| C API
 | |
| -----
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
 | |
| 
 | |
| - PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
 | |
|   issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available.  This
 | |
|   makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG.  Extensions that use this and
 | |
|   need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
 | |
| 
 | |
|     #ifndef  PY_LONG_LONG
 | |
|     #define  PY_LONG_LONG  LONG_LONG
 | |
|     #endif
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
 | |
|   typical case where the method returns its self argument.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
 | |
|   classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
 | |
|   exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject.  (SF patch #696193.)
 | |
| 
 | |
| New platforms
 | |
| -------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| None this time.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Tests
 | |
| -----
 | |
| 
 | |
| - test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
 | |
|   See SF bug #692988.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Windows
 | |
| -------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
 | |
|   function.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
 | |
|   MessageBeep().
 | |
| 
 | |
| Mac
 | |
| ---
 | |
| 
 | |
| - os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
 | |
|   a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
 | |
| 
 | |
| - A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
 | |
|   the window manager, false otherwise.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
 | |
|   currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
 | |
|   before displaying.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
 | |
|   be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
 | |
|   complete.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
 | |
|   in Apple Help Viewer format.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
 | |
| =================================
 | |
| 
 | |
| *Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
 | |
| 
 | |
| Core and builtins
 | |
| -----------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
 | |
|   treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
 | |
|   that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
 | |
|   turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
 | |
|   (SF patch #664376.)
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
 | |
|   with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
 | |
|   This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c...  Except
 | |
|   codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
 | |
|   invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
 | |
|   this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
 | |
|   files.  (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
 | |
| 
 | |
| - If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
 | |
|   constructor would ignore all arguments.  This is changed now: the
 | |
|   constructor refuses arguments in this case.  This might break code
 | |
|   that worked under Python 2.2.  The simplest fix is to add a no-op
 | |
|   __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
 | |
|   Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
 | |
|   with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
 | |
|   ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
 | |
|   range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
 | |
|   always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
 | |
|   E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
 | |
|   come out as -4294967295.  This was the case in Python 2.2 through
 | |
|   2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
 | |
|   value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now.  This
 | |
|   will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well.  (SF #660455)
 | |
| 
 | |
| - int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
 | |
|   does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'.  When the
 | |
|   sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
 | |
|   machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
 | |
|   2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
 | |
|   int("0xffffffff", 16) right now.  (PEP 347)
 | |
| 
 | |
| - super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
 | |
|   issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
 | |
|   to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X).  Previously
 | |
|   only type(x) was tested.  (For classic classes this was already the
 | |
|   case.)
 | |
| 
 | |
| - compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
 | |
|   passed as unicode strings.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
 | |
|   See SF bug #683467.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
 | |
|   of 2 now.  It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
 | |
|   Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
 | |
|   arguments.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
 | |
|   See SF bug #667147.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
 | |
|   to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
 | |
|   See SF bug #676155.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
 | |
|   the name of the module in which the function was defined.  This
 | |
|   applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
 | |
|   defined in Python.  This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
 | |
|   which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly.  In Python 2.2
 | |
|   whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
 | |
|   at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
 | |
|   Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Extension modules
 | |
| -----------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
 | |
|   nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
 | |
|   tp_as_number pointer.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
 | |
|   lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock().  Note: this is a
 | |
|   reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
 | |
|   this is the last release_lock() call.  You can check with
 | |
|   imp.lock_held().  (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Fix some bugs in the parser module.  SF bug #678518.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
 | |
|   extension implemented flush() was fixed.  Scott also rewrote the
 | |
|   zlib test suite using the unittest module.  (SF bug #640230 and
 | |
|   patch #678531.)
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
 | |
|   looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
 | |
|   patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
 | |
|   errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
 | |
|   thread was active.  (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
 | |
| 
 | |
| - fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
 | |
|   an mmap'ed file which was already closed.  (SF patch #665913)
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - datetime changes:
 | |
| 
 | |
|   The date class is now properly subclassable.  (SF bug #720908)
 | |
| 
 | |
|   The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
 | |
|   datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
 | |
|   time class.  Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
 | |
|   exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz.  This wasn't
 | |
|   enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
 | |
|   now.
 | |
| 
 | |
|   today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
 | |
|   microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>.  This repairs an
 | |
|   irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
 | |
| 
 | |
|   In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
 | |
|   ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
 | |
|   as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
 | |
|   time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
 | |
|   DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
 | |
|   meaning that DST is never in effect).
 | |
| 
 | |
|   The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
 | |
|   (or None) now.  In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
 | |
|   was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
 | |
|   they couldn't return a timedelta.  TOOWTDI.
 | |
| 
 | |
|   The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug.  It was replaced
 | |
|   by a later example coded by Guido.
 | |
| 
 | |
|   datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
 | |
|   input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz.  For typical "hybrid" time
 | |
|   zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
 | |
|   time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
 | |
|   ends.  See new docs for details.  In short, the new behavior mimics
 | |
|   the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
 | |
| 
 | |
|   dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
 | |
|   datetime objects.  If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
 | |
|   object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
 | |
|   dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
 | |
|   tzinfo subclass instance.
 | |
| 
 | |
|   A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
 | |
|   to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
 | |
|   a local time.  The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
 | |
|   as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
 | |
|   fromutc().  It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
 | |
|   be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
 | |
|   creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
 | |
|   allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
 | |
| 
 | |
|   datetime.now():  The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
 | |
|   repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
 | |
|   already).  With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
 | |
|   and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
 | |
|   members.  This was less than useful.  Now now(tz) returns the current
 | |
|   date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
 | |
| 
 | |
|       tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
 | |
| 
 | |
|   where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC.  Without
 | |
|   a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
 | |
|   as a naive datetime object.
 | |
| 
 | |
|   datetime.fromtimestamp():  Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
 | |
|   useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified.  See
 | |
|   also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
 | |
| 
 | |
|   date and datetime comparison:  In order to prevent comparison from
 | |
|   falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
 | |
|   raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
 | |
|   They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
 | |
|   in which case they return NotImplemented now.  This gives other
 | |
|   datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
 | |
|   comparison.
 | |
| 
 | |
|   date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison:  When the exception
 | |
|   for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
 | |
|   the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
 | |
|   != then True is returned.  Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
 | |
|   only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
 | |
| 
 | |
|       if some_datetime in some_sequence:
 | |
| 
 | |
|   and ::
 | |
| 
 | |
|       some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
 | |
| 
 | |
|   to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
 | |
|   sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys.  [This
 | |
|   seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
 | |
|   that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
 | |
| 
 | |
|   The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
 | |
|   ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
 | |
|   seconds".  Leap seconds are ignored now.  On such platforms, it's
 | |
|   possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
 | |
|   datetimes constructed from them are equal.
 | |
| 
 | |
|   The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
 | |
|   completely.  The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
 | |
|   longer exist.  The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
 | |
|   methods no longer exist either.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Library
 | |
| -------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
 | |
|   to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
 | |
|   protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
 | |
|   extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
 | |
|   etc.).  The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
 | |
|   API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
 | |
|   See PEP 307 for details.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
 | |
|   as the default repository.  (See PEP 301.)
 | |
| 
 | |
| - the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep,
 | |
|   pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
 | |
|   dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
 | |
|   variables are now available via os.path.  They continue to be
 | |
|   available from the os module.
 | |
|   (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
 | |
|   <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
 | |
|   internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
 | |
|   a symbolic pickle disassembler.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - xmlrpclib.py now supports the built-in boolean type.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
 | |
|   exception.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
 | |
|   class.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
 | |
|   sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
 | |
|   operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled.  These modules are not safe in
 | |
|   Python 2.2. or 2.3.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
 | |
|   It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
 | |
|   See SF bug #659228.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
 | |
|   to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
 | |
|   See SF patch #651082.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs.  See SF feature request #618024.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
 | |
|   the gain value which is passed to Tk.  SF bug# 602259.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
 | |
|   See SF patch #642974.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The dospath module was deleted.  Use the ntpath module when manipulating
 | |
|   DOS paths from other platforms.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Tools/Demos
 | |
| -----------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
 | |
|   Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
 | |
|   to the new one.  While the user-visible API of the new module is
 | |
|   compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
 | |
|   underlying database library has changed.  To convert from the old library,
 | |
|   run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
 | |
|   to a pickle file.  After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
 | |
|   using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database.  For
 | |
|   example:
 | |
| 
 | |
|     % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
 | |
|     % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
 | |
| 
 | |
|   Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| Build
 | |
| -----
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
 | |
|   test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default.  This is
 | |
|   because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
 | |
|   software.  To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
 | |
| 
 | |
|     ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
 | |
| 
 | |
| - On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
 | |
|   used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
 | |
|   groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS.  OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
 | |
|   debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3".  BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
 | |
|   compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile.  On some
 | |
|   platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
 | |
|   default.  On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
 | |
|   flags.  This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
 | |
|   fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
 | |
|   relevant search lists in setup.py.  This allows users building Python to
 | |
|   take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
 | |
|   <http://fink.sf.net/>.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
 | |
|   from the Tools/scripts directory.
 | |
| 
 | |
| C API
 | |
| -----
 | |
| 
 | |
| - PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
 | |
|   instead of a plain ``PyObject *``.  (SF patch #686601.)
 | |
| 
 | |
| - PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
 | |
|   slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
 | |
|   tp_as_number pointer.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
 | |
|   will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
 | |
|   (SF #681367)
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
 | |
|   argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
 | |
|   'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes).  Future versions of Python will
 | |
|   raise a TypeError.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Tests
 | |
| -----
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
 | |
|   test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
 | |
|   test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py).  Now they are.  (Note to
 | |
|   developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
 | |
|   make sure to do it right!  All tests need to use either unittest or
 | |
|   pydoc.)
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Windows
 | |
| -------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
 | |
|   now been fixed.  test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
 | |
|   time).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
 | |
|   the resource compiler.  See SF patch #669198.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
 | |
|   release without strong cryptography.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
 | |
|   absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer.  It
 | |
|   wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Mac
 | |
| ---
 | |
| 
 | |
| - There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
 | |
|   and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
 | |
|   of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
 | |
|   in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
 | |
|   This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
 | |
|   accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
 | |
|   and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
 | |
|   form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
 | |
|   them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
 | |
|   downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
 | |
|   Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
 | |
| =================================
 | |
| 
 | |
| *Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
 | |
| 
 | |
| Type/class unification and new-style classes
 | |
| --------------------------------------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
 | |
|   is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}.  Accordingly,
 | |
|   the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
 | |
|   been eliminated.  This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
 | |
|   a different meaning than before.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
 | |
|   integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
 | |
|   all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
 | |
|   class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
 | |
|   extension module).  This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
 | |
|   significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
 | |
|   and deallocation.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
 | |
|   right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types.  The
 | |
|   types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
 | |
|   instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
 | |
|   names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
 | |
|   callable.  The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
 | |
|   now detected by the garbage collector.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
 | |
|   [SF bug 519621]
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
 | |
|   identifier.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
 | |
|   takes an optional docstring argument.  Previously, this constructor
 | |
|   ignored its arguments.  As a consequence, deriving a class from a
 | |
|   module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
 | |
|   created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
 | |
|   [SF bug 563060]
 | |
| 
 | |
| - A new type object, 'basestring', is added.  This is a common base type
 | |
|   for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
 | |
|   types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
 | |
|   isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings.  This
 | |
|   is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
 | |
|   method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
 | |
|   not called.  [SF bug #537450]
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods.  [SF bug #535444]
 | |
| 
 | |
| - If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
 | |
|   doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
 | |
|   This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
 | |
|   raises TypeError.  (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
 | |
|   state of the slots would be lost.)
 | |
| 
 | |
| Core and builtins
 | |
| -----------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Import from zipfiles is now supported.  The name of a zipfile placed
 | |
|   on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
 | |
|   modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
 | |
|   zipfile.  The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
 | |
|   the sample implementation) of PEP 273.  The semantics of __path__ are
 | |
|   compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
 | |
|   Jython 2.1.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - PEP 302 has been accepted.  Although it was initially developed to
 | |
|   support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
 | |
|   Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
 | |
|   sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
 | |
|   make extending the import statement much more convenient than
 | |
|   overriding the __import__ built-in function.  For a description of
 | |
|   these, see PEP 302.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
 | |
|   trace function to change which line will execute next.  A command to
 | |
|   exploit this from pdb has been added.  [SF patch #643835]
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a built-in
 | |
|   module to assure that at least the built-in codecs are available
 | |
|   to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
 | |
|   isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
 | |
|   ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
 | |
|   by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
 | |
|   during a list.sort() operation has been fixed.  The effect of
 | |
|   attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
 | |
|   length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
 | |
|   The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
 | |
|   and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
 | |
|   all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
 | |
|   releases or implementations.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
 | |
|   All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
 | |
|   which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
 | |
|   Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
 | |
|   interned strings are no longer immortal.  You must keep a reference
 | |
|   to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
 | |
|   issues a SyntaxWarning.  In the future, None may become a keyword.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - SET_LINENO is gone.  co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
 | |
|   call the trace function.  C code that accessed f_lineno should call
 | |
|   PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
 | |
|   to date when there is a trace function set).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - There's a new warning category, FutureWarning.  This is used to warn
 | |
|   about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
 | |
|   result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
 | |
|   unification).  The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
 | |
|   PEP.  The warnings are about the following situations:
 | |
| 
 | |
|     - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
 | |
|       [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
 | |
|       in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
 | |
|       pattern.
 | |
| 
 | |
|     - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
 | |
|       bits or have a different sign than the left operand.  To be
 | |
|       precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
 | |
|       as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
 | |
| 
 | |
|     - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
 | |
|       unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
 | |
|       this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
 | |
|       formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X.  In Python 2.4, these will
 | |
|       show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
 | |
|       in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
 | |
|   been changed.  Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
 | |
|   per-thread values.  They are now just a pair of global variables.
 | |
|   In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
 | |
|   bytecode instructions.  This may have some effect on systems that
 | |
|   relied on the old default value.  In particular, in multi-threaded
 | |
|   applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
 | |
|   increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
 | |
|   Karatsuba algorithm is now used.  This is most effective if the
 | |
|   inputs have roughly the same size.  If they both have about N digits,
 | |
|   Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
 | |
|   log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2).  Measured results may
 | |
|   be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks.  Besides
 | |
|   the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
 | |
|   appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
 | |
|   (starting in the ballpark of a million bits).  Note that this is a
 | |
|   simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
 | |
|   e.g., GMP.  It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
 | |
|   devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
 | |
|   integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security.  The
 | |
|   mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
 | |
|   mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
 | |
|   higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
 | |
|   Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
 | |
|   new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
 | |
|   functionality.  All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
 | |
|   interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements.  Thanks
 | |
|   to Zack Weinberg!
 | |
| 
 | |
| - When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
 | |
|   1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
 | |
|   invoke __mul__.  This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
 | |
|   type.  This has been fixed now.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
 | |
|   This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
 | |
|   any length.  Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - File objects are now their own iterators.  For a file f, iter(f) now
 | |
|   returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
 | |
|   f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
 | |
|   readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
 | |
|   f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
 | |
|   Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
 | |
|   don't.  It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
 | |
|   to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
 | |
|   module are now obsolete.  Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented.  A
 | |
|   comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
 | |
|   or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - list.sort() has a new implementation.  While cross-platform results
 | |
|   may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
 | |
|   kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
 | |
|   and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
 | |
|   several major platforms.  This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
 | |
|   precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
 | |
|   although the language definition does not guarantee stability.  A
 | |
|   potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
 | |
|   len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine).  It's therefore possible
 | |
|   for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
 | |
|   does not.  See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
 | |
|   raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
 | |
|   raise StopIteration.  There used to be various counterexamples to
 | |
|   this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
 | |
|   breakage, without any benefits.  (Note that this is still an
 | |
|   iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
 | |
|   this.)
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
 | |
|   other platforms.  KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
 | |
|   and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
 | |
|   process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x).  Ctrl+C will
 | |
|   interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
 | |
|   created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
 | |
|   reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
 | |
|   [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
 | |
| 
 | |
| - sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows.  This
 | |
|   returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
 | |
|   currently running.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
 | |
|   a string.  Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
 | |
|   but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
 | |
|   was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
 | |
|   as directory names.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith built-in methods
 | |
|   so they accept negative indices.  [SF bug 493951]
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
 | |
|   finally clause.  [SF bug 567538]
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Most built-in sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
 | |
|   with a third "stride" parameter.  For example, "hello world"[::-1]
 | |
|   gives "dlrow olleh".
 | |
| 
 | |
| - A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
 | |
|   direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
 | |
|   The warning will not be printed by default.  To see the pending
 | |
|   deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
 | |
|   as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
 | |
|   promised.  The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
 | |
|   method no longer exist.  xrange repetition and slicing have been
 | |
|   removed.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - New built-in function enumerate(x), from PEP 279.  Example:
 | |
|   enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
 | |
|   The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime.  This means
 | |
|   that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
 | |
|   to __debug__.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
 | |
|   string to the left with zeros.  For example,
 | |
|   "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
 | |
|   these make no sense.  Since this was documented, they're being
 | |
|   deprecated now.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
 | |
|   an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip.  For
 | |
|   example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
 | |
| 
 | |
| - There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
 | |
|   class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None).  It constructs a
 | |
|   dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
 | |
|   single value.  It can be used for building sets and for removing
 | |
|   duplicates from sequences.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Added a new dict method pop(key).  This removes and returns the
 | |
|   value corresponding to key.  [SF patch #539949]
 | |
| 
 | |
| - A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
 | |
|   names for its two values, True and False.  Comparisons and sundry
 | |
|   other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
 | |
|   return a bool instead.  Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
 | |
|   is backward compatible.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
 | |
|   deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
 | |
|   garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
 | |
|   access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
 | |
|   could access a pointer to freed memory.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
 | |
|   default.  The recommended practice for memory allocation and
 | |
|   deallocation has been streamlined.  A header file is included,
 | |
|   Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
 | |
|   and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
 | |
|   onwards.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
 | |
|   that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
 | |
|   correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented.  Briefly, using 'U'
 | |
|   instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
 | |
|   ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
 | |
|   recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
 | |
|   '\n', the standard Python line end character.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
 | |
|   Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
 | |
|   a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
 | |
|   An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
 | |
|   general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
 | |
|   evaluate f1 first.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
 | |
|   could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
 | |
|   slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
 | |
|   This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
 | |
| 
 | |
| Extension modules
 | |
| -----------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Added three operators to the operator module:
 | |
|     operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to:  a**b.
 | |
|     operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to:  a is b.
 | |
|     operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to:  a is not b.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
 | |
|   archives.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
 | |
|   times.  The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
 | |
|   favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica.  See
 | |
| 
 | |
|       http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
 | |
| 
 | |
| - _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
 | |
|   have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
 | |
|   are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
 | |
|   or Tkinter.wantobjects.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
 | |
|   been added as the package bsddb.  The traditional bsddb module is
 | |
|   still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
 | |
|   and is now named bsddb185.  This supports Berkeley DB versions from
 | |
|   3.0 to 4.1.  For help converting your databases from the old module (which
 | |
|   probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
 | |
|   the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
 | |
|   section above.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
 | |
|   and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
 | |
|   sys.stdin/stdout changes.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
 | |
|   Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1.  Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
 | |
|   supported.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
 | |
|   after stat_float_times has been called.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
 | |
|   file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
 | |
|   Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
 | |
|   only exists for backwards compatibility.  Its contents are no longer
 | |
|   functions but callable type objects.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
 | |
|   This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
 | |
|   written to disk.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
 | |
|   posix.getpgid have been added where available.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
 | |
|   also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
 | |
|   third party compression library used by some Python modules.  The
 | |
|   hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
 | |
|   Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
 | |
|   field names.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - array.array is now a type object. A new format character
 | |
|   'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
 | |
|   .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
 | |
|   and __imul__.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h.  Failure in case
 | |
|   of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
 | |
|   is called.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
 | |
|   to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
 | |
|   interpreter was compiled.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
 | |
|   when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
 | |
|   returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
 | |
|   lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
 | |
|   when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
 | |
|   1, not 2.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
 | |
|   before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
 | |
|   loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
 | |
|   limit.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
 | |
|   letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
 | |
|   bug #623464.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
 | |
|   ossaudiodev.  The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
 | |
|   OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
 | |
|   OSS mixer API.  Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Library
 | |
| -------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
 | |
|   slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
 | |
|   reports (see sf path #643711 for details).  Documentation will follow
 | |
|   with Python 2.3a2.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - os.path exposes getctime.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
 | |
|   and failIfAlmostEqual().  They implement an approximate comparison
 | |
|   by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
 | |
|   the result to zero.  Approximate comparison is essential for
 | |
|   unit tests of floating point results.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
 | |
|   the time module.  As a result, the range of allowable dates
 | |
|   has been increased.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
 | |
|   executed.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The distutils created windows installers now can run a
 | |
|   postinstallation script.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
 | |
|   test the current module.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
 | |
|   interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
 | |
|   client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
 | |
|   the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
 | |
|   this behavior needs to be controlled.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
 | |
|   command line parsing.  It is a slightly modified version of Greg
 | |
|   Ward's Optik package.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
 | |
|   methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
 | |
|   This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
 | |
|   for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin.  Now shelve supports
 | |
|   all dictionary methods.  This eases the transition to persistent
 | |
|   storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
 | |
|   binary flag, which defaults to False.  If True, the values stored in the
 | |
|   shelf are binary pickles.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
 | |
|   282.  The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
 | |
|   modules are iterators now.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB.  Files over 4GB also work
 | |
|   now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
 | |
|   file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
 | |
|   record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
 | |
|   some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
 | |
|   size.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
 | |
|   with their entity value.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
 | |
|   option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
 | |
|   tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
 | |
|   dictionary when invoked with no argument.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
 | |
|   calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, "").  The initial "C" locale, or
 | |
|   whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved.  If you
 | |
|   want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
 | |
|   all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
 | |
|   following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
 | |
|   main():
 | |
| 
 | |
|     import locale
 | |
|     locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
 | |
| 
 | |
| - shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
 | |
|   exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
 | |
|   replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
 | |
|   characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
 | |
|   package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
 | |
|   to the new standard.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
 | |
|   returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
 | |
|   add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
 | |
|   an extension to the database.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
 | |
|   set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set.  There's
 | |
|   also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
 | |
|   or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
 | |
|   is the base class of the two.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
 | |
|   Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
 | |
|   OverflowError.  That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
 | |
|   and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
 | |
|   bounded integers.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
 | |
|   generator.  The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
 | |
|   threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
 | |
|   large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
 | |
|   precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
 | |
|   in existence.
 | |
| 
 | |
|   The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
 | |
|   generator.  Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
 | |
|   existing state to create a new state.  This means that jumpahead()
 | |
|   continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
 | |
|   non-overlapping sequences.  However, it will break code which relies
 | |
|   on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
 | |
| 
 | |
|   The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
 | |
|   the new generator.  Code using these attributes should switch to a
 | |
|   new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
 | |
|   compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue.  Thanks to
 | |
|   Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
 | |
|   write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
 | |
|   platforms.  These have been fixed.  On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
 | |
|   crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
 | |
|   as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
 | |
|   argument.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
 | |
|   __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
 | |
|   the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
 | |
|   custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
 | |
|   [SF patch 560794].
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Sockets now support timeout mode.  After s.settimeout(T), where T is
 | |
|   a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
 | |
|   if they cannot be completed within T seconds.  To disable timeout
 | |
|   mode, use s.settimeout(None).  There's also a module function,
 | |
|   socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
 | |
|   created henceforth.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - getopt.gnu_getopt was added.  This supports GNU-style option
 | |
|   processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Stop using strings for exceptions.  String objects used for
 | |
|   exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception.  The objects
 | |
|   changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
 | |
|   tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
 | |
|   BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
 | |
|   Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
 | |
|   big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
 | |
|   BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
 | |
| 
 | |
| - math.log() now takes an optional argument:  math.log(x[, base]).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
 | |
|   for False.  Was causing an error when given a callback object which
 | |
|   was callable but also returned len() as zero.  The change may
 | |
|   create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
 | |
|   and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
 | |
|   identical to None.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
 | |
|   and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it.  In other
 | |
|   words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
 | |
|   results produced by random.gauss().  It does now.  Programs repeatedly
 | |
|   mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
 | |
|   results now.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
 | |
|   provided by cPickle.Pickler.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
 | |
|   which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise.  For
 | |
|   comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
 | |
|   than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
 | |
|   argument defaults to None now as a result.  A happy benefit is
 | |
|   that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
 | |
|   to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
 | |
|   text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
 | |
|   support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
 | |
|   command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
 | |
|   This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
 | |
|   people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
 | |
|   and other systems.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
 | |
|   NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
 | |
|   used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
 | |
|   UTF-16 is a 2-byte encoding and the C lib's line reading APIs don't
 | |
|   work well with these.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - compileall now supports quiet operation.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
 | |
|   connections.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
 | |
|   _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
 | |
|   which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
 | |
|   sets
 | |
| 
 | |
| - ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
 | |
|   "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
 | |
|   name.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
 | |
|   arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
 | |
|   passed in.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
 | |
|   gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
 | |
|   on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
 | |
|   of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
 | |
|   circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
 | |
|   to the content handler implementation.  [SF bug #535474]
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
 | |
|   of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
 | |
|   or CRLF).  Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
 | |
|   has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
 | |
|   honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
 | |
|   compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
 | |
|   running under \*nix.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
 | |
|   library.  It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
 | |
|   functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
 | |
|   the value of its expression argument.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
 | |
|   the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
 | |
|   the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
 | |
|   unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
 | |
|   skipstone browser was included.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
 | |
|   strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Tools/Demos
 | |
| -----------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
 | |
|   names in addition to accepting file names.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed.  Nobody thought they
 | |
|   were interesting any more.  (The SGI library modules and extensions
 | |
|   are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
 | |
|   still used and useful.)
 | |
| 
 | |
| - IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
 | |
|   deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
 | |
|   allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
 | |
|   in the locale's encoding.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
 | |
|   unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
 | |
|   the generated binary.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Build
 | |
| -----
 | |
| 
 | |
| - On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
 | |
|   except in the hands of experts.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
 | |
|   and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
 | |
|   will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC.  DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
 | |
|   are deprecated.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
 | |
|   get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
 | |
|   Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
 | |
|   that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds.  Note that
 | |
|   COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
 | |
|   builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
 | |
|   builds.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
 | |
|   The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
 | |
|   that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
 | |
|   that may be conditionalizing on it).  A bonus is that any extension
 | |
|   type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
 | |
|   Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
 | |
|   to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
 | |
|   new type.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - According to Annex F of the current C standard,
 | |
| 
 | |
|     The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
 | |
|     HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
 | |
|     positive infinities.
 | |
| 
 | |
|   Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
 | |
|   Py_HUGE_VAL.  Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
 | |
|   pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
 | |
|   other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up.  If your platform defines
 | |
|   HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
 | |
|   that works on your platform.  The only instance of this I'm sure about
 | |
|   is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
 | |
| 
 | |
|   http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
 | |
| 
 | |
|   Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems.  If anyone uses such a system, help!
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
 | |
|   doc strings from the built-in functions and modules; this reduces the
 | |
|   size of the executable.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default.  On Unix
 | |
|   it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
 | |
|   configure script.  On other platforms, remove
 | |
|   WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
 | |
|   preprocessor symbols were eliminated.  The internal decisions they
 | |
|   controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
 | |
|   well as Unix.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
 | |
|   skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
 | |
|   installer knows what s/he's doing.  See the section on building these
 | |
|   modules in the README file for details.
 | |
| 
 | |
| C API
 | |
| -----
 | |
| 
 | |
| - PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
 | |
|   This is a result of these types having a partially defined
 | |
|   tp_as_number slot.  (This is not a feature, but an indication that
 | |
|   PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
 | |
|   It may be deprecated.)
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
 | |
|   ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate.  On some
 | |
|   platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
 | |
|   the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
 | |
|   incremented.  The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
 | |
|   strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone.  Interned
 | |
|   strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
 | |
|   PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
 | |
|   (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
 | |
|   making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
 | |
|   it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
 | |
|   aligned.)
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
 | |
|   argument.  Modules without global functions are becoming more common
 | |
|   now that factories can be types rather than functions.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
 | |
|   level.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
 | |
|   PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
 | |
|   PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
 | |
|   PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
 | |
|   the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument.  It
 | |
|   was previously declared without const.  This should not affect working
 | |
|   code.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
 | |
|   sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
 | |
|   adjusting for negative indices.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
 | |
|   This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
 | |
|   object.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
 | |
|   coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
 | |
|   CHECKTYPES flag set.  This is to better support proxies.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
 | |
|   "``void (*)(void *)``".
 | |
| 
 | |
| - PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type.  Previously,
 | |
|   when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
 | |
|   was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
 | |
|   where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
 | |
|   without going through the buffer API.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h.  This
 | |
|   hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
 | |
|   been marked as obsolete since then.  SF bug 495548 says it created
 | |
|   conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
 | |
|   to stop Python development.  Thanks for all the fish!
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
 | |
|   scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
 | |
| 
 | |
| New platforms
 | |
| -------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - OpenVMS is now supported.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - AtheOS is now supported.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - GNU/Hurd is now supported.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Tests
 | |
| -----
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
 | |
|   all resources except this one."  For example, to allow everything
 | |
|   except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Windows
 | |
| -------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
 | |
|   Sleepycat Berkeley database library.  This should be a huge
 | |
|   improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
 | |
|   bugs.
 | |
|   XXX What are the licensing issues here?
 | |
|   XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
 | |
|   XXX     Python, what must they do to convert it?
 | |
|   XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
 | |
|   XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
 | |
|    module (_ssl.pyd)
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
 | |
|   previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
 | |
|   includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER).  For example, under
 | |
|   MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ".  1200 is
 | |
|   the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes.  One cause
 | |
|   of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
 | |
|   use files" uninstall option).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows.  [SF bug #503031]
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
 | |
|   equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
 | |
|   It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
 | |
|   limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
 | |
|   until a specified process exits.  This is similar to, but not exactly
 | |
|   the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems.  If you're waiting for
 | |
|   a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
 | |
|   functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
 | |
|   See the docs for details.  The docs were changed to clarify that
 | |
|   spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
 | |
|   Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows:  this doesn't
 | |
|   need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
 | |
|   to a nasty problem:  before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
 | |
|   got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
 | |
|   underlying file, then deleted the file.  This usually worked fine.
 | |
|   However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
 | |
|   level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
 | |
|   open in the spawning process P.  If a temp file f was among them, then
 | |
|   doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
 | |
|   C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
 | |
|   blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
 | |
|   deleting open files).  This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
 | |
|   work around.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
 | |
|   low-level os.open() on Windows:  the new constants in 2.3 are
 | |
|   O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
 | |
|   The others were also available in 2.2:  O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
 | |
|   O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY.  Contrary
 | |
|   to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
 | |
|   (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
 | |
|   specified with O_CREAT too).
 | |
| 
 | |
| Mac
 | |
| ----
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
 | |
|   version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
 | |
|   system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
 | |
|   refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
 | |
|   CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
 | |
|   including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
 | |
|   will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
 | |
|   talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
 | |
|   bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
 | |
|   with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
 | |
|   be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
 | |
|   Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
 | |
|   MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
 | |
|   are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
 | |
|   .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
 | |
|   run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
 | |
|   files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
 | |
|   window, but all this can be customized.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
 | |
|   possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
 | |
|   releases.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
 | |
|   line interface too.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
 | |
|   subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
 | |
|   now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
 | |
|   documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
 | |
|   available for convenience.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
 | |
|   and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs built-in module is
 | |
|   gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
 | |
|   unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
 | |
|   (also when running on Mac OS X).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
 | |
|   There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
 | |
|   (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
 | |
|   See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
 | |
|   Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
 | |
|   mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
 | |
|   This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
 | |
|   mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
 | |
|   other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
 | |
|   you can change this in site.py.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| What's New in Python 2.2 final?
 | |
| ===============================
 | |
| 
 | |
| *Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
 | |
| 
 | |
| Type/class unification and new-style classes
 | |
| --------------------------------------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
 | |
|   with a custom metaclass.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Core and builtins
 | |
| -----------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
 | |
|   are proxies.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Extension modules
 | |
| -----------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
 | |
|   very short strings.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
 | |
|   overflows on the Mac.  Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
 | |
|   limit much smaller.  If the limit is too low (it only affects
 | |
|   performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
 | |
|   when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
 | |
| 
 | |
| Library
 | |
| -------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
 | |
|   close or delete time).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
 | |
|   instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
 | |
|   when run from the standard regression test.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Tools/Demos
 | |
| -----------
 | |
| 
 | |
| Build
 | |
| -----
 | |
| 
 | |
| C API
 | |
| -----
 | |
| 
 | |
| New platforms
 | |
| -------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| Tests
 | |
| -----
 | |
| 
 | |
| Windows
 | |
| -------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
 | |
|   instances are deleted at process exit time.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
 | |
|   deleted at process exit time.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
 | |
|   in backslash.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Mac
 | |
| ----
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
 | |
|   3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
 | |
|   been added.  All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| What's New in Python 2.2c1?
 | |
| ===========================
 | |
| 
 | |
| *Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
 | |
| 
 | |
| Type/class unification and new-style classes
 | |
| --------------------------------------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
 | |
|   been extensively updated.  See
 | |
| 
 | |
|       http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
 | |
| 
 | |
|   That remains the primary documentation in this area.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
 | |
|   deleted!
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
 | |
|   __delete__, not __del__.  In previous releases, it was mistakenly
 | |
|   called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
 | |
|   with finalizers.  (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
 | |
|   are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
 | |
| 
 | |
|   (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
 | |
|       return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
 | |
| 
 | |
|   (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super.  This
 | |
|       is confusing.  To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
 | |
|       super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
 | |
|       attributes.  After all, overriding data attributes is not
 | |
|       supported anyway.
 | |
| 
 | |
|   (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
 | |
|       instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
 | |
|   (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
 | |
|   TypeError.  This has been fixed.  Also, directly calling
 | |
|   dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
 | |
|   (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__.  This is for
 | |
|   all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
 | |
|   dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Core and builtins
 | |
| -----------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238:  when -Qnew is passed on
 | |
|   the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
 | |
|   of classic division.  See the PEP for details.  Note that "all"
 | |
|   means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
 | |
|   your own code.  As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
 | |
|   educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
 | |
|   Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
 | |
|   under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
 | |
|   division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
 | |
|   testing the current rules).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
 | |
|   argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
 | |
|   or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Extension modules
 | |
| -----------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Library
 | |
| -------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
 | |
|   lock around calling the platform spawn.  They should always have done
 | |
|   this, but did not before 2.2c1.  Multithreaded programs calling
 | |
|   an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
 | |
|   until the spawned program completes.  It's possible that some programs
 | |
|   relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
 | |
|   usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
 | |
|   without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Tools/Demos
 | |
| -----------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
 | |
|   off a search on Google.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Build
 | |
| -----
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
 | |
|   preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
 | |
|   In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
 | |
|   Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
 | |
|   authors.  The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
 | |
|   release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead.  Ports to
 | |
|   other platforms should do likewise.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
 | |
|   case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
 | |
|   directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
 | |
| 
 | |
| C API
 | |
| -----
 | |
| 
 | |
| - New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the built-in dict
 | |
|   constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
 | |
|   producing key-value pairs.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
 | |
|   the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers.  This
 | |
|   wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
 | |
|   dump core in some bad cases.  This has been repaired.  As a result,
 | |
|   PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
 | |
|   previously went unchallenged.
 | |
| 
 | |
| New platforms
 | |
| -------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| Tests
 | |
| -----
 | |
| 
 | |
| Windows
 | |
| -------
 | |
| 
 | |
| Mac
 | |
| ----
 | |
| 
 | |
| - In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
 | |
|   without any trailing digits.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
 | |
|   Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
 | |
|   the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
 | |
|   home.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| What's New in Python 2.2b2?
 | |
| ===========================
 | |
| 
 | |
| *Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
 | |
| 
 | |
| Type/class unification and new-style classes
 | |
| --------------------------------------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
 | |
|   list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
 | |
| 
 | |
|       class Classic: pass
 | |
|       class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
 | |
| 
 | |
|   The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
 | |
|   according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
 | |
|   using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
 | |
|   This needs to be documented.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The new built-in dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
 | |
|   been renamed to dict.  This reflects a decade of common usage.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences.  For
 | |
|   example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d.  The argument,
 | |
|   and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
 | |
|   when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
 | |
|   instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
 | |
|   class forbids it).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
 | |
|   (formerly these were silently ignored).  The only built-in methods
 | |
|   that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Core and builtins
 | |
| -----------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time.  This
 | |
|   was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
 | |
|   (see below) says.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
 | |
|   (like 1 + '').
 | |
| 
 | |
| Extension modules
 | |
| -----------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
 | |
|   both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
 | |
|   copy-on-write memory mappings.  This was previously possible only on
 | |
|   Unix.  A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
 | |
|   uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
 | |
|   platforms.  Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
 | |
| 
 | |
| - By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
 | |
|   unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
 | |
|   instances in unreachable cycles.  "Instances" here has been generalized
 | |
|   to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
 | |
|   sendall().  This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
 | |
|   send() until all data has been sent.  Also, the socket function has
 | |
|   been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
 | |
|   before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Various bugfixes to the curses module.  There is now a test suite
 | |
|   for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
 | |
|   bytes on its input.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Library
 | |
| -------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
 | |
|   convenience function.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique.  For
 | |
|   example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
 | |
|   single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
 | |
|   Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
 | |
|   previously, the error went undetected, and results were
 | |
|   unpredictable.  Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
 | |
|   pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C.  Also, an
 | |
|   experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
 | |
|   like findall() but returns an iterator.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
 | |
|   DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
 | |
|   methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
 | |
|   tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
 | |
|   cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
 | |
|   permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
 | |
|   found types.  guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
 | |
|   optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
 | |
|   recognize non-standard types or not.  A few non-standard types we
 | |
|   know about have been added.  Also, when run as a script, there are
 | |
|   new -l and -e options.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - statcache is now deprecated.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
 | |
|   dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
 | |
|   hard coded to "GMT" timezone).  An optional 'localtime' flag is
 | |
|   added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
 | |
|   time properly taken into account.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
 | |
|   transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
 | |
|   propagate out.  Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
 | |
|   in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Tools/Demos
 | |
| -----------
 | |
| 
 | |
| Build
 | |
| -----
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available.  The bsddb module
 | |
|   is built with libdb3 if available.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
 | |
| 
 | |
| C API
 | |
| -----
 | |
| 
 | |
| - New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
 | |
|   NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
 | |
|   PySequence_Size().
 | |
| 
 | |
| - New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
 | |
|   PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
 | |
|   convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
 | |
|   possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
 | |
|   argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
 | |
| 
 | |
| New platforms
 | |
| -------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
 | |
|   *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
 | |
|   again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Tests
 | |
| -----
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Added a test script for the curses module.  It isn't run automatically;
 | |
|   regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Windows
 | |
| -------
 | |
| 
 | |
| Mac
 | |
| ----
 | |
| 
 | |
| - PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
 | |
|   removed completely in the next release.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
 | |
|   OSX.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
 | |
|   result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| What's New in Python 2.2b1?
 | |
| ===========================
 | |
| 
 | |
| *Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
 | |
| 
 | |
| Type/class unification and new-style classes
 | |
| --------------------------------------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
 | |
|   extension types).  There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
 | |
|   no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around.  One relic
 | |
|   remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
 | |
|   must set the class's attribute to modify it.  As a consequence, the
 | |
|   __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
 | |
|   of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
 | |
|   future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
 | |
|   can prove that it actually speeds things up).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
 | |
|   always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
 | |
|   class methods, static methods, and properties.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Core and builtins
 | |
| -----------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
 | |
|   For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def'].  The comma in
 | |
|   this example is a mistake.  Previously, this would silently let 'a'
 | |
|   iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
 | |
|   'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
 | |
|   'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf'].  Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
 | |
|   Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
 | |
|   [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
 | |
|   documented, rather than returning the default value for all
 | |
|   exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
 | |
|   example).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
 | |
|   A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
 | |
|   proxy reference has been fixed.  weakref.ReferenceError is now a
 | |
|   built-in exception.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
 | |
|   objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
 | |
|   unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
 | |
|   require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
 | |
|   class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
 | |
|   second argument.  The second argument may also be a tuple of a
 | |
|   class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
 | |
|   will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
 | |
|   things contained in the second argument tuple.  E.g.
 | |
| 
 | |
|   isinstance(x, (A, B))
 | |
| 
 | |
|   returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Extension modules
 | |
| -----------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
 | |
|   pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
 | |
|   available.  The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
 | |
|   now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
 | |
|   accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
 | |
|   backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
 | |
|   Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
 | |
|   attributes.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
 | |
|   pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
 | |
|   attributes like tm_year etc.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
 | |
|   second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
 | |
|   of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
 | |
|   functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status().  These calls
 | |
|   are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
 | |
|   automatically seed its PRNG.  Also, the keyfile and certfile
 | |
|   arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
 | |
|   exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Library
 | |
| -------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
 | |
|   being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
 | |
|   been added.  This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
 | |
|   but it is still quite preliminary.  Support modules and
 | |
|   documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
 | |
|   raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()).  This used
 | |
|   to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
 | |
|   functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
 | |
| 
 | |
|   The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
 | |
|   profiling classes was removed.  The code hasn't worked for years (if
 | |
|   you tried to use them, they raised exceptions).  OldProfile
 | |
|   intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
 | |
|   than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore.  HotProfile intended
 | |
|   to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
 | |
|   that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
 | |
|   without losing information).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
 | |
|   a much better system-specific calibration constant.  The constant can
 | |
|   now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
 | |
|   instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
 | |
|   Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
 | |
|   module).
 | |
| 
 | |
|   Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
 | |
|   Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
 | |
|   profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
 | |
|   and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
 | |
|   a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
 | |
|   which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
 | |
|   encoding.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
 | |
|   finish_request() returns.  (Not when it errors out though.)
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
 | |
|   to allow saving the message body to a file.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
 | |
|   only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
 | |
|   Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
 | |
|   audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
 | |
|   ON, and OFF.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
 | |
|   and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Tools/Demos
 | |
| -----------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Demo/dns was removed.  It no longer serves any purpose; a package
 | |
|   derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
 | |
|   http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
 | |
|   been added: -X and -E.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Build
 | |
| -----
 | |
| 
 | |
| - configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
 | |
|   the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
 | |
| 
 | |
| C API
 | |
| -----
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
 | |
|   the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
 | |
|   not correct.  This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
 | |
|   Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
 | |
|   "NotImplemented".  Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
 | |
|   Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
 | |
|   as long) arguments.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
 | |
|   ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
 | |
|   thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
 | |
|   the thread module used this API).  This code has only really been
 | |
|   tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
 | |
|   report any bugs or strange behavior).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
 | |
|   input.
 | |
| 
 | |
| New platforms
 | |
| -------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| Tests
 | |
| -----
 | |
| 
 | |
| Windows
 | |
| -------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Installer:  If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
 | |
|   registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
 | |
|   is created for .py and .pyw files.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
 | |
|   Scott.  Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows.  The default SIGBREAK
 | |
|   action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess().  This can be changed via
 | |
|   signal.signal().  For example::
 | |
| 
 | |
|       # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
 | |
|       # (SIGINT) behavior.
 | |
|       import signal
 | |
|       signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
 | |
| 
 | |
|       try:
 | |
|           while 1:
 | |
|               pass
 | |
|       except KeyboardInterrupt:
 | |
|           # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
 | |
|           # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
 | |
|           # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
 | |
|           print "Clean exit"
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| What's New in Python 2.2a4?
 | |
| ===========================
 | |
| 
 | |
| *Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
 | |
| 
 | |
| Type/class unification and new-style classes
 | |
| --------------------------------------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
 | |
|   e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
 | |
|   documentation for all operations on list objects.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
 | |
|   be used with Python 2.2.  In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
 | |
|   Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1).  The Demo/metaclass
 | |
|   examples also work again.  It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
 | |
|   with 2.2a4 and beyond.  (If you can confirm this, please write
 | |
|   webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
 | |
|   report on SourceForge.)
 | |
| 
 | |
| - property() now takes 4 keyword arguments:  fget, fset, fdel and doc.
 | |
|   These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
 | |
|   in the constructed property object.  fget, fset and fdel weren't
 | |
|   discoverable from Python in 2.2a3.  __doc__ is new, and allows to
 | |
|   associate a docstring with a property.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented.  For
 | |
|   example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
 | |
|   instance, and it can properly overload comparison.  Ditto for most
 | |
|   other built-in object types.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
 | |
|   'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
 | |
|   *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
 | |
|   'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
 | |
|   otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
 | |
|   previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
 | |
|   called __getattribute__.  This method, if defined, is called for
 | |
|   *every* attribute access.  A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
 | |
|   one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
 | |
|   attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
 | |
|   access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes).  If
 | |
|   both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
 | |
|   AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
 | |
|   The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
 | |
|   class.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The built-in file type can be subclassed now.  In the usual pattern,
 | |
|   "file" is the name of the built-in type, and file() is a new built-in
 | |
|   constructor, with the same signature as the built-in open() function.
 | |
|   file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
 | |
|   the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
 | |
|   and keyword arguments.  This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
 | |
|   now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
 | |
|   unicode always returned 0.  This has been repaired.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
 | |
|   immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
 | |
|   where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
 | |
|   operation was handled by the built-in type), could return that
 | |
|   instance instead a value of the base type.  For example, if s was of
 | |
|   a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is.  Now it returns a str
 | |
|   with the same value as s.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Core
 | |
| ----
 | |
| 
 | |
| - file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
 | |
|   PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
 | |
|   on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
 | |
|   makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
 | |
|   objects.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
 | |
|   method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
 | |
|   of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
 | |
|   at least convert them into ASCII strings.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
 | |
|   necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
 | |
|   to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Library
 | |
| -------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
 | |
|   read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
 | |
|   These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
 | |
|   by the instances.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The "email" package has been added.  This is basically a port of the
 | |
|   mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
 | |
|   and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now.  This
 | |
|   restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
 | |
|   before the entire comparison is complete.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
 | |
|   iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
 | |
|   called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
 | |
|   built-in codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
 | |
|   getwriter().
 | |
| 
 | |
| - SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
 | |
|   simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
 | |
|   after interpretation of symbolic links.  On non-Unix systems, this
 | |
|   is an alias for os.path.abspath().
 | |
| 
 | |
| - operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
 | |
|   iterable object.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
 | |
|   the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
 | |
|   authentication.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types.  At the
 | |
|   same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
 | |
|   Python 2.2 bytecode generation.  It has also been promoted from a
 | |
|   Tool to a standard library package.  (Tools/compiler still exists as
 | |
|   a sample driver.)
 | |
| 
 | |
| Build
 | |
| -----
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
 | |
|   it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed.  On Linux, at
 | |
|   least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
 | |
|   files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
 | |
|   still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
 | |
|   kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
 | |
|   kernel has large file support.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
 | |
|   cross-compilation environment.  This doesn't mean that the supplied
 | |
|   values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
 | |
|   flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
 | |
|   autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
 | |
|   generator.  The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
 | |
|   using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
 | |
| 
 | |
| C API
 | |
| -----
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
 | |
|   and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
 | |
| 
 | |
| New platforms
 | |
| -------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
 | |
|   (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
 | |
| 
 | |
| Tests
 | |
| -----
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
 | |
|   an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
 | |
|   the first mismatch.  Instead the test is run to completion, and a
 | |
|   variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
 | |
|   This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
 | |
|   convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
 | |
|   imported.  This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
 | |
|   flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
 | |
|   especially in regard to reporting errors.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Windows
 | |
| -------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
 | |
|   that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000).  See "What's New in
 | |
|   Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| What's New in Python 2.2a3?
 | |
| ===========================
 | |
| 
 | |
| *Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
 | |
| 
 | |
| Core
 | |
| ----
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
 | |
|   big to represent as a C double.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
 | |
|   if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
 | |
|   integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
 | |
|   the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
 | |
|   restriction).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
 | |
|   more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
 | |
|   reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
 | |
|   classes, and so on from them too.  Example:  in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
 | |
|   an empty list.  In 2.2a3,
 | |
| 
 | |
|   >>> dir([])
 | |
|   ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
 | |
|    '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
 | |
|    '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
 | |
|    '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
 | |
|    '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
 | |
|    'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
 | |
|    'reverse', 'sort']
 | |
| 
 | |
|   dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
 | |
|   than raising OverflowError.  This is a partial implementation of PEP
 | |
|   237.  You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
 | |
|   this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
 | |
|   OverflowError exception.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
 | |
|   warnings for the use of classic division.  (See PEP 238.)  Possible
 | |
|   values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew.  The default is
 | |
|   -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
 | |
|   warnings are issued.  Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
 | |
|   all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
 | |
|   also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
 | |
|   (for use with fixdiv.py).
 | |
|   [Note:  the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
 | |
|   obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
 | |
| 
 | |
|     Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
 | |
|     only in the __main__ module.  You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
 | |
|     -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
 | |
|     warns about classic division everywhere else.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Many built-in types can now be subclassed.  This applies to int,
 | |
|   long, float, str, unicode, and tuple.  (The types complex, list and
 | |
|   dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
 | |
|   Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
 | |
|   types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
 | |
|   __new__.  You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
 | |
|   will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
 | |
|   (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
 | |
|   once it is created.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
 | |
|   mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
 | |
|   (key, value) pairs.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - A new built-in type, super, has been added.  This facilitates making
 | |
|   "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting.  For an
 | |
|   explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
 | |
| 
 | |
| - A new built-in type, property, has been added.  This enables the
 | |
|   creation of "properties".  These are attributes implemented by
 | |
|   getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
 | |
|   write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
 | |
|   See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
 | |
|   liberalized, to allow leading zeroes.  Examples of literals now
 | |
|   legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
 | |
| 
 | |
|       00.0    0e3   0100j   07.5   00000000000000000008.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
 | |
|   exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-.  Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Library
 | |
| -------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
 | |
|   setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
 | |
|   of suboptions.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
 | |
|   ERANGE on overflow.  For platform libraries that exploit this new
 | |
|   freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken.  A new overflow-
 | |
|   checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
 | |
|   platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
 | |
|   in this area anymore).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
 | |
|   threading.Timer.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
 | |
|   long arguments.  For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
 | |
|   currently held.  See the docs for the imp module.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
 | |
|   dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
 | |
|   When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
 | |
|   converted to Python longs.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
 | |
|   code objects is no longer allowed.  This plugs a security hole.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
 | |
|   generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
 | |
|   to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Tools
 | |
| -----
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
 | |
|   division operators as per PEP 238.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Build
 | |
| -----
 | |
| 
 | |
| - If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
 | |
|   Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
 | |
|   application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
 | |
|   Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
 | |
| 
 | |
| C API
 | |
| -----
 | |
| 
 | |
| - New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail!  This has always been true, but no
 | |
|   callers checked for it.  It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
 | |
|   errors are properly detected now.  The proper way to check::
 | |
| 
 | |
|       double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
 | |
|       if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
 | |
|               /* The conversion failed. */
 | |
|       }
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The GC API has been changed.  Extensions that use the old API will still
 | |
|   compile but will not participate in GC.  To upgrade an extension
 | |
|   module:
 | |
| 
 | |
|     - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
 | |
| 
 | |
|     - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
 | |
|       PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
 | |
| 
 | |
|     - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
 | |
|       to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
 | |
| 
 | |
|     - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
 | |
| 
 | |
|     - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
 | |
|   These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
 | |
|   sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
 | |
|   by PyErr_Format()).
 | |
| 
 | |
| New platforms
 | |
| -------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
 | |
|   under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
 | |
|   out of time to complete the port.  Volunteers?  Expect a MemoryError
 | |
|   when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
 | |
|   causing later failures too.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Tests
 | |
| -----
 | |
| 
 | |
| Windows
 | |
| -------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
 | |
|   Win64.  This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
 | |
|   to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
 | |
|   disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
 | |
|   partitions).  Windows filesystem limits:  FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
 | |
|   filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
 | |
|   FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
 | |
|   NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
 | |
|   used from Python now.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
 | |
|   points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| What's New in Python 2.2a2?
 | |
| ===========================
 | |
| 
 | |
| *Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
 | |
| 
 | |
| Build
 | |
| -----
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
 | |
|   generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
 | |
|   ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
 | |
|   type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
 | |
|   which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
 | |
|   point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
 | |
|   if you are interested in helping.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The 'new' module is now statically linked.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Tools
 | |
| -----
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
 | |
|   edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code.  See
 | |
|   the module docstring for details.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Tests
 | |
| -----
 | |
| 
 | |
| - regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
 | |
|   platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output.  regrtest
 | |
|   also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
 | |
|   which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
 | |
|   Nick Mathewson.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Core
 | |
| ----
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
 | |
|   238.  The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
 | |
|   Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
 | |
|   which case the / operator will provide true division.  The operator
 | |
|   module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions.  Augmented
 | |
|   assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
 | |
|   methods and C API methods.  See the PEP for a full discussion:
 | |
|   <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
 | |
|   (like IDLE).  This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
 | |
|   Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
 | |
|   details:  <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
 | |
|   trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
 | |
|   some features is still tentative).  A lot of work has done on fixing
 | |
|   bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
 | |
|   come a long way).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
 | |
|   now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
 | |
|   write filters for these warnings).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
 | |
|   dictionary.  It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
 | |
|   but now both actions raise TypeErrors.  It is still legal to set it
 | |
|   to a dictionary object.  Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
 | |
|   have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
 | |
|   all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
 | |
|   significant to Python.  Usually those have a name starting with
 | |
|   "PYTHON".  This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
 | |
|   the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
 | |
|   older distribution.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Library
 | |
| -------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
 | |
|   These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
 | |
|   for programmatic reuse.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr():  Quote an XML attribute
 | |
|   value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
 | |
|   reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The gc module offers the get_referents function.
 | |
| 
 | |
| New platforms
 | |
| -------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| C API
 | |
| -----
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
 | |
|   which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
 | |
|   relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
 | |
|   the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
 | |
|   apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
 | |
|   against buffer overruns.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
 | |
|   and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
 | |
|   impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
 | |
|   will result in an ImportError.  Unicode extensions writers must make
 | |
|   sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
 | |
|   using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
 | |
|   tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
 | |
|   single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
 | |
|   calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
 | |
|   deprecated.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Windows
 | |
| -------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
 | |
|   relevant is found.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| What's New in Python 2.2a1?
 | |
| ===========================
 | |
| 
 | |
| *Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
 | |
| 
 | |
| Core
 | |
| ----
 | |
| 
 | |
| - TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
 | |
|   described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
 | |
|   253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added.  This will be released
 | |
|   with Python 2.2a1.  Documentation will be provided separately
 | |
|   through http://www.python.org/2.2/.  The purpose of releasing this
 | |
|   with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility.  It is
 | |
|   possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
 | |
|   this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
 | |
|   incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
 | |
|   repaired.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
 | |
|   below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
 | |
|   more 'yield' statements.  See PEP 255.  Since this adds a new
 | |
|   keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
 | |
|   future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
 | |
|   Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
 | |
|   (probably 2.3).  Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
 | |
|   ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
 | |
|   (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
 | |
|   PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
 | |
|   only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
 | |
|   only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
 | |
|   leading BMO character).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
 | |
|   existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
 | |
|   to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
 | |
| 
 | |
|   To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
 | |
|   casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
 | |
|   were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
 | |
| 
 | |
|   Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
 | |
|   requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
 | |
|   return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
 | |
|   will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
 | |
|   for various simple to use conversions.
 | |
| 
 | |
|   New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
 | |
|   and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
 | |
| 
 | |
|   +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
 | |
|   |Name     | .encode() | .decode() | Description                 |
 | |
|   +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
 | |
|   |uu       | string    | string    | UU codec (e.g. for email)   |
 | |
|   +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
 | |
|   |base64   | string    | string    | base64 codec                |
 | |
|   +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
 | |
|   |quopri   | string    | string    | quoted-printable codec      |
 | |
|   +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
 | |
|   |zlib     | string    | string    | zlib compression            |
 | |
|   +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
 | |
|   |hex      | string    | string    | 2-byte hex codec            |
 | |
|   +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
 | |
|   |rot-13   | string    | Unicode   | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
 | |
|   +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
 | |
|   encoding for file system operations.  Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
 | |
|   as the default.  The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
 | |
|   term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
 | |
|   'mbcs'.
 | |
| 
 | |
|   On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
 | |
|   functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
 | |
|   string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
 | |
|   the platform.  As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
 | |
|   default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
 | |
|   it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
 | |
|   would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
 | |
|   the default encoding for the file system.
 | |
| 
 | |
|   In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
 | |
|   Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
 | |
|   increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
 | |
|   See [????] for more details, including examples.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
 | |
|   precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
 | |
|   .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
 | |
|   12th significant decimal digit.  For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
 | |
|   floating arithmetic,
 | |
| 
 | |
|       x = 9007199254740992.0
 | |
|       print long(x)
 | |
| 
 | |
|   printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
 | |
|   if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file.  This was due to marshal using
 | |
|   str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects.  marshal
 | |
|   now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
 | |
|   machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
 | |
|   functions are of good quality).
 | |
| 
 | |
|   This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
 | |
|   usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
 | |
|   algorithms to break.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
 | |
|   benefits.  However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
 | |
|   dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
 | |
|   given dict.  Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
 | |
|   rely on it.  Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
 | |
|   order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
 | |
|   dict to an "expected results" file.  See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
 | |
|   sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
 | |
|   order.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
 | |
|   operation along the most common code paths.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
 | |
|   the same as dict.has_key(x).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
 | |
|   objects.  Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
 | |
|   and __getitem__() methods.  This allows you to say, for example,
 | |
|   {}.update(UserDict())
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
 | |
|   to a for loop.  See PEP 234.  There's a new built-in function iter()
 | |
|   to return an iterator.  There's a new protocol to get the next value
 | |
|   from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
 | |
|   tp_iternext slot (in C).  There's a new protocol to get iterators
 | |
|   using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
 | |
|   Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
 | |
|   Iterating over a file generates its lines.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
 | |
|   arguments::
 | |
| 
 | |
|     map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
 | |
|     list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
 | |
|     max(), min()
 | |
|     join() method of strings
 | |
|     extend() method of lists
 | |
|     'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
 | |
|     operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
 | |
|     right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
 | |
|         x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
 | |
|   random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
 | |
|   if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower:  there were
 | |
|   insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
 | |
|   to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
 | |
|   values mutated the dicts.  Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
 | |
|   dramatically in bad cases.  For example, looking up every key in a dict
 | |
|   d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
 | |
|   faster now.  Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
 | |
|   the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| Library
 | |
| -------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
 | |
|   were added to the string module.  These a locale-independent
 | |
|   constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase.  These are now
 | |
|   use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
 | |
|   sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module.  This
 | |
|   provides full client-side XML-RPC support.  In addition,
 | |
|   Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
 | |
|   one asyncore-based).  Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
 | |
|   repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
 | |
|   method, or the start, stop and step attributes.  See PEP 260.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
 | |
|   and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
 | |
|   that are still imported into string.py).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
 | |
|   Now it does.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
 | |
|   types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64).  In
 | |
|   native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
 | |
|   these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
 | |
|   process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
 | |
|   In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
 | |
|   8-byte integral types.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
 | |
|   pydoc.help.  It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
 | |
|   it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
 | |
|   'help(object)'.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Tests
 | |
| -----
 | |
| 
 | |
| - New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
 | |
|   comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison.  This
 | |
|   rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
 | |
|   of heart:  it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
 | |
|   pprint.isreadable() return sensible results.  Also verifies that simple
 | |
|   cases produce correct output.
 | |
| 
 | |
| C API
 | |
| -----
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
 | |
|   _PyTuple_Resize().  If this affects you, you were cheating.
 | |
| 
 | |
| What's New in Python 2.1 (final)?
 | |
| =================================
 | |
| 
 | |
| We only changed a few things since the last release candidate, all in
 | |
| Python library code:
 | |
| 
 | |
| - A bug in the locale module was fixed that affected locales which
 | |
|   define no grouping for numeric formatting.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - A few bugs in the weakref module's implementations of weak
 | |
|   dictionaries (WeakValueDictionary and WeakKeyDictionary) were fixed,
 | |
|   and the test suite was updated to check for these bugs.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - An old bug in the os.path.walk() function (introduced in Python
 | |
|   2.0!) was fixed: a non-existent file would cause an exception
 | |
|   instead of being ignored.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Fixed a few bugs in the new symtable module found by Neil Norwitz's
 | |
|   PyChecker.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| What's New in Python 2.1c2?
 | |
| ===========================
 | |
| 
 | |
| A flurry of small changes, and one showstopper fixed in the nick of
 | |
| time made it necessary to release another release candidate.  The list
 | |
| here is the *complete* list of patches (except version updates):
 | |
| 
 | |
| Core
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Tim discovered a nasty bug in the dictionary code, caused by
 | |
|   PyDict_Next() calling dict_resize(), and the GC code's use of
 | |
|   PyDict_Next() violating an assumption in dict_items().  This was
 | |
|   fixed with considerable amounts of band-aid, but the net effect is a
 | |
|   saner and more robust implementation.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Made a bunch of symbols static that were accidentally global.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Build and Ports
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The setup.py script didn't check for a new enough version of zlib
 | |
|   (1.1.3 is needed).  Now it does.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Changed "make clean" target to also remove shared libraries.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Added a more general warning about the SGI Irix optimizer to README.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Library
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Fix a bug in urllib.basejoin("http://host", "../file.html") which
 | |
|   omitted the slash between host and file.html.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The mailbox module's _Mailbox class contained a completely broken
 | |
|   and undocumented seek() method.  Ripped it out.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Fixed a bunch of typos in various library modules (urllib2, smtpd,
 | |
|   sgmllib, netrc, chunk) found by Neil Norwitz's PyChecker.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Fixed a few last-minute bugs in unittest.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Extensions
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Reverted the patch to the OpenSSL code in socketmodule.c to support
 | |
|   RAND_status() and the EGD, and the subsequent patch that tried to
 | |
|   fix it for pre-0.9.5 versions; the problem with the patch is that on
 | |
|   some systems it issues a warning whenever socket is imported, and
 | |
|   that's unacceptable.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Tests
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Fixed the pickle tests to work with "import test.test_pickle".
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Tweaked test_locale.py to actually run the test Windows.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - In distutils/archive_util.py, call zipfile.ZipFile() with mode "w",
 | |
|   not "wb" (which is not a valid mode at all).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Fix pstats browser crashes.  Import readline if it exists to make
 | |
|   the user interface nicer.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Add "import thread" to the top of test modules that import the
 | |
|   threading module (test_asynchat and test_threadedtempfile).  This
 | |
|   prevents test failures caused by a broken threading module resulting
 | |
|   from a previously caught failed import.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Changed test_asynchat.py to set the SO_REUSEADDR option; this was
 | |
|   needed on some platforms (e.g. Solaris 8) when the tests are run
 | |
|   twice in succession.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Skip rather than fail test_sunaudiodev if no audio device is found.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| What's New in Python 2.1c1?
 | |
| ===========================
 | |
| 
 | |
| This list was significantly updated when 2.1c2 was released; the 2.1c1
 | |
| release didn't mention most changes that were actually part of 2.1c1:
 | |
| 
 | |
| Legal
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Copyright was assigned to the Python Software Foundation (PSF) and a
 | |
|   PSF license (very similar to the CNRI license) was added.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The CNRI copyright notice was updated to include 2001.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Core
 | |
| 
 | |
| - After a public outcry, assignment to __debug__ is no longer illegal;
 | |
|   instead, a warning is issued.  It will become illegal in 2.2.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Fixed a core dump with "%#x" % 0, and changed the semantics so that
 | |
|   "%#x" now always prepends "0x", even if the value is zero.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Fixed some nits in the bytecode compiler.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Fixed core dumps when calling certain kinds of non-functions.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Fixed various core dumps caused by reference count bugs.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Build and Ports
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Use INSTALL_SCRIPT to install script files.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - New port: SCO Unixware 7, by Billy G. Allie.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Updated RISCOS port.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Updated BeOS port and notes.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Various other porting problems resolved.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Library
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The TERMIOS and SOCKET modules are now truly obsolete and
 | |
|   unnecessary.  Their symbols are incorporated in the termios and
 | |
|   socket modules.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Fixed some 64-bit bugs in pickle, cPickle, and struct, and added
 | |
|   better tests for pickling.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - threading: make Condition.wait() robust against KeyboardInterrupt.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - zipfile: add support to zipfile to support opening an archive
 | |
|   represented by an open file rather than a file name.  Fix bug where
 | |
|   the archive was not properly closed.  Fixed a bug in this bugfix
 | |
|   where flush() was called for a read-only file.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - imputil: added an uninstall() method to the ImportManager.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Canvas: fixed bugs in lower() and tkraise() methods.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - SocketServer: API change (added overridable close_request() method)
 | |
|   so that the TCP server can explicitly close the request.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - pstats: Eric Raymond added a simple interactive statistics browser,
 | |
|   invoked when the module is run as a script.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - locale: fixed a problem in format().
 | |
| 
 | |
| - webbrowser: made it work when the BROWSER environment variable has a
 | |
|   value like "/usr/bin/netscape".  Made it auto-detect Konqueror for
 | |
|   KDE 2.  Fixed some other nits.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - unittest: changes to allow using a different exception than
 | |
|   AssertionError, and added a few more function aliases.  Some other
 | |
|   small changes.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - urllib, urllib2: fixed redirect problems and a coupleof other nits.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - asynchat: fixed a critical bug in asynchat that slipped through the
 | |
|   2.1b2 release.  Fixed another rare bug.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Fix some unqualified except: clauses (always a bad code example).
 | |
| 
 | |
| XML
 | |
| 
 | |
| - pyexpat: new API get_version_string().
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Fixed some minidom bugs.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Extensions
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Fixed a core dump in _weakref.  Removed the weakref.mapping()
 | |
|   function (it adds nothing to the API).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Rationalized the use of header files in the readline module, to make
 | |
|   it compile (albeit with some warnings) with the very recent readline
 | |
|   4.2, without breaking for earlier versions.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Hopefully fixed a buffering problem in linuxaudiodev.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Attempted a fix to make the OpenSSL support in the socket module
 | |
|   work again with pre-0.9.5 versions of OpenSSL.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Tests
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Added a test case for asynchat and asyncore.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Removed coupling between tests where one test failing could break
 | |
|   another.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Tools
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Ping added an interactive help browser to pydoc, fixed some nits
 | |
|   in the rest of the pydoc code, and added some features to his
 | |
|   inspect module.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - An updated python-mode.el version 4.1 which integrates Ken
 | |
|   Manheimer's pdbtrack.el.  This makes debugging Python code via pdb
 | |
|   much nicer in XEmacs and Emacs.  When stepping through your program
 | |
|   with pdb, in either the shell window or the *Python* window, the
 | |
|   source file and line will be tracked by an arrow.  Very cool!
 | |
| 
 | |
| - IDLE: syntax warnings in interactive mode are changed into errors.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Some improvements to Tools/webchecker (ignore some more URL types,
 | |
|   follow some more links).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Brought the Tools/compiler package up to date.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| What's New in Python 2.1 beta 2?
 | |
| ================================
 | |
| 
 | |
| (Unlisted are many fixed bugs, more documentation, etc.)
 | |
| 
 | |
| Core language, builtins, and interpreter
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The nested scopes work (enabled by "from __future__ import
 | |
|   nested_scopes") is completed; in particular, the future now extends
 | |
|   into code executed through exec, eval() and execfile(), and into the
 | |
|   interactive interpreter.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - When calling a base class method (e.g. BaseClass.__init__(self)),
 | |
|   this is now allowed even if self is not strictly spoken a class
 | |
|   instance (e.g. when using metaclasses or the Don Beaudry hook).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Slice objects are now comparable but not hashable; this prevents
 | |
|   dict[:] from being accepted but meaningless.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Complex division is now calculated using less braindead algorithms.
 | |
|   This doesn't change semantics except it's more likely to give useful
 | |
|   results in extreme cases.  Complex repr() now uses full precision
 | |
|   like float repr().
 | |
| 
 | |
| - sgmllib.py now calls handle_decl() for simple <!...> declarations.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - It is illegal to assign to the name __debug__, which is set when the
 | |
|   interpreter starts.  It is effectively a compile-time constant.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - A warning will be issued if a global statement for a variable
 | |
|   follows a use or assignment of that variable.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Standard library
 | |
| 
 | |
| - unittest.py, a unit testing framework by Steve Purcell (PyUNIT,
 | |
|   inspired by JUnit), is now part of the standard library.  You now
 | |
|   have a choice of two testing frameworks: unittest requires you to
 | |
|   write testcases as separate code, doctest gathers them from
 | |
|   docstrings.  Both approaches have their advantages and
 | |
|   disadvantages.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - A new module Tix was added, which wraps the Tix extension library
 | |
|   for Tk.  With that module, it is not necessary to statically link
 | |
|   Tix with _tkinter, since Tix will be loaded with Tcl's "package
 | |
|   require" command.  See Demo/tix/.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - tzparse.py is now obsolete.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - In gzip.py, the seek() and tell() methods are removed -- they were
 | |
|   non-functional anyway, and it's better if callers can test for their
 | |
|   existence with hasattr().
 | |
| 
 | |
| Python/C API
 | |
| 
 | |
| - PyDict_Next(): it is now safe to call PyDict_SetItem() with a key
 | |
|   that's already in the dictionary during a PyDict_Next() iteration.
 | |
|   This used to fail occasionally when a dictionary resize operation
 | |
|   could be triggered that would rehash all the keys.  All other
 | |
|   modifications to the dictionary are still off-limits during a
 | |
|   PyDict_Next() iteration!
 | |
| 
 | |
| - New extended APIs related to passing compiler variables around.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - New abstract APIs PyObject_IsInstance(), PyObject_IsSubclass()
 | |
|   implement isinstance() and issubclass().
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Py_BuildValue() now has a "D" conversion to create a Python complex
 | |
|   number from a Py_complex C value.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Extensions types which support weak references must now set the
 | |
|   field allocated for the weak reference machinery to NULL themselves;
 | |
|   this is done to avoid the cost of checking each object for having a
 | |
|   weakly referencable type in PyObject_INIT(), since most types are
 | |
|   not weakly referencable.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - PyFrame_FastToLocals() and PyFrame_LocalsToFast() copy bindings for
 | |
|   free variables and cell variables to and from the frame's f_locals.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Variants of several functions defined in pythonrun.h have been added
 | |
|   to support the nested_scopes future statement.  The variants all end
 | |
|   in Flags and take an extra argument, a PyCompilerFlags *; examples:
 | |
|   PyRun_AnyFileExFlags(), PyRun_InteractiveLoopFlags().  These
 | |
|   variants may be removed in Python 2.2, when nested scopes are
 | |
|   mandatory.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Distutils
 | |
| 
 | |
| - the sdist command now writes a PKG-INFO file, as described in PEP 241,
 | |
|   into the release tree.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - several enhancements to the bdist_wininst command from Thomas Heller
 | |
|   (an uninstaller, more customization of the installer's display)
 | |
| 
 | |
| - from Jack Jansen: added Mac-specific code to generate a dialog for
 | |
|   users to specify the command-line (because providing a command-line with
 | |
|   MacPython is awkward).  Jack also made various fixes for the Mac
 | |
|   and the Metrowerks compiler.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - added 'platforms' and 'keywords' to the set of metadata that can be
 | |
|   specified for a distribution.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - applied patches from Jason Tishler to make the compiler class work with
 | |
|   Cygwin.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| What's New in Python 2.1 beta 1?
 | |
| ================================
 | |
| 
 | |
| Core language, builtins, and interpreter
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Following an outcry from the community about the amount of code
 | |
|   broken by the nested scopes feature introduced in 2.1a2, we decided
 | |
|   to make this feature optional, and to wait until Python 2.2 (or at
 | |
|   least 6 months) to make it standard.  The option can be enabled on a
 | |
|   per-module basis by adding "from __future__ import nested_scopes" at
 | |
|   the beginning of a module (before any other statements, but after
 | |
|   comments and an optional docstring).  See PEP 236 (Back to the
 | |
|   __future__) for a description of the __future__ statement.  PEP 227
 | |
|   (Statically Nested Scopes) has been updated to reflect this change,
 | |
|   and to clarify the semantics in a number of endcases.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The nested scopes code, when enabled, has been hardened, and most
 | |
|   bugs and memory leaks in it have been fixed.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Compile-time warnings are now generated for a number of conditions
 | |
|   that will break or change in meaning when nested scopes are enabled:
 | |
| 
 | |
|   - Using "from...import *" or "exec" without in-clause in a function
 | |
|     scope that also defines a lambda or nested function with one or
 | |
|     more free (non-local) variables.  The presence of the import* or
 | |
|     bare exec makes it impossible for the compiler to determine the
 | |
|     exact set of local variables in the outer scope, which makes it
 | |
|     impossible to determine the bindings for free variables in the
 | |
|     inner scope.  To avoid the warning about import *, change it into
 | |
|     an import of explicitly name object, or move the import* statement
 | |
|     to the global scope; to avoid the warning about bare exec, use
 | |
|     exec...in... (a good idea anyway -- there's a possibility that
 | |
|     bare exec will be deprecated in the future).
 | |
| 
 | |
|   - Use of a global variable in a nested scope with the same name as a
 | |
|     local variable in a surrounding scope.  This will change in
 | |
|     meaning with nested scopes: the name in the inner scope will
 | |
|     reference the variable in the outer scope rather than the global
 | |
|     of the same name.  To avoid the warning, either rename the outer
 | |
|     variable, or use a global statement in the inner function.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - An optional object allocator has been included.  This allocator is
 | |
|   optimized for Python objects and should be faster and use less memory
 | |
|   than the standard system allocator.  It is not enabled by default
 | |
|   because of possible thread safety problems.  The allocator is only
 | |
|   protected by the Python interpreter lock and it is possible that some
 | |
|   extension modules require a thread safe allocator.  The object
 | |
|   allocator can be enabled by providing the "--with-pymalloc" option to
 | |
|   configure.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Standard library
 | |
| 
 | |
| - pyexpat now detects the expat version if expat.h defines it. A
 | |
|   number of additional handlers are provided, which are only available
 | |
|   since expat 1.95. In addition, the methods SetParamEntityParsing and
 | |
|   GetInputContext of Parser objects are available with 1.95.x
 | |
|   only. Parser objects now provide the ordered_attributes and
 | |
|   specified_attributes attributes. A new module expat.model was added,
 | |
|   which offers a number of additional constants if 1.95.x is used.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - xml.dom offers the new functions registerDOMImplementation and
 | |
|   getDOMImplementation.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - xml.dom.minidom offers a toprettyxml method. A number of DOM
 | |
|   conformance issues have been resolved. In particular, Element now
 | |
|   has an hasAttributes method, and the handling of namespaces was
 | |
|   improved.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Ka-Ping Yee contributed two new modules: inspect.py, a module for
 | |
|   getting information about live Python code, and pydoc.py, a module
 | |
|   for interactively converting docstrings to HTML or text.
 | |
|   Tools/scripts/pydoc, which is now automatically installed into
 | |
|   <prefix>/bin, uses pydoc.py to display documentation; try running
 | |
|   "pydoc -h" for instructions.  "pydoc -g" pops up a small GUI that
 | |
|   lets you browse the module docstrings using a web browser.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - New library module difflib.py, primarily packaging the SequenceMatcher
 | |
|   class at the heart of the popular ndiff.py file-comparison tool.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - doctest.py (a framework for verifying Python code examples in docstrings)
 | |
|   is now part of the std library.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Windows changes
 | |
| 
 | |
| - A new entry in the Start menu, "Module Docs", runs "pydoc -g" -- a
 | |
|   small GUI that lets you browse the module docstrings using your
 | |
|   default web browser.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Import is now case-sensitive.  PEP 235 (Import on Case-Insensitive
 | |
|   Platforms) is implemented.  See
 | |
| 
 | |
|       http://python.sourceforge.net/peps/pep-0235.html
 | |
| 
 | |
|   for full details, especially the "Current Lower-Left Semantics" section.
 | |
|   The new Windows import rules are simpler than before:
 | |
| 
 | |
|   A. If the PYTHONCASEOK environment variable exists, same as
 | |
|      before:  silently accept the first case-insensitive match of any
 | |
|      kind; raise ImportError if none found.
 | |
| 
 | |
|   B. Else search sys.path for the first case-sensitive match; raise
 | |
|      ImportError if none found.
 | |
| 
 | |
|   The same rules have been implemented on other platforms with case-
 | |
|   insensitive but case-preserving filesystems too (including Cygwin, and
 | |
|   several flavors of Macintosh operating systems).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - winsound module:  Under Win9x, winsound.Beep() now attempts to simulate
 | |
|   what it's supposed to do (and does do under NT and 2000) via direct
 | |
|   port manipulation.  It's unknown whether this will work on all systems,
 | |
|   but it does work on my Win98SE systems now and was known to be useless on
 | |
|   all Win9x systems before.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Build:  Subproject _test (effectively) renamed to _testcapi.
 | |
| 
 | |
| New platforms
 | |
| 
 | |
| - 2.1 should compile and run out of the box under MacOS X, even using HFS+.
 | |
|   Thanks to Steven Majewski!
 | |
| 
 | |
| - 2.1 should compile and run out of the box on Cygwin.  Thanks to Jason
 | |
|   Tishler!
 | |
| 
 | |
| - 2.1 contains new files and patches for RISCOS, thanks to Dietmar
 | |
|   Schwertberger!  See RISCOS/README for more information -- it seems
 | |
|   that because of the bizarre filename conventions on RISCOS, no port
 | |
|   to that platform is easy.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| What's New in Python 2.1 alpha 2?
 | |
| =================================
 | |
| 
 | |
| Core language, builtins, and interpreter
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Scopes nest.  If a name is used in a function or class, but is not
 | |
|   local, the definition in the nearest enclosing function scope will
 | |
|   be used.  One consequence of this change is that lambda statements
 | |
|   could reference variables in the namespaces where the lambda is
 | |
|   defined.  In some unusual cases, this change will break code.
 | |
| 
 | |
|   In all previous version of Python, names were resolved in exactly
 | |
|   three namespaces -- the local namespace, the global namespace, and
 | |
|   the builtins namespace.  According to this old definition, if a
 | |
|   function A is defined within a function B, the names bound in B are
 | |
|   not visible in A.  The new rules make names bound in B visible in A,
 | |
|   unless A contains a name binding that hides the binding in B.
 | |
| 
 | |
|   Section 4.1 of the reference manual describes the new scoping rules
 | |
|   in detail.  The test script in Lib/test/test_scope.py demonstrates
 | |
|   some of the effects of the change.
 | |
| 
 | |
|   The new rules will cause existing code to break if it defines nested
 | |
|   functions where an outer function has local variables with the same
 | |
|   name as globals or builtins used by the inner function.  Example:
 | |
| 
 | |
|     def munge(str):
 | |
|         def helper(x):
 | |
|             return str(x)
 | |
|         if type(str) != type(''):
 | |
|             str = helper(str)
 | |
|         return str.strip()
 | |
| 
 | |
|   Under the old rules, the name str in helper() is bound to the
 | |
|   built-in function str().  Under the new rules, it will be bound to
 | |
|   the argument named str and an error will occur when helper() is
 | |
|   called.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The compiler will report a SyntaxError if "from ... import *" occurs
 | |
|   in a function or class scope.  The language reference has documented
 | |
|   that this case is illegal, but the compiler never checked for it.
 | |
|   The recent introduction of nested scope makes the meaning of this
 | |
|   form of name binding ambiguous.  In a future release, the compiler
 | |
|   may allow this form when there is no possibility of ambiguity.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - repr(string) is easier to read, now using hex escapes instead of octal,
 | |
|   and using \t, \n and \r instead of \011, \012 and \015 (respectively):
 | |
| 
 | |
|   >>> "\texample \r\n" + chr(0) + chr(255)
 | |
|   '\texample \r\n\x00\xff'         # in 2.1
 | |
|   '\011example \015\012\000\377'   # in 2.0
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Functions are now compared and hashed by identity, not by value, since
 | |
|   the func_code attribute is writable.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Weak references (PEP 205) have been added.  This involves a few
 | |
|   changes in the core, an extension module (_weakref), and a Python
 | |
|   module (weakref).  The weakref module is the public interface.  It
 | |
|   includes support for "explicit" weak references, proxy objects, and
 | |
|   mappings with weakly held values.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - A 'continue' statement can now appear in a try block within the body
 | |
|   of a loop.  It is still not possible to use continue in a finally
 | |
|   clause.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Standard library
 | |
| 
 | |
| - mailbox.py now has a new class, PortableUnixMailbox which is
 | |
|   identical to UnixMailbox but uses a more portable scheme for
 | |
|   determining From_ separators.  Also, the constructors for all the
 | |
|   classes in this module have a new optional `factory' argument, which
 | |
|   is a callable used when new message classes must be instantiated by
 | |
|   the next() method.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - random.py is now self-contained, and offers all the functionality of
 | |
|   the now-deprecated whrandom.py.  See the docs for details.  random.py
 | |
|   also supports new functions getstate() and setstate(), for saving
 | |
|   and restoring the internal state of the generator; and jumpahead(n),
 | |
|   for quickly forcing the internal state to be the same as if n calls to
 | |
|   random() had been made.  The latter is particularly useful for multi-
 | |
|   threaded programs, creating one instance of the random.Random() class for
 | |
|   each thread, then using .jumpahead() to force each instance to use a
 | |
|   non-overlapping segment of the full period.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - random.py's seed() function is new.  For bit-for-bit compatibility with
 | |
|   prior releases, use the whseed function instead.  The new seed function
 | |
|   addresses two problems:  (1) The old function couldn't produce more than
 | |
|   about 2**24 distinct internal states; the new one about 2**45 (the best
 | |
|   that can be done in the Wichmann-Hill generator).  (2) The old function
 | |
|   sometimes produced identical internal states when passed distinct
 | |
|   integers, and there was no simple way to predict when that would happen;
 | |
|   the new one guarantees to produce distinct internal states for all
 | |
|   arguments in [0, 27814431486576L).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The socket module now supports raw packets on Linux.  The socket
 | |
|   family is AF_PACKET.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - test_capi.py is a start at running tests of the Python C API.  The tests
 | |
|   are implemented by the new Modules/_testmodule.c.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - A new extension module, _symtable, provides provisional access to the
 | |
|   internal symbol table used by the Python compiler.  A higher-level
 | |
|   interface will be added on top of _symtable in a future release.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Removed the obsolete soundex module.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - xml.dom.minidom now uses the standard DOM exceptions. Node supports
 | |
|   the isSameNode method; NamedNodeMap the get method.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - xml.sax.expatreader supports the lexical handler property; it
 | |
|   generates comment, startCDATA, and endCDATA events.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Windows changes
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Build procedure:  the zlib project is built in a different way that
 | |
|   ensures the zlib header files used can no longer get out of synch with
 | |
|   the zlib binary used.  See PCbuild\readme.txt for details.  Your old
 | |
|   zlib-related directories can be deleted; you'll need to download fresh
 | |
|   source for zlib and unpack it into a new directory.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Build:  New subproject _test for the benefit of test_capi.py (see above).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Build:  New subproject _symtable, for new DLL _symtable.pyd (a nascent
 | |
|   interface to some Python compiler internals).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Build:  Subproject ucnhash is gone, since the code was folded into the
 | |
|   unicodedata subproject.
 | |
| 
 | |
| What's New in Python 2.1 alpha 1?
 | |
| =================================
 | |
| 
 | |
| Core language, builtins, and interpreter
 | |
| 
 | |
| - There is a new Unicode companion to the PyObject_Str() API
 | |
|   called PyObject_Unicode(). It behaves in the same way as the
 | |
|   former, but assures that the returned value is an Unicode object
 | |
|   (applying the usual coercion if necessary).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The comparison operators support "rich comparison overloading" (PEP
 | |
|   207).  C extension types can provide a rich comparison function in
 | |
|   the new tp_richcompare slot in the type object.  The cmp() function
 | |
|   and the C function PyObject_Compare() first try the new rich
 | |
|   comparison operators before trying the old 3-way comparison.  There
 | |
|   is also a new C API PyObject_RichCompare() (which also falls back on
 | |
|   the old 3-way comparison, but does not constrain the outcome of the
 | |
|   rich comparison to a Boolean result).
 | |
| 
 | |
|   The rich comparison function takes two objects (at least one of
 | |
|   which is guaranteed to have the type that provided the function) and
 | |
|   an integer indicating the opcode, which can be Py_LT, Py_LE, Py_EQ,
 | |
|   Py_NE, Py_GT, Py_GE (for <, <=, ==, !=, >, >=), and returns a Python
 | |
|   object, which may be NotImplemented (in which case the tp_compare
 | |
|   slot function is used as a fallback, if defined).
 | |
| 
 | |
|   Classes can overload individual comparison operators by defining one
 | |
|   or more of the methods__lt__, __le__, __eq__, __ne__, __gt__,
 | |
|   __ge__.  There are no explicit "reflected argument" versions of
 | |
|   these; instead, __lt__ and __gt__ are each other's reflection,
 | |
|   likewise for__le__ and __ge__; __eq__ and __ne__ are their own
 | |
|   reflection (similar at the C level).  No other implications are
 | |
|   made; in particular, Python does not assume that == is the Boolean
 | |
|   inverse of !=, or that < is the Boolean inverse of >=.  This makes
 | |
|   it possible to define types with partial orderings.
 | |
| 
 | |
|   Classes or types that want to implement (in)equality tests but not
 | |
|   the ordering operators (i.e. unordered types) should implement ==
 | |
|   and !=, and raise an error for the ordering operators.
 | |
| 
 | |
|   It is possible to define types whose rich comparison results are not
 | |
|   Boolean; e.g. a matrix type might want to return a matrix of bits
 | |
|   for A < B, giving elementwise comparisons.  Such types should ensure
 | |
|   that any interpretation of their value in a Boolean context raises
 | |
|   an exception, e.g. by defining __nonzero__ (or the tp_nonzero slot
 | |
|   at the C level) to always raise an exception.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Complex numbers use rich comparisons to define == and != but raise
 | |
|   an exception for <, <=, > and >=.  Unfortunately, this also means
 | |
|   that cmp() of two complex numbers raises an exception when the two
 | |
|   numbers differ.  Since it is not mathematically meaningful to compare
 | |
|   complex numbers except for equality, I hope that this doesn't break
 | |
|   too much code.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The outcome of comparing non-numeric objects of different types is
 | |
|   not defined by the language, other than that it's arbitrary but
 | |
|   consistent (see the Reference Manual).  An implementation detail changed
 | |
|   in 2.1a1 such that None now compares less than any other object.  Code
 | |
|   relying on this new behavior (like code that relied on the previous
 | |
|   behavior) does so at its own risk.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Functions and methods now support getting and setting arbitrarily
 | |
|   named attributes (PEP 232).  Functions have a new __dict__
 | |
|   (a.k.a. func_dict) which hold the function attributes.  Methods get
 | |
|   and set attributes on their underlying im_func.  It is a TypeError
 | |
|   to set an attribute on a bound method.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The xrange() object implementation has been improved so that
 | |
|   xrange(sys.maxint) can be used on 64-bit platforms.  There's still a
 | |
|   limitation that in this case len(xrange(sys.maxint)) can't be
 | |
|   calculated, but the common idiom "for i in xrange(sys.maxint)" will
 | |
|   work fine as long as the index i doesn't actually reach 2**31.
 | |
|   (Python uses regular ints for sequence and string indices; fixing
 | |
|   that is much more work.)
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Two changes to from...import:
 | |
| 
 | |
|   1) "from M import X" now works even if (after loading module M)
 | |
|      sys.modules['M'] is not a real module; it's basically a getattr()
 | |
|      operation with AttributeError exceptions changed into ImportError.
 | |
| 
 | |
|   2) "from M import *" now looks for M.__all__ to decide which names to
 | |
|      import; if M.__all__ doesn't exist, it uses M.__dict__.keys() but
 | |
|      filters out names starting with '_' as before.  Whether or not
 | |
|      __all__ exists, there's no restriction on the type of M.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - File objects have a new method, xreadlines().  This is the fastest
 | |
|   way to iterate over all lines in a file:
 | |
| 
 | |
|   for line in file.xreadlines():
 | |
|       ...do something to line...
 | |
| 
 | |
|   See the xreadlines module (mentioned below) for how to do this for
 | |
|   other file-like objects.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Even if you don't use file.xreadlines(), you may expect a speedup on
 | |
|   line-by-line input.  The file.readline() method has been optimized
 | |
|   quite a bit in platform-specific ways:  on systems (like Linux) that
 | |
|   support flockfile(), getc_unlocked(), and funlockfile(), those are
 | |
|   used by default.  On systems (like Windows) without getc_unlocked(),
 | |
|   a complicated (but still thread-safe) method using fgets() is used by
 | |
|   default.
 | |
| 
 | |
|   You can force use of the fgets() method by #define'ing
 | |
|   USE_FGETS_IN_GETLINE at build time (it may be faster than
 | |
|   getc_unlocked()).
 | |
| 
 | |
|   You can force fgets() not to be used by #define'ing
 | |
|   DONT_USE_FGETS_IN_GETLINE (this is the first thing to try if std test
 | |
|   test_bufio.py fails -- and let us know if it does!).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - In addition, the fileinput module, while still slower than the other
 | |
|   methods on most platforms, has been sped up too, by using
 | |
|   file.readlines(sizehint).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Support for run-time warnings has been added, including a new
 | |
|   command line option (-W) to specify the disposition of warnings.
 | |
|   See the description of the warnings module below.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Extensive changes have been made to the coercion code.  This mostly
 | |
|   affects extension modules (which can now implement mixed-type
 | |
|   numerical operators without having to use coercion), but
 | |
|   occasionally, in boundary cases the coercion semantics have changed
 | |
|   subtly.  Since this was a terrible gray area of the language, this
 | |
|   is considered an improvement.  Also note that __rcmp__ is no longer
 | |
|   supported -- instead of calling __rcmp__, __cmp__ is called with
 | |
|   reflected arguments.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - In connection with the coercion changes, a new built-in singleton
 | |
|   object, NotImplemented is defined.  This can be returned for
 | |
|   operations that wish to indicate they are not implemented for a
 | |
|   particular combination of arguments.  From C, this is
 | |
|   Py_NotImplemented.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The interpreter accepts now bytecode files on the command line even
 | |
|   if they do not have a .pyc or .pyo extension. On Linux, after executing
 | |
| 
 | |
| import imp,sys,string
 | |
| magic = string.join(["\\x%.2x" % ord(c) for c in imp.get_magic()],"")
 | |
| reg = ':pyc:M::%s::%s:' % (magic, sys.executable)
 | |
| open("/proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc/register","wb").write(reg)
 | |
| 
 | |
|   any byte code file can be used as an executable (i.e. as an argument
 | |
|   to execve(2)).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - %[xXo] formats of negative Python longs now produce a sign
 | |
|   character.  In 1.6 and earlier, they never produced a sign,
 | |
|   and raised an error if the value of the long was too large
 | |
|   to fit in a Python int.  In 2.0, they produced a sign if and
 | |
|   only if too large to fit in an int.  This was inconsistent
 | |
|   across platforms (because the size of an int varies across
 | |
|   platforms), and inconsistent with hex() and oct().  Example:
 | |
| 
 | |
|   >>> "%x" % -0x42L
 | |
|   '-42'      # in 2.1
 | |
|   'ffffffbe' # in 2.0 and before, on 32-bit machines
 | |
|   >>> hex(-0x42L)
 | |
|   '-0x42L'   # in all versions of Python
 | |
| 
 | |
|   The behavior of %d formats for negative Python longs remains
 | |
|   the same as in 2.0 (although in 1.6 and before, they raised
 | |
|   an error if the long didn't fit in a Python int).
 | |
| 
 | |
|   %u formats don't make sense for Python longs, but are allowed
 | |
|   and treated the same as %d in 2.1.  In 2.0, a negative long
 | |
|   formatted via %u produced a sign if and only if too large to
 | |
|   fit in an int.  In 1.6 and earlier, a negative long formatted
 | |
|   via %u raised an error if it was too big to fit in an int.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Dictionary objects have an odd new method, popitem().  This removes
 | |
|   an arbitrary item from the dictionary and returns it (in the form of
 | |
|   a (key, value) pair).  This can be useful for algorithms that use a
 | |
|   dictionary as a bag of "to do" items and repeatedly need to pick one
 | |
|   item.  Such algorithms normally end up running in quadratic time;
 | |
|   using popitem() they can usually be made to run in linear time.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Standard library
 | |
| 
 | |
| - In the time module, the time argument to the functions strftime,
 | |
|   localtime, gmtime, asctime and ctime is now optional, defaulting to
 | |
|   the current time (in the local timezone).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The ftplib module now defaults to passive mode, which is deemed a
 | |
|   more useful default given that clients are often inside firewalls
 | |
|   these days.  Note that this could break if ftplib is used to connect
 | |
|   to a *server* that is inside a firewall, from outside; this is
 | |
|   expected to be a very rare situation.  To fix that, you can call
 | |
|   ftp.set_pasv(0).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The module site now treats .pth files not only for path configuration,
 | |
|   but also supports extensions to the initialization code: Lines starting
 | |
|   with import are executed.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - There's a new module, warnings, which implements a mechanism for
 | |
|   issuing and filtering warnings.  There are some new built-in
 | |
|   exceptions that serve as warning categories, and a new command line
 | |
|   option, -W, to control warnings (e.g. -Wi ignores all warnings, -We
 | |
|   turns warnings into errors).  warnings.warn(message[, category])
 | |
|   issues a warning message; this can also be called from C as
 | |
|   PyErr_Warn(category, message).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - A new module xreadlines was added.  This exports a single factory
 | |
|   function, xreadlines().  The intention is that this code is the
 | |
|   absolutely fastest way to iterate over all lines in an open
 | |
|   file(-like) object:
 | |
| 
 | |
|   import xreadlines
 | |
|   for line in xreadlines.xreadlines(file):
 | |
|       ...do something to line...
 | |
| 
 | |
|   This is equivalent to the previous the speed record holder using
 | |
|   file.readlines(sizehint).  Note that if file is a real file object
 | |
|   (as opposed to a file-like object), this is equivalent:
 | |
| 
 | |
|   for line in file.xreadlines():
 | |
|       ...do something to line...
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The bisect module has new functions bisect_left, insort_left,
 | |
|   bisect_right and insort_right.  The old names bisect and insort
 | |
|   are now aliases for bisect_right and insort_right.  XXX_right
 | |
|   and XXX_left methods differ in what happens when the new element
 | |
|   compares equal to one or more elements already in the list:  the
 | |
|   XXX_left methods insert to the left, the XXX_right methods to the
 | |
|   right.  Code that doesn't care where equal elements end up should
 | |
|   continue to use the old, short names ("bisect" and "insort").
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The new curses.panel module wraps the panel library that forms part
 | |
|   of SYSV curses and ncurses.  Contributed by Thomas Gellekum.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The SocketServer module now sets the allow_reuse_address flag by
 | |
|   default in the TCPServer class.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - A new function, sys._getframe(), returns the stack frame pointer of
 | |
|   the caller.  This is intended only as a building block for
 | |
|   higher-level mechanisms such as string interpolation.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The pyexpat module supports a number of new handlers, which are
 | |
|   available only in expat 1.2. If invocation of a callback fails, it
 | |
|   will report an additional frame in the traceback. Parser objects
 | |
|   participate now in garbage collection. If expat reports an unknown
 | |
|   encoding, pyexpat will try to use a Python codec; that works only
 | |
|   for single-byte charsets. The parser type objects is exposed as
 | |
|   XMLParserObject.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - xml.dom now offers standard definitions for symbolic node type and
 | |
|   exception code constants, and a hierarchy of DOM exceptions. minidom
 | |
|   was adjusted to use them.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The conformance of xml.dom.minidom to the DOM specification was
 | |
|   improved. It detects a number of additional error cases; the
 | |
|   previous/next relationship works even when the tree is modified;
 | |
|   Node supports the normalize() method; NamedNodeMap, DocumentType and
 | |
|   DOMImplementation classes were added; Element supports the
 | |
|   hasAttribute and hasAttributeNS methods; and Text supports the splitText
 | |
|   method.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Build issues
 | |
| 
 | |
| - For Unix (and Unix-compatible) builds, configuration and building of
 | |
|   extension modules is now greatly automated.  Rather than having to
 | |
|   edit the Modules/Setup file to indicate which modules should be
 | |
|   built and where their include files and libraries are, a
 | |
|   distutils-based setup.py script now takes care of building most
 | |
|   extension modules.  All extension modules built this way are built
 | |
|   as shared libraries.  Only a few modules that must be linked
 | |
|   statically are still listed in the Setup file; you won't need to
 | |
|   edit their configuration.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Python should now build out of the box on Cygwin.  If it doesn't,
 | |
|   mail to Jason Tishler (jlt63 at users.sourceforge.net).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Python now always uses its own (renamed) implementation of getopt()
 | |
|   -- there's too much variation among C library getopt()
 | |
|   implementations.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - C++ compilers are better supported; the CXX macro is always set to a
 | |
|   C++ compiler if one is found.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Windows changes
 | |
| 
 | |
| - select module:  By default under Windows, a select() call
 | |
|   can specify no more than 64 sockets.  Python now boosts
 | |
|   this Microsoft default to 512.  If you need even more than
 | |
|   that, see the MS docs (you'll need to #define FD_SETSIZE
 | |
|   and recompile Python from source).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Support for Windows 3.1, DOS and OS/2 is gone.  The Lib/dos-8x3
 | |
|   subdirectory is no more!
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| What's New in Python 2.0?
 | |
| =========================
 | |
| 
 | |
| Below is a list of all relevant changes since release 1.6.  Older
 | |
| changes are in the file HISTORY.  If you are making the jump directly
 | |
| from Python 1.5.2 to 2.0, make sure to read the section for 1.6 in the
 | |
| HISTORY file!  Many important changes listed there.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Alternatively, a good overview of the changes between 1.5.2 and 2.0 is
 | |
| the document "What's New in Python 2.0" by Kuchling and Moshe Zadka:
 | |
| http://www.amk.ca/python/2.0/.
 | |
| 
 | |
| --Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.pythonlabs.com/~guido/)
 | |
| 
 | |
| ======================================================================
 | |
| 
 | |
| What's new in 2.0 (since release candidate 1)?
 | |
| ==============================================
 | |
| 
 | |
| Standard library
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The copy_reg module was modified to clarify its intended use: to
 | |
|   register pickle support for extension types, not for classes.
 | |
|   pickle() will raise a TypeError if it is passed a class.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Fixed a bug in gettext's "normalize and expand" code that prevented
 | |
|   it from finding an existing .mo file.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Restored support for HTTP/0.9 servers in httplib.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The math module was changed to stop raising OverflowError in case of
 | |
|   underflow, and return 0 instead in underflow cases.  Whether Python
 | |
|   used to raise OverflowError in case of underflow was platform-
 | |
|   dependent (it did when the platform math library set errno to ERANGE
 | |
|   on underflow).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Fixed a bug in StringIO that occurred when the file position was not
 | |
|   at the end of the file and write() was called with enough data to
 | |
|   extend past the end of the file.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Fixed a bug that caused Tkinter error messages to get lost on
 | |
|   Windows.  The bug was fixed by replacing direct use of
 | |
|   interp->result with Tcl_GetStringResult(interp).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Fixed bug in urllib2 that caused it to fail when it received an HTTP
 | |
|   redirect response.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Several changes were made to distutils: Some debugging code was
 | |
|   removed from util.  Fixed the installer used when an external zip
 | |
|   program (like WinZip) is not found; the source code for this
 | |
|   installer is in Misc/distutils.  check_lib() was modified to behave
 | |
|   more like AC_CHECK_LIB by add other_libraries() as a parameter.  The
 | |
|   test for whether installed modules are on sys.path was changed to
 | |
|   use both normcase() and normpath().
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Several minor bugs were fixed in the xml package (the minidom,
 | |
|   pulldom, expatreader, and saxutils modules).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The regression test driver (regrtest.py) behavior when invoked with
 | |
|   -l changed: It now reports a count of objects that are recognized as
 | |
|   garbage but not freed by the garbage collector.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The regression test for the math module was changed to test
 | |
|   exceptional behavior when the test is run in verbose mode.  Python
 | |
|   cannot yet guarantee consistent exception behavior across platforms,
 | |
|   so the exception part of test_math is run only in verbose mode, and
 | |
|   may fail on your platform.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Internals
 | |
| 
 | |
| - PyOS_CheckStack() has been disabled on Win64, where it caused
 | |
|   test_sre to fail.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Build issues
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Changed compiler flags, so that gcc is always invoked with -Wall and
 | |
|   -Wstrict-prototypes.  Users compiling Python with GCC should see
 | |
|   exactly one warning, except if they have passed configure the
 | |
|   --with-pydebug flag.  The expected warning is for getopt() in
 | |
|   Modules/main.c.  This warning will be fixed for Python 2.1.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Fixed configure to add -threads argument during linking on OSF1.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Tools and other miscellany
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The compiler in Tools/compiler was updated to support the new
 | |
|   language features introduced in 2.0: extended print statement, list
 | |
|   comprehensions, and augmented assignments.  The new compiler should
 | |
|   also be backwards compatible with Python 1.5.2; the compiler will
 | |
|   always generate code for the version of the interpreter it runs
 | |
|   under.
 | |
| 
 | |
| What's new in 2.0 release candidate 1 (since beta 2)?
 | |
| =====================================================
 | |
| 
 | |
| What is release candidate 1?
 | |
| 
 | |
| We believe that release candidate 1 will fix all known bugs that we
 | |
| intend to fix for the 2.0 final release.  This release should be a bit
 | |
| more stable than the previous betas.  We would like to see even more
 | |
| widespread testing before the final release, so we are producing this
 | |
| release candidate.  The final release will be exactly the same unless
 | |
| any show-stopping (or brown bag) bugs are found by testers of the
 | |
| release candidate.
 | |
| 
 | |
| All the changes since the last beta release are bug fixes or changes
 | |
| to support building Python for specific platforms.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Core language, builtins, and interpreter
 | |
| 
 | |
| - A bug that caused crashes when __coerce__ was used with augmented
 | |
|   assignment, e.g. +=, was fixed.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Raise ZeroDivisionError when raising zero to a negative number,
 | |
|   e.g. 0.0 ** -2.0.  Note that math.pow is unrelated to the built-in
 | |
|   power operator and the result of math.pow(0.0, -2.0) will vary by
 | |
|   platform.  On Linux, it raises a ValueError.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - A bug in Unicode string interpolation was fixed that occasionally
 | |
|   caused errors with formats including "%%".  For example, the
 | |
|   following expression "%% %s" % u"abc" no longer raises a TypeError.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Compilation of deeply nested expressions raises MemoryError instead
 | |
|   of SyntaxError, e.g. eval("[" * 50 + "]" * 50).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - In 2.0b2 on Windows, the interpreter wrote .pyc files in text mode,
 | |
|   rendering them useless.  They are now written in binary mode again.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Standard library
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Keyword arguments are now accepted for most pattern and match object
 | |
|   methods in SRE, the standard regular expression engine.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - In SRE, fixed error with negative lookahead and lookbehind that
 | |
|   manifested itself as a runtime error in patterns like "(?<!abc)(def)".
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Several bugs in the Unicode handling and error handling in _tkinter
 | |
|   were fixed.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Fix memory management errors in Merge() and Tkapp_Call() routines.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Several changes were made to cStringIO to make it compatible with
 | |
|   the file-like object interface and with StringIO.  If operations are
 | |
|   performed on a closed object, an exception is raised.  The truncate
 | |
|   method now accepts a position argument and readline accepts a size
 | |
|   argument.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - There were many changes made to the linuxaudiodev module and its
 | |
|   test suite; as a result, a short, unexpected audio sample should now
 | |
|   play when the regression test is run.
 | |
| 
 | |
|   Note that this module is named poorly, because it should work
 | |
|   correctly on any platform that supports the Open Sound System
 | |
|   (OSS).
 | |
| 
 | |
|   The module now raises exceptions when errors occur instead of
 | |
|   crashing.  It also defines the AFMT_A_LAW format (logarithmic A-law
 | |
|   audio) and defines a getptr() method that calls the
 | |
|   SNDCTL_DSP_GETxPTR ioctl defined in the OSS Programmer's Guide.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The library_version attribute, introduced in an earlier beta, was
 | |
|   removed because it can not be supported with early versions of the C
 | |
|   readline library, which provides no way to determine the version at
 | |
|   compile-time.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The binascii module is now enabled on Win64.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - tokenize.py no longer suffers "recursion depth" errors when parsing
 | |
|   programs with very long string literals.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Internals
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Fixed several buffer overflow vulnerabilities in calculate_path(),
 | |
|   which is called when the interpreter starts up to determine where
 | |
|   the standard library is installed.  These vulnerabilities affect all
 | |
|   previous versions of Python and can be exploited by setting very
 | |
|   long values for PYTHONHOME or argv[0].  The risk is greatest for a
 | |
|   setuid Python script, although use of the wrapper in
 | |
|   Misc/setuid-prog.c will eliminate the vulnerability.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Fixed garbage collection bugs in instance creation that were
 | |
|   triggered when errors occurred during initialization.  The solution,
 | |
|   applied in cPickle and in PyInstance_New(), is to call
 | |
|   PyObject_GC_Init() after the initialization of the object's
 | |
|   container attributes is complete.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - pyexpat adds definitions of PyModule_AddStringConstant and
 | |
|   PyModule_AddObject if the Python version is less than 2.0, which
 | |
|   provides compatibility with PyXML on Python 1.5.2.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - If the platform has a bogus definition for LONG_BIT (the number of
 | |
|   bits in a long), an error will be reported at compile time.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Fix bugs in _PyTuple_Resize() which caused hard-to-interpret garbage
 | |
|   collection crashes and possibly other, unreported crashes.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Fixed a memory leak in _PyUnicode_Fini().
 | |
| 
 | |
| Build issues
 | |
| 
 | |
| - configure now accepts a --with-suffix option that specifies the
 | |
|   executable suffix.  This is useful for builds on Cygwin and Mac OS
 | |
|   X, for example.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The mmap.PAGESIZE constant is now initialized using sysconf when
 | |
|   possible, which eliminates a dependency on -lucb for Reliant UNIX.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The md5 file should now compile on all platforms.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The select module now compiles on platforms that do not define
 | |
|   POLLRDNORM and related constants.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Darwin (Mac OS X):  Initial support for static builds on this
 | |
|   platform.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - BeOS: A number of changes were made to the build and installation
 | |
|   process.  ar-fake now operates on a directory of object files.
 | |
|   dl_export.h is gone, and its macros now appear on the mwcc command
 | |
|   line during build on PPC BeOS.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Platform directory in lib/python2.0 is "plat-beos5" (or
 | |
|   "plat-beos4", if building on BeOS 4.5), rather than "plat-beos".
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Cygwin: Support for shared libraries, Tkinter, and sockets.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - SunOS 4.1.4_JL: Fix test for directory existence in configure.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Tools and other miscellany
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Removed debugging prints from main used with freeze.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - IDLE auto-indent no longer crashes when it encounters Unicode
 | |
|   characters.
 | |
| 
 | |
| What's new in 2.0 beta 2 (since beta 1)?
 | |
| ========================================
 | |
| 
 | |
| Core language, builtins, and interpreter
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Add support for unbounded ints in %d,i,u,x,X,o formats; for example
 | |
|   "%d" % 2L**64 == "18446744073709551616".
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Add -h and -V command line options to print the usage message and
 | |
|   Python version number and exit immediately.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - eval() and exec accept Unicode objects as code parameters.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - getattr() and setattr() now also accept Unicode objects for the
 | |
|   attribute name, which are converted to strings using the default
 | |
|   encoding before lookup.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Multiplication on string and Unicode now does proper bounds
 | |
|   checking; e.g. 'a' * 65536 * 65536 will raise ValueError, "repeated
 | |
|   string is too long."
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Better error message when continue is found in try statement in a
 | |
|   loop.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| Standard library and extensions
 | |
| 
 | |
| - socket module: the OpenSSL code now adds support for RAND_status()
 | |
|   and EGD (Entropy Gathering Device).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - array: reverse() method of array now works.  buffer_info() now does
 | |
|   argument checking; it still takes no arguments.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - asyncore/asynchat: Included most recent version from Sam Rushing.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - cgi: Accept '&' or ';' as separator characters when parsing form data.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - CGIHTTPServer: Now works on Windows (and perhaps even Mac).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - ConfigParser: When reading the file, options spelled in upper case
 | |
|   letters are now correctly converted to lowercase.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - copy: Copy Unicode objects atomically.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - cPickle: Fail gracefully when copy_reg can't be imported.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - cStringIO: Implemented readlines() method.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - dbm: Add get() and setdefault() methods to dbm object.  Add constant
 | |
|   `library' to module that names the library used.  Added doc strings
 | |
|   and method names to error messages.  Uses configure to determine
 | |
|   which ndbm.h file to include; Berkeley DB's nbdm and GDBM's ndbm is
 | |
|   now available options.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - distutils: Update to version 0.9.3.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - dl: Add several dl.RTLD_ constants.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - fpectl: Now supported on FreeBSD.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - gc: Add DEBUG_SAVEALL option.  When enabled all garbage objects
 | |
|   found by the collector will be saved in gc.garbage.  This is useful
 | |
|   for debugging a program that creates reference cycles.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - httplib: Three changes: Restore support for set_debuglevel feature
 | |
|   of HTTP class.  Do not close socket on zero-length response.  Do not
 | |
|   crash when server sends invalid content-length header.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - mailbox: Mailbox class conforms better to qmail specifications.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - marshal: When reading a short, sign-extend on platforms where shorts
 | |
|   are bigger than 16 bits.  When reading a long, repair the unportable
 | |
|   sign extension that was being done for 64-bit machines.  (It assumed
 | |
|   that signed right shift sign-extends.)
 | |
| 
 | |
| - operator: Add contains(), invert(), __invert__() as aliases for
 | |
|   __contains__(), inv(), and __inv__() respectively.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - os: Add support for popen2() and popen3() on all platforms where
 | |
|   fork() exists.  (popen4() is still in the works.)
 | |
| 
 | |
| - os: (Windows only:) Add startfile() function that acts like double-
 | |
|   clicking on a file in Explorer (or passing the file name to the
 | |
|   DOS "start" command).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - os.path: (Windows, DOS:) Treat trailing colon correctly in
 | |
|   os.path.join.  os.path.join("a:", "b") yields "a:b".
 | |
| 
 | |
| - pickle: Now raises ValueError when an invalid pickle that contains
 | |
|   a non-string repr where a string repr was expected.  This behavior
 | |
|   matches cPickle.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - posixfile: Remove broken __del__() method.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - py_compile: support CR+LF line terminators in source file.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - readline: Does not immediately exit when ^C is hit when readline and
 | |
|   threads are configured.  Adds definition of rl_library_version.  (The
 | |
|   latter addition requires GNU readline 2.2 or later.)
 | |
| 
 | |
| - rfc822: Domain literals returned by AddrlistClass method
 | |
|   getdomainliteral() are now properly wrapped in brackets.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - site: sys.setdefaultencoding() should only be called in case the
 | |
|   standard default encoding ("ascii") is changed. This saves quite a
 | |
|   few cycles during startup since the first call to
 | |
|   setdefaultencoding() will initialize the codec registry and the
 | |
|   encodings package.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - socket: Support for size hint in readlines() method of object returned
 | |
|   by makefile().
 | |
| 
 | |
| - sre: Added experimental expand() method to match objects.  Does not
 | |
|   use buffer interface on Unicode strings.  Does not hang if group id
 | |
|   is followed by whitespace.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - StringIO: Size hint in readlines() is now supported as documented.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - struct: Check ranges for bytes and shorts.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - urllib: Improved handling of win32 proxy settings. Fixed quote and
 | |
|   quote_plus functions so that the always encode a comma.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Tkinter: Image objects are now guaranteed to have unique ids.  Set
 | |
|   event.delta to zero if Tk version doesn't support mousewheel.
 | |
|   Removed some debugging prints.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - UserList: now implements __contains__().
 | |
| 
 | |
| - webbrowser: On Windows, use os.startfile() instead of os.popen(),
 | |
|   which works around a bug in Norton AntiVirus 2000 that leads directly
 | |
|   to a Blue Screen freeze.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - xml: New version detection code allows PyXML to override standard
 | |
|   XML package if PyXML version is greater than 0.6.1.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - xml.dom: DOM level 1 support for basic XML.  Includes xml.dom.minidom
 | |
|   (conventional DOM), and xml.dom.pulldom, which allows building the DOM
 | |
|   tree only for nodes which are sufficiently interesting to a specific
 | |
|   application.  Does not provide the HTML-specific extensions.  Still
 | |
|   undocumented.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - xml.sax: SAX 2 support for Python, including all the handler
 | |
|   interfaces needed to process XML 1.0 compliant XML.  Some
 | |
|   documentation is already available.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - pyexpat: Renamed to xml.parsers.expat since this is part of the new,
 | |
|   packagized XML support.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| C API
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Add three new convenience functions for module initialization --
 | |
|   PyModule_AddObject(), PyModule_AddIntConstant(), and
 | |
|   PyModule_AddStringConstant().
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Cleaned up definition of NULL in C source code; all definitions were
 | |
|   removed and add #error to Python.h if NULL isn't defined after
 | |
|   #include of stdio.h.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Py_PROTO() macros that were removed in 2.0b1 have been restored for
 | |
|   backwards compatibility (at the source level) with old extensions.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - A wrapper API was added for signal() and sigaction().  Instead of
 | |
|   either function, always use PyOS_getsig() to get a signal handler
 | |
|   and PyOS_setsig() to set one.  A new convenience typedef
 | |
|   PyOS_sighandler_t is defined for the type of signal handlers.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Add PyString_AsStringAndSize() function that provides access to the
 | |
|   internal data buffer and size of a string object -- or the default
 | |
|   encoded version of a Unicode object.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - PyString_Size() and PyString_AsString() accept Unicode objects.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The standard header <limits.h> is now included by Python.h (if it
 | |
|   exists).  INT_MAX and LONG_MAX will always be defined, even if
 | |
|   <limits.h> is not available.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - PyFloat_FromString takes a second argument, pend, that was
 | |
|   effectively useless.  It is now officially useless but preserved for
 | |
|   backwards compatibility.  If the pend argument is not NULL, *pend is
 | |
|   set to NULL.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - PyObject_GetAttr() and PyObject_SetAttr() now accept Unicode objects
 | |
|   for the attribute name.  See note on getattr() above.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - A few bug fixes to argument processing for Unicode.
 | |
|   PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() now accepts "es#" and "es".
 | |
|   PyArg_Parse() special cases "s#" for Unicode objects; it returns a
 | |
|   pointer to the default encoded string data instead of to the raw
 | |
|   UTF-16.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Py_BuildValue accepts B format (for bgen-generated code).
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| Internals
 | |
| 
 | |
| - On Unix, fix code for finding Python installation directory so that
 | |
|   it works when argv[0] is a relative path.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Added a true unicode_internal_encode() function and fixed the
 | |
|   unicode_internal_decode function() to support Unicode objects directly
 | |
|   rather than by generating a copy of the object.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Several of the internal Unicode tables are much smaller now, and
 | |
|   the source code should be much friendlier to weaker compilers.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - In the garbage collector: Fixed bug in collection of tuples.  Fixed
 | |
|   bug that caused some instances to be removed from the container set
 | |
|   while they were still live.  Fixed parsing in gc.set_debug() for
 | |
|   platforms where sizeof(long) > sizeof(int).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Fixed refcount problem in instance deallocation that only occurred
 | |
|   when Py_REF_DEBUG was defined and Py_TRACE_REFS was not.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - On Windows, getpythonregpath is now protected against null data in
 | |
|   registry key.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - On Unix, create .pyc/.pyo files with O_EXCL flag to avoid a race
 | |
|   condition.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| Build and platform-specific issues
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Better support of GNU Pth via --with-pth configure option.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Python/C API now properly exposed to dynamically-loaded extension
 | |
|   modules on Reliant UNIX.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Changes for the benefit of SunOS 4.1.4 (really!).  mmapmodule.c:
 | |
|   Don't define MS_SYNC to be zero when it is undefined.  Added missing
 | |
|   prototypes in posixmodule.c.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Improved support for HP-UX build.  Threads should now be correctly
 | |
|   configured (on HP-UX 10.20 and 11.00).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Fix largefile support on older NetBSD systems and OpenBSD by adding
 | |
|   define for TELL64.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| Tools and other miscellany
 | |
| 
 | |
| - ftpmirror: Call to main() is wrapped in if __name__ == "__main__".
 | |
| 
 | |
| - freeze: The modulefinder now works with 2.0 opcodes.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - IDLE:
 | |
|   Move hackery of sys.argv until after the Tk instance has been
 | |
|   created, which allows the application-specific Tkinter
 | |
|   initialization to be executed if present; also pass an explicit
 | |
|   className parameter to the Tk() constructor.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| What's new in 2.0 beta 1?
 | |
| =========================
 | |
| 
 | |
| Source Incompatibilities
 | |
| ------------------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| None.  Note that 1.6 introduced several incompatibilities with 1.5.2,
 | |
| such as single-argument append(), connect() and bind(), and changes to
 | |
| str(long) and repr(float).
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| Binary Incompatibilities
 | |
| ------------------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Third party extensions built for Python 1.5.x or 1.6 cannot be used
 | |
| with Python 2.0; these extensions will have to be rebuilt for Python
 | |
| 2.0.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - On Windows, attempting to import a third party extension built for
 | |
| Python 1.5.x or 1.6 results in an immediate crash; there's not much we
 | |
| can do about this.  Check your PYTHONPATH environment variable!
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Python bytecode files (*.pyc and *.pyo) are not compatible between
 | |
| releases.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| Overview of Changes Since 1.6
 | |
| -----------------------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| There are many new modules (including brand new XML support through
 | |
| the xml package, and i18n support through the gettext module); a list
 | |
| of all new modules is included below.  Lots of bugs have been fixed.
 | |
| 
 | |
| The process for making major new changes to the language has changed
 | |
| since Python 1.6.  Enhancements must now be documented by a Python
 | |
| Enhancement Proposal (PEP) before they can be accepted.
 | |
| 
 | |
| There are several important syntax enhancements, described in more
 | |
| detail below:
 | |
| 
 | |
|   - Augmented assignment, e.g. x += 1
 | |
| 
 | |
|   - List comprehensions, e.g. [x**2 for x in range(10)]
 | |
| 
 | |
|   - Extended import statement, e.g. import Module as Name
 | |
| 
 | |
|   - Extended print statement, e.g. print >> file, "Hello"
 | |
| 
 | |
| Other important changes:
 | |
| 
 | |
|   - Optional collection of cyclical garbage
 | |
| 
 | |
| Python Enhancement Proposal (PEP)
 | |
| ---------------------------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| PEP stands for Python Enhancement Proposal.  A PEP is a design
 | |
| document providing information to the Python community, or describing
 | |
| a new feature for Python.  The PEP should provide a concise technical
 | |
| specification of the feature and a rationale for the feature.
 | |
| 
 | |
| We intend PEPs to be the primary mechanisms for proposing new
 | |
| features, for collecting community input on an issue, and for
 | |
| documenting the design decisions that have gone into Python.  The PEP
 | |
| author is responsible for building consensus within the community and
 | |
| documenting dissenting opinions.
 | |
| 
 | |
| The PEPs are available at http://python.sourceforge.net/peps/.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Augmented Assignment
 | |
| --------------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| This must have been the most-requested feature of the past years!
 | |
| Eleven new assignment operators were added:
 | |
| 
 | |
|     += -= *= /= %= **= <<= >>= &= ^= |=
 | |
| 
 | |
| For example,
 | |
| 
 | |
|     A += B
 | |
| 
 | |
| is similar to
 | |
| 
 | |
|     A = A + B
 | |
| 
 | |
| except that A is evaluated only once (relevant when A is something
 | |
| like dict[index].attr).
 | |
| 
 | |
| However, if A is a mutable object, A may be modified in place.  Thus,
 | |
| if A is a number or a string, A += B has the same effect as A = A+B
 | |
| (except A is only evaluated once); but if a is a list, A += B has the
 | |
| same effect as A.extend(B)!
 | |
| 
 | |
| Classes and built-in object types can override the new operators in
 | |
| order to implement the in-place behavior; the not-in-place behavior is
 | |
| used automatically as a fallback when an object doesn't implement the
 | |
| in-place behavior.  For classes, the method name is derived from the
 | |
| method name for the corresponding not-in-place operator by inserting
 | |
| an 'i' in front of the name, e.g. __iadd__ implements in-place
 | |
| __add__.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Augmented assignment was implemented by Thomas Wouters.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| List Comprehensions
 | |
| -------------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| This is a flexible new notation for lists whose elements are computed
 | |
| from another list (or lists).  The simplest form is:
 | |
| 
 | |
|     [<expression> for <variable> in <sequence>]
 | |
| 
 | |
| For example, [i**2 for i in range(4)] yields the list [0, 1, 4, 9].
 | |
| This is more efficient than a for loop with a list.append() call.
 | |
| 
 | |
| You can also add a condition:
 | |
| 
 | |
|     [<expression> for <variable> in <sequence> if <condition>]
 | |
| 
 | |
| For example, [w for w in words if w == w.lower()] would yield the list
 | |
| of words that contain no uppercase characters.  This is more efficient
 | |
| than a for loop with an if statement and a list.append() call.
 | |
| 
 | |
| You can also have nested for loops and more than one 'if' clause.  For
 | |
| example, here's a function that flattens a sequence of sequences::
 | |
| 
 | |
|     def flatten(seq):
 | |
|         return [x for subseq in seq for x in subseq]
 | |
| 
 | |
|     flatten([[0], [1,2,3], [4,5], [6,7,8,9], []])
 | |
| 
 | |
| This prints
 | |
| 
 | |
|     [0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9]
 | |
| 
 | |
| List comprehensions originated as a patch set from Greg Ewing; Skip
 | |
| Montanaro and Thomas Wouters also contributed.  Described by PEP 202.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| Extended Import Statement
 | |
| -------------------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| Many people have asked for a way to import a module under a different
 | |
| name.  This can be accomplished like this:
 | |
| 
 | |
|     import foo
 | |
|     bar = foo
 | |
|     del foo
 | |
| 
 | |
| but this common idiom gets old quickly.  A simple extension of the
 | |
| import statement now allows this to be written as follows:
 | |
| 
 | |
|     import foo as bar
 | |
| 
 | |
| There's also a variant for 'from ... import':
 | |
| 
 | |
|     from foo import bar as spam
 | |
| 
 | |
| This also works with packages; e.g. you can write this:
 | |
| 
 | |
|     import test.regrtest as regrtest
 | |
| 
 | |
| Note that 'as' is not a new keyword -- it is recognized only in this
 | |
| context (this is only possible because the syntax for the import
 | |
| statement doesn't involve expressions).
 | |
| 
 | |
| Implemented by Thomas Wouters.  Described by PEP 221.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| Extended Print Statement
 | |
| ------------------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| Easily the most controversial new feature, this extension to the print
 | |
| statement adds an option to make the output go to a different file
 | |
| than the default sys.stdout.
 | |
| 
 | |
| For example, to write an error message to sys.stderr, you can now
 | |
| write:
 | |
| 
 | |
|     print >> sys.stderr, "Error: bad dog!"
 | |
| 
 | |
| As a special feature, if the expression used to indicate the file
 | |
| evaluates to None, the current value of sys.stdout is used.  Thus:
 | |
| 
 | |
|     print >> None, "Hello world"
 | |
| 
 | |
| is equivalent to
 | |
| 
 | |
|     print "Hello world"
 | |
| 
 | |
| Design and implementation by Barry Warsaw.  Described by PEP 214.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| Optional Collection of Cyclical Garbage
 | |
| ---------------------------------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| Python is now equipped with a garbage collector that can hunt down
 | |
| cyclical references between Python objects.  It's no replacement for
 | |
| reference counting; in fact, it depends on the reference counts being
 | |
| correct, and decides that a set of objects belong to a cycle if all
 | |
| their reference counts can be accounted for from their references to
 | |
| each other.  This devious scheme was first proposed by Eric Tiedemann,
 | |
| and brought to implementation by Neil Schemenauer.
 | |
| 
 | |
| There's a module "gc" that lets you control some parameters of the
 | |
| garbage collection.  There's also an option to the configure script
 | |
| that lets you enable or disable the garbage collection.  In 2.0b1,
 | |
| it's on by default, so that we (hopefully) can collect decent user
 | |
| experience with this new feature.  There are some questions about its
 | |
| performance.  If it proves to be too much of a problem, we'll turn it
 | |
| off by default in the final 2.0 release.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| Smaller Changes
 | |
| ---------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| A new function zip() was added.  zip(seq1, seq2, ...) is equivalent to
 | |
| map(None, seq1, seq2, ...) when the sequences have the same length;
 | |
| i.e. zip([1,2,3], [10,20,30]) returns [(1,10), (2,20), (3,30)].  When
 | |
| the lists are not all the same length, the shortest list wins:
 | |
| zip([1,2,3], [10,20]) returns [(1,10), (2,20)].  See PEP 201.
 | |
| 
 | |
| sys.version_info is a tuple (major, minor, micro, level, serial).
 | |
| 
 | |
| Dictionaries have an odd new method, setdefault(key, default).
 | |
| dict.setdefault(key, default) returns dict[key] if it exists; if not,
 | |
| it sets dict[key] to default and returns that value.  Thus:
 | |
| 
 | |
|     dict.setdefault(key, []).append(item)
 | |
| 
 | |
| does the same work as this common idiom:
 | |
| 
 | |
|     if not dict.has_key(key):
 | |
|         dict[key] = []
 | |
|     dict[key].append(item)
 | |
| 
 | |
| There are two new variants of SyntaxError that are raised for
 | |
| indentation-related errors: IndentationError and TabError.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Changed \x to consume exactly two hex digits; see PEP 223.  Added \U
 | |
| escape that consumes exactly eight hex digits.
 | |
| 
 | |
| The limits on the size of expressions and file in Python source code
 | |
| have been raised from 2**16 to 2**32.  Previous versions of Python
 | |
| were limited because the maximum argument size the Python VM accepted
 | |
| was 2**16.  This limited the size of object constructor expressions,
 | |
| e.g. [1,2,3] or {'a':1, 'b':2}, and the size of source files.  This
 | |
| limit was raised thanks to a patch by Charles Waldman that effectively
 | |
| fixes the problem.  It is now much more likely that you will be
 | |
| limited by available memory than by an arbitrary limit in Python.
 | |
| 
 | |
| The interpreter's maximum recursion depth can be modified by Python
 | |
| programs using sys.getrecursionlimit and sys.setrecursionlimit.  This
 | |
| limit is the maximum number of recursive calls that can be made by
 | |
| Python code.  The limit exists to prevent infinite recursion from
 | |
| overflowing the C stack and causing a core dump.  The default value is
 | |
| 1000.  The maximum safe value for a particular platform can be found
 | |
| by running Tools/scripts/find_recursionlimit.py.
 | |
| 
 | |
| New Modules and Packages
 | |
| ------------------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| atexit - for registering functions to be called when Python exits.
 | |
| 
 | |
| imputil - Greg Stein's alternative API for writing custom import
 | |
| hooks.
 | |
| 
 | |
| pyexpat - an interface to the Expat XML parser, contributed by Paul
 | |
| Prescod.
 | |
| 
 | |
| xml - a new package with XML support code organized (so far) in three
 | |
| subpackages: xml.dom, xml.sax, and xml.parsers.  Describing these
 | |
| would fill a volume.  There's a special feature whereby a
 | |
| user-installed package named _xmlplus overrides the standard
 | |
| xmlpackage; this is intended to give the XML SIG a hook to distribute
 | |
| backwards-compatible updates to the standard xml package.
 | |
| 
 | |
| webbrowser - a platform-independent API to launch a web browser.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| Changed Modules
 | |
| ---------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| array -- new methods for array objects: count, extend, index, pop, and
 | |
| remove
 | |
| 
 | |
| binascii -- new functions b2a_hex and a2b_hex that convert between
 | |
| binary data and its hex representation
 | |
| 
 | |
| calendar -- Many new functions that support features including control
 | |
| over which day of the week is the first day, returning strings instead
 | |
| of printing them.  Also new symbolic constants for days of week,
 | |
| e.g. MONDAY, ..., SUNDAY.
 | |
| 
 | |
| cgi -- FieldStorage objects have a getvalue method that works like a
 | |
| dictionary's get method and returns the value attribute of the object.
 | |
| 
 | |
| ConfigParser -- The parser object has new methods has_option,
 | |
| remove_section, remove_option, set, and write.  They allow the module
 | |
| to be used for writing config files as well as reading them.
 | |
| 
 | |
| ftplib -- ntransfercmd(), transfercmd(), and retrbinary() all now
 | |
| optionally support the RFC 959 REST command.
 | |
| 
 | |
| gzip -- readline and readlines now accept optional size arguments
 | |
| 
 | |
| httplib -- New interfaces and support for HTTP/1.1 by Greg Stein.  See
 | |
| the module doc strings for details.
 | |
| 
 | |
| locale -- implement getdefaultlocale for Win32 and Macintosh
 | |
| 
 | |
| marshal -- no longer dumps core when marshaling deeply nested or
 | |
| recursive data structures
 | |
| 
 | |
| os -- new functions isatty, seteuid, setegid, setreuid, setregid
 | |
| 
 | |
| os/popen2 -- popen2/popen3/popen4 support under Windows.  popen2/popen3
 | |
| support under Unix.
 | |
| 
 | |
| os/pty -- support for openpty and forkpty
 | |
| 
 | |
| os.path -- fix semantics of os.path.commonprefix
 | |
| 
 | |
| smtplib -- support for sending very long messages
 | |
| 
 | |
| socket -- new function getfqdn()
 | |
| 
 | |
| readline -- new functions to read, write and truncate history files.
 | |
| The readline section of the library reference manual contains an
 | |
| example.
 | |
| 
 | |
| select -- add interface to poll system call
 | |
| 
 | |
| shutil -- new copyfileobj function
 | |
| 
 | |
| SimpleHTTPServer, CGIHTTPServer -- Fix problems with buffering in the
 | |
| HTTP server.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Tkinter -- optimization of function flatten
 | |
| 
 | |
| urllib -- scans environment variables for proxy configuration,
 | |
| e.g. http_proxy.
 | |
| 
 | |
| whichdb -- recognizes dumbdbm format
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| Obsolete Modules
 | |
| ----------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| None.  However note that 1.6 made a whole slew of modules obsolete:
 | |
| stdwin, soundex, cml, cmpcache, dircache, dump, find, grep, packmail,
 | |
| poly, zmod, strop, util, whatsound.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| Changed, New, Obsolete Tools
 | |
| ----------------------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| None.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| C-level Changes
 | |
| ---------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| Several cleanup jobs were carried out throughout the source code.
 | |
| 
 | |
| All C code was converted to ANSI C; we got rid of all uses of the
 | |
| Py_PROTO() macro, which makes the header files a lot more readable.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Most of the portability hacks were moved to a new header file,
 | |
| pyport.h; several other new header files were added and some old
 | |
| header files were removed, in an attempt to create a more rational set
 | |
| of header files.  (Few of these ever need to be included explicitly;
 | |
| they are all included by Python.h.)
 | |
| 
 | |
| Trent Mick ensured portability to 64-bit platforms, under both Linux
 | |
| and Win64, especially for the new Intel Itanium processor.  Mick also
 | |
| added large file support for Linux64 and Win64.
 | |
| 
 | |
| The C APIs to return an object's size have been update to consistently
 | |
| use the form PyXXX_Size, e.g. PySequence_Size and PyDict_Size.  In
 | |
| previous versions, the abstract interfaces used PyXXX_Length and the
 | |
| concrete interfaces used PyXXX_Size.  The old names,
 | |
| e.g. PyObject_Length, are still available for backwards compatibility
 | |
| at the API level, but are deprecated.
 | |
| 
 | |
| The PyOS_CheckStack function has been implemented on Windows by
 | |
| Fredrik Lundh.  It prevents Python from failing with a stack overflow
 | |
| on Windows.
 | |
| 
 | |
| The GC changes resulted in creation of two new slots on object,
 | |
| tp_traverse and tp_clear.  The augmented assignment changes result in
 | |
| the creation of a new slot for each in-place operator.
 | |
| 
 | |
| The GC API creates new requirements for container types implemented in
 | |
| C extension modules.  See Include/objimpl.h for details.
 | |
| 
 | |
| PyErr_Format has been updated to automatically calculate the size of
 | |
| the buffer needed to hold the formatted result string.  This change
 | |
| prevents crashes caused by programmer error.
 | |
| 
 | |
| New C API calls: PyObject_AsFileDescriptor, PyErr_WriteUnraisable.
 | |
| 
 | |
| PyRun_AnyFileEx, PyRun_SimpleFileEx, PyRun_FileEx -- New functions
 | |
| that are the same as their non-Ex counterparts except they take an
 | |
| extra flag argument that tells them to close the file when done.
 | |
| 
 | |
| XXX There were other API changes that should be fleshed out here.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| Windows Changes
 | |
| ---------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| New popen2/popen3/peopen4 in os module (see Changed Modules above).
 | |
| 
 | |
| os.popen is much more usable on Windows 95 and 98.  See Microsoft
 | |
| Knowledge Base article Q150956.  The Win9x workaround described there
 | |
| is implemented by the new w9xpopen.exe helper in the root of your
 | |
| Python installation.  Note that Python uses this internally; it is not
 | |
| a standalone program.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Administrator privileges are no longer required to install Python
 | |
| on Windows NT or Windows 2000.  If you have administrator privileges,
 | |
| Python's registry info will be written under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE.
 | |
| Otherwise the installer backs off to writing Python's registry info
 | |
| under HKEY_CURRENT_USER.  The latter is sufficient for all "normal"
 | |
| uses of Python, but will prevent some advanced uses from working
 | |
| (for example, running a Python script as an NT service, or possibly
 | |
| from CGI).
 | |
| 
 | |
| [This was new in 1.6] The installer no longer runs a separate Tcl/Tk
 | |
| installer; instead, it installs the needed Tcl/Tk files directly in the
 | |
| Python directory.  If you already have a Tcl/Tk installation, this
 | |
| wastes some disk space (about 4 Megs) but avoids problems with
 | |
| conflicting Tcl/Tk installations, and makes it much easier for Python
 | |
| to ensure that Tcl/Tk can find all its files.
 | |
| 
 | |
| [This was new in 1.6] The Windows installer now installs by default in
 | |
| \Python20\ on the default volume, instead of \Program Files\Python-2.0\.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| Updates to the changes between 1.5.2 and 1.6
 | |
| --------------------------------------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| The 1.6 NEWS file can't be changed after the release is done, so here
 | |
| is some late-breaking news:
 | |
| 
 | |
| New APIs in locale.py: normalize(), getdefaultlocale(), resetlocale(),
 | |
| and changes to getlocale() and setlocale().
 | |
| 
 | |
| The new module is now enabled per default.
 | |
| 
 | |
| It is not true that the encodings codecs cannot be used for normal
 | |
| strings: the string.encode() (which is also present on 8-bit strings
 | |
| !) allows using them for 8-bit strings too, e.g. to convert files from
 | |
| cp1252 (Windows) to latin-1 or vice-versa.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Japanese codecs are available from Tamito KAJIYAMA:
 | |
| http://pseudo.grad.sccs.chukyo-u.ac.jp/~kajiyama/python/
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| ======================================================================
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| =======================================
 | |
| ==> Release 1.6 (September 5, 2000) <==
 | |
| =======================================
 | |
| 
 | |
| What's new in release 1.6?
 | |
| ==========================
 | |
| 
 | |
| Below is a list of all relevant changes since release 1.5.2.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| Source Incompatibilities
 | |
| ------------------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| Several small incompatible library changes may trip you up:
 | |
| 
 | |
|   - The append() method for lists can no longer be invoked with more
 | |
|   than one argument.  This used to append a single tuple made out of
 | |
|   all arguments, but was undocumented.  To append a tuple, use
 | |
|   e.g. l.append((a, b, c)).
 | |
| 
 | |
|   - The connect(), connect_ex() and bind() methods for sockets require
 | |
|   exactly one argument.  Previously, you could call s.connect(host,
 | |
|   port), but this was undocumented. You must now write
 | |
|   s.connect((host, port)).
 | |
| 
 | |
|   - The str() and repr() functions are now different more often.  For
 | |
|   long integers, str() no longer appends a 'L'.  Thus, str(1L) == '1',
 | |
|   which used to be '1L'; repr(1L) is unchanged and still returns '1L'.
 | |
|   For floats, repr() now gives 17 digits of precision, to ensure no
 | |
|   precision is lost (on all current hardware).
 | |
| 
 | |
|   - The -X option is gone.  Built-in exceptions are now always
 | |
|   classes.  Many more library modules also have been converted to
 | |
|   class-based exceptions.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| Binary Incompatibilities
 | |
| ------------------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Third party extensions built for Python 1.5.x cannot be used with
 | |
| Python 1.6; these extensions will have to be rebuilt for Python 1.6.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - On Windows, attempting to import a third party extension built for
 | |
| Python 1.5.x results in an immediate crash; there's not much we can do
 | |
| about this.  Check your PYTHONPATH environment variable!
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| Overview of Changes since 1.5.2
 | |
| -------------------------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| For this overview, I have borrowed from the document "What's New in
 | |
| Python 2.0" by Andrew Kuchling and Moshe Zadka:
 | |
| http://www.amk.ca/python/2.0/ .
 | |
| 
 | |
| There are lots of new modules and lots of bugs have been fixed.  A
 | |
| list of all new modules is included below.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Probably the most pervasive change is the addition of Unicode support.
 | |
| We've added a new fundamental datatype, the Unicode string, a new
 | |
| build-in function unicode(), an numerous C APIs to deal with Unicode
 | |
| and encodings.  See the file Misc/unicode.txt for details, or
 | |
| http://starship.python.net/crew/lemburg/unicode-proposal.txt.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Two other big changes, related to the Unicode support, are the
 | |
| addition of string methods and (yet another) new regular expression
 | |
| engine.
 | |
| 
 | |
|   - String methods mean that you can now say s.lower() etc. instead of
 | |
|   importing the string module and saying string.lower(s) etc.  One
 | |
|   peculiarity is that the equivalent of string.join(sequence,
 | |
|   delimiter) is delimiter.join(sequence).  Use " ".join(sequence) for
 | |
|   the effect of string.join(sequence); to make this more readable, try
 | |
|   space=" " first.  Note that the maxsplit argument defaults in
 | |
|   split() and replace() have changed from 0 to -1.
 | |
| 
 | |
|   - The new regular expression engine, SRE by Fredrik Lundh, is fully
 | |
|   backwards compatible with the old engine, and is in fact invoked
 | |
|   using the same interface (the "re" module).  You can explicitly
 | |
|   invoke the old engine by import pre, or the SRE engine by importing
 | |
|   sre.  SRE is faster than pre, and supports Unicode (which was the
 | |
|   main reason to put effort in yet another new regular expression
 | |
|   engine -- this is at least the fourth!).
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| Other Changes
 | |
| -------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| Other changes that won't break code but are nice to know about:
 | |
| 
 | |
| Deleting objects is now safe even for deeply nested data structures.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Long/int unifications: long integers can be used in seek() calls, as
 | |
| slice indexes.
 | |
| 
 | |
| String formatting (s % args) has a new formatting option, '%r', which
 | |
| acts like '%s' but inserts repr(arg) instead of str(arg). (Not yet in
 | |
| alpha 1.)
 | |
| 
 | |
| Greg Ward's "distutils" package is included: this will make
 | |
| installing, building and distributing third party packages much
 | |
| simpler.
 | |
| 
 | |
| There's now special syntax that you can use instead of the apply()
 | |
| function.  f(*args, **kwds) is equivalent to apply(f, args, kwds).
 | |
| You can also use variations f(a1, a2, *args, **kwds) and you can leave
 | |
| one or the other out: f(*args), f(**kwds).
 | |
| 
 | |
| The built-ins int() and long() take an optional second argument to
 | |
| indicate the conversion base -- of course only if the first argument
 | |
| is a string.  This makes string.atoi() and string.atol() obsolete.
 | |
| (string.atof() was already obsolete).
 | |
| 
 | |
| When a local variable is known to the compiler but undefined when
 | |
| used, a new exception UnboundLocalError is raised.  This is a class
 | |
| derived from NameError so code catching NameError should still work.
 | |
| The purpose is to provide better diagnostics in the following example:
 | |
|   x = 1
 | |
|   def f():
 | |
|       print x
 | |
|       x = x+1
 | |
| This used to raise a NameError on the print statement, which confused
 | |
| even experienced Python programmers (especially if there are several
 | |
| hundreds of lines of code between the reference and the assignment to
 | |
| x :-).
 | |
| 
 | |
| You can now override the 'in' operator by defining a __contains__
 | |
| method.  Note that it has its arguments backwards: x in a causes
 | |
| a.__contains__(x) to be called.  That's why the name isn't __in__.
 | |
| 
 | |
| The exception AttributeError will have a more friendly error message,
 | |
| e.g.: <code>'Spam' instance has no attribute 'eggs'</code>.  This may
 | |
| <b>break code</b> that expects the message to be exactly the attribute
 | |
| name.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| New Modules in 1.6
 | |
| ------------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| UserString - base class for deriving from the string type.
 | |
| 
 | |
| distutils - tools for distributing Python modules.
 | |
| 
 | |
| robotparser - parse a robots.txt file, for writing web spiders.
 | |
| (Moved from Tools/webchecker/.)
 | |
| 
 | |
| linuxaudiodev - audio for Linux.
 | |
| 
 | |
| mmap - treat a file as a memory buffer.  (Windows and Unix.)
 | |
| 
 | |
| sre - regular expressions (fast, supports unicode).  Currently, this
 | |
| code is very rough.  Eventually, the re module will be reimplemented
 | |
| using sre (without changes to the re API).
 | |
| 
 | |
| filecmp - supersedes the old cmp.py and dircmp.py modules.
 | |
| 
 | |
| tabnanny - check Python sources for tab-width dependance.  (Moved from
 | |
| Tools/scripts/.)
 | |
| 
 | |
| urllib2 - new and improved but incompatible version of urllib (still
 | |
| experimental).
 | |
| 
 | |
| zipfile - read and write zip archives.
 | |
| 
 | |
| codecs - support for Unicode encoders/decoders.
 | |
| 
 | |
| unicodedata - provides access to the Unicode 3.0 database.
 | |
| 
 | |
| _winreg - Windows registry access.
 | |
| 
 | |
| encodings - package which provides a large set of standard codecs --
 | |
| currently only for the new Unicode support. It has a drop-in extension
 | |
| mechanism which allows you to add new codecs by simply copying them
 | |
| into the encodings package directory. Asian codec support will
 | |
| probably be made available as separate distribution package built upon
 | |
| this technique and the new distutils package.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| Changed Modules
 | |
| ---------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| readline, ConfigParser, cgi, calendar, posix, readline, xmllib, aifc,
 | |
| chunk, wave, random, shelve, nntplib - minor enhancements.
 | |
| 
 | |
| socket, httplib, urllib - optional OpenSSL support (Unix only).
 | |
| 
 | |
| _tkinter - support for 8.0 up to 8.3.  Support for versions older than
 | |
| 8.0 has been dropped.
 | |
| 
 | |
| string - most of this module is deprecated now that strings have
 | |
| methods.  This no longer uses the built-in strop module, but takes
 | |
| advantage of the new string methods to provide transparent support for
 | |
| both Unicode and ordinary strings.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| Changes on Windows
 | |
| ------------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| The installer no longer runs a separate Tcl/Tk installer; instead, it
 | |
| installs the needed Tcl/Tk files directly in the Python directory.  If
 | |
| you already have a Tcl/Tk installation, this wastes some disk space
 | |
| (about 4 Megs) but avoids problems with conflincting Tcl/Tk
 | |
| installations, and makes it much easier for Python to ensure that
 | |
| Tcl/Tk can find all its files.  Note: the alpha installers don't
 | |
| include the documentation.
 | |
| 
 | |
| The Windows installer now installs by default in \Python16\ on the
 | |
| default volume, instead of \Program Files\Python-1.6\.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| Changed Tools
 | |
| -------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| IDLE - complete overhaul.  See the <a href="../idle/">IDLE home
 | |
| page</a> for more information.  (Python 1.6 alpha 1 will come with
 | |
| IDLE 0.6.)
 | |
| 
 | |
| Tools/i18n/pygettext.py - Python equivalent of xgettext(1).  A message
 | |
| text extraction tool used for internationalizing applications written
 | |
| in Python.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| Obsolete Modules
 | |
| ----------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| stdwin and everything that uses it.  (Get Python 1.5.2 if you need
 | |
| it. :-)
 | |
| 
 | |
| soundex.  (Skip Montanaro has a version in Python but it won't be
 | |
| included in the Python release.)
 | |
| 
 | |
| cmp, cmpcache, dircmp.  (Replaced by filecmp.)
 | |
| 
 | |
| dump.  (Use pickle.)
 | |
| 
 | |
| find.  (Easily coded using os.walk().)
 | |
| 
 | |
| grep.  (Not very useful as a library module.)
 | |
| 
 | |
| packmail.  (No longer has any use.)
 | |
| 
 | |
| poly, zmod.  (These were poor examples at best.)
 | |
| 
 | |
| strop.  (No longer needed by the string module.)
 | |
| 
 | |
| util.  (This functionality was long ago built in elsewhere).
 | |
| 
 | |
| whatsound.  (Use sndhdr.)
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| Detailed Changes from 1.6b1 to 1.6
 | |
| ----------------------------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Slight changes to the CNRI license.  A copyright notice has been
 | |
| added; the requirement to indicate the nature of modifications now
 | |
| applies when making a derivative work available "to others" instead of
 | |
| just "to the public"; the version and date are updated.  The new
 | |
| license has a new handle.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Added the Tools/compiler package.  This is a project led by Jeremy
 | |
| Hylton to write the Python bytecode generator in Python.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The function math.rint() is removed.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - In Python.h, "#define _GNU_SOURCE 1" was added.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Version 0.9.1 of Greg Ward's distutils is included (instead of
 | |
| version 0.9).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - A new version of SRE is included.  It is more stable, and more
 | |
| compatible with the old RE module.  Non-matching ranges are indicated
 | |
| by -1, not None.  (The documentation said None, but the PRE
 | |
| implementation used -1; changing to None would break existing code.)
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The winreg module has been renamed to _winreg.  (There are plans for
 | |
| a higher-level API called winreg, but this has not yet materialized in
 | |
| a form that is acceptable to the experts.)
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The _locale module is enabled by default.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Fixed the configuration line for the _curses module.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - A few crashes have been fixed, notably <file>.writelines() with a
 | |
| list containing non-string objects would crash, and there were
 | |
| situations where a lost SyntaxError could dump core.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The <list>.extend() method now accepts an arbitrary sequence
 | |
| argument.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - If __str__() or __repr__() returns a Unicode object, this is
 | |
| converted to an 8-bit string.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Unicode string comparisons is no longer aware of UTF-16
 | |
| encoding peculiarities; it's a straight 16-bit compare.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The Windows installer now installs the LICENSE file and no longer
 | |
| registers the Python DLL version in the registry (this is no longer
 | |
| needed).  It now uses Tcl/Tk 8.3.2.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - A few portability problems have been fixed, in particular a
 | |
| compilation error involving socklen_t.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The PC configuration is slightly friendlier to non-Microsoft
 | |
| compilers.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| ======================================================================
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| ======================================
 | |
| ==> Release 1.5.2 (April 13, 1999) <==
 | |
| ======================================
 | |
| 
 | |
| From 1.5.2c1 to 1.5.2 (final)
 | |
| =============================
 | |
| 
 | |
| Tue Apr 13 15:44:49 1999  Guido van Rossum  <guido@eric.cnri.reston.va.us>
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	* PCbuild/python15.wse: Bump version to 1.5.2 (final)
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	* PCbuild/python15.dsp: Added shamodule.c
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	* PC/config.c: Added sha module!
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	* README, Include/patchlevel.h: Prepare for final release.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	* Misc/ACKS:
 | |
| 	More (Cameron Laird is honorary; the others are 1.5.2c1 testers).
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	* Python/thread_solaris.h:
 | |
| 	While I can't really test this thoroughly, Pat Knight and the Solaris
 | |
| 	man pages suggest that the proper thing to do is to add THR_NEW_LWP to
 | |
| 	the flags on thr_create(), and that there really isn't a downside, so
 | |
| 	I'll do that.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	* Misc/ACKS:
 | |
| 	Bunch of new names who helped iron out the last wrinkles of 1.5.2.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	* PC/python_nt.rc:
 | |
| 	Bump the myusterious M$ version number from 1,5,2,1 to 1,5,2,3.
 | |
| 	(I can't even display this on NT, maybe Win/98 can?)
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	* Lib/pstats.py:
 | |
| 	Fix mysterious references to jprofile that were in the source since
 | |
| 	its creation.  I'm assuming these were once valid references to "Jim
 | |
| 	Roskind's profile"...
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	* Lib/Attic/threading_api.py:
 | |
| 	Removed; since long subsumed in Doc/lib/libthreading.tex
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	* Modules/socketmodule.c:
 | |
| 	Put back __osf__ support for gethostbyname_r(); the real bug was that
 | |
| 	it was being used even without threads.  This of course might be an
 | |
| 	all-platform problem so now we only use the _r variant when we are
 | |
| 	using threads.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Mon Apr 12 22:51:20 1999  Guido van Rossum  <guido@eric.cnri.reston.va.us>
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	* Modules/cPickle.c:
 | |
| 	Fix accidentally reversed NULL test in load_mark().  Suggested by
 | |
| 	Tamito Kajiyama.  (This caused a bug only on platforms where malloc(0)
 | |
| 	returns NULL.)
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	* README:
 | |
| 	Add note about popen2 problem on Linux noticed by Pablo Bleyer.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	* README: Add note about -D_REENTRANT for HP-UX 10.20.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	* Modules/Makefile.pre.in: 'clean' target should remove hassignal.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	* PC/Attic/vc40.mak, PC/readme.txt:
 | |
| 	Remove all VC++ info (except VC 1.5) from readme.txt;
 | |
| 	remove the VC++ 4.0 project file; remove the unused _tkinter extern defs.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	* README: Clarify PC build instructions (point to PCbuild).
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	* Modules/zlibmodule.c: Cast added by Jack Jansen (for Mac port).
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	* Lib/plat-sunos5/CDIO.py, Lib/plat-linux2/CDROM.py:
 | |
| 	Forgot to add this file.  CDROM device parameters.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	* Lib/gzip.py: Two different changes.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	1. Jack Jansen reports that on the Mac, the time may be negative, and
 | |
| 	solves this by adding a write32u() function that writes an unsigned
 | |
| 	long.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	2. On 64-bit platforms the CRC comparison fails; I've fixed this by
 | |
| 	casting both values to be compared to "unsigned long" i.e. modulo
 | |
| 	0x100000000L.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Sat Apr 10 18:42:02 1999  Guido van Rossum  <guido@eric.cnri.reston.va.us>
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	* PC/Attic/_tkinter.def: No longer needed.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	* Misc/ACKS: Correct missed character in Andrew Dalke's name.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	* README: Add DEC Ultrix notes (from Donn Cave's email).
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	* configure: The usual
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	* configure.in:
 | |
| 	Quote a bunch of shell variables used in test, related to long-long.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	* Objects/fileobject.c, Modules/shamodule.c, Modules/regexpr.c:
 | |
| 	casts for picky compilers.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	* Modules/socketmodule.c:
 | |
| 	3-arg gethostbyname_r doesn't really work on OSF/1.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	* PC/vc15_w31/_.c, PC/vc15_lib/_.c, Tools/pynche/__init__.py:
 | |
| 	Avoid totally empty files.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Fri Apr  9 14:56:35 1999  Guido van Rossum  <guido@eric.cnri.reston.va.us>
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	* Tools/scripts/fixps.py: Use re instead of regex.
 | |
| 	Don't rewrite the file in place.
 | |
| 	(Reported by Andy Dustman.)
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	* Lib/netrc.py, Lib/shlex.py: Get rid of #! line
 | |
| 
 | |
| Thu Apr  8 23:13:37 1999  Guido van Rossum  <guido@eric.cnri.reston.va.us>
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	* PCbuild/python15.wse: Use the Tcl 8.0.5 installer.
 | |
| 	Add a variable %_TCL_% that makes it easier to switch to a different version.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| ======================================================================
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| From 1.5.2b2 to 1.5.2c1
 | |
| =======================
 | |
| 
 | |
| Thu Apr  8 23:13:37 1999  Guido van Rossum  <guido@eric.cnri.reston.va.us>
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	* PCbuild/python15.wse:
 | |
| 	Release 1.5.2c1.  Add IDLE and Uninstall to program group.
 | |
| 	Don't distribute zlib.dll.  Tweak some comments.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	* PCbuild/zlib.dsp: Now using static zlib 1.1.3
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	* Lib/dos-8x3/userdict.py, Lib/dos-8x3/userlist.py, Lib/dos-8x3/test_zli.py, Lib/dos-8x3/test_use.py, Lib/dos-8x3/test_pop.py, Lib/dos-8x3/test_pic.py, Lib/dos-8x3/test_ntp.py, Lib/dos-8x3/test_gzi.py, Lib/dos-8x3/test_fcn.py, Lib/dos-8x3/test_cpi.py, Lib/dos-8x3/test_bsd.py, Lib/dos-8x3/posixfil.py, Lib/dos-8x3/mimetype.py, Lib/dos-8x3/nturl2pa.py, Lib/dos-8x3/compilea.py, Lib/dos-8x3/exceptio.py, Lib/dos-8x3/basehttp.py:
 | |
| 	The usual
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	* Include/patchlevel.h: Release 1.5.2c1
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	* README: Release 1.5.2c1.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	* Misc/NEWS: News for the 1.5.2c1 release.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	* Lib/test/test_strftime.py:
 | |
| 	On Windows, we suddenly find, strftime() may return "" for an
 | |
| 	unsupported format string.  (I guess this is because the logic for
 | |
| 	deciding whether to reallocate the buffer or not has been improved.)
 | |
| 	This caused the test code to crash on result[0].  Fix this by assuming
 | |
| 	an empty result also means the format is not supported.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	* Demo/tkinter/matt/window-creation-w-location.py:
 | |
| 	This demo imported some private code from Matt.  Make it cripple along.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	* Lib/lib-tk/Tkinter.py:
 | |
| 	Delete an accidentally checked-in feature that actually broke more
 | |
| 	than was worth it: when deleting a canvas item, it would try to
 | |
| 	automatically delete the bindings for that item.  Since there's
 | |
| 	nothing that says you can't reuse the tag and still have the bindings,
 | |
| 	this is not correct.  Also, it broke at least one demo
 | |
| 	(Demo/tkinter/matt/rubber-band-box-demo-1.py).
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	* Python/thread_wince.h: Win/CE thread support by Mark Hammond.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Wed Apr  7 20:23:17 1999  Guido van Rossum  <guido@eric.cnri.reston.va.us>
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	* Modules/zlibmodule.c:
 | |
| 	Patch by Andrew Kuchling to unflush() (flush() for deflating).
 | |
| 	Without this, if inflate() returned Z_BUF_ERROR asking for more output
 | |
| 	space, we would report the error; now, we increase the buffer size and
 | |
| 	try again, just as for Z_OK.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	* Lib/test/test_gzip.py: Use binary mode for all gzip files we open.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	* Tools/idle/ChangeLog: New change log.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	* Tools/idle/README.txt, Tools/idle/NEWS.txt: New version.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	* Python/pythonrun.c:
 | |
| 	Alas, get rid of the Win specific hack to ask the user to press Return
 | |
| 	before exiting when an error happened.  This didn't work right when
 | |
| 	Python is invoked from a daemon.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	* Tools/idle/idlever.py: Version bump awaiting impending new release.
 | |
| 	(Not much has changed :-( )
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	* Lib/lib-tk/Tkinter.py:
 | |
| 	lower, tkraise/lift hide Misc.lower, Misc.tkraise/lift,
 | |
| 	so the preferred name for them is tag_lower, tag_raise
 | |
| 	(similar to tag_bind, and similar to the Text widget);
 | |
| 	unfortunately can't delete the old ones yet (maybe in 1.6)
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	* Python/thread.c, Python/strtod.c, Python/mystrtoul.c, Python/import.c, Python/ceval.c:
 | |
| 	Changes by Mark Hammond for Windows CE.  Mostly of the form
 | |
| 	  #ifdef DONT_HAVE_header_H ... #endif around #include <header.h>.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	* Python/bltinmodule.c:
 | |
| 	Remove unused variable from complex_from_string() code.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	* Include/patchlevel.h:
 | |
| 	Add the possibility of a gamma release (release candidate).
 | |
| 	Add '+' to string version number to indicate we're beyond b2 now.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	* Modules/posixmodule.c: Add extern decl for fsync() for SunOS 4.x.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	* Lib/smtplib.py: Changes by Per Cederquist and The Dragon.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	Per writes:
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	"""
 | |
| 	The application where Signum Support uses smtplib needs to be able to
 | |
| 	report good error messages to the user when sending email fails.  To
 | |
| 	help in diagnosing problems it is useful to be able to report the
 | |
| 	entire message sent by the server, not only the SMTP error code of the
 | |
| 	offending command.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	A lot of the functions in sendmail.py unfortunately discards the
 | |
| 	message, leaving only the code.  The enclosed patch fixes that
 | |
| 	problem.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	The enclosed patch also introduces a base class for exceptions that
 | |
| 	include an SMTP error code and error message, and make the code and
 | |
| 	message available on separate attributes, so that surrounding code can
 | |
| 	deal with them in whatever way it sees fit.  I've also added some
 | |
| 	documentation to the exception classes.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	The constructor will now raise an exception if it cannot connect to
 | |
| 	the SMTP server.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	The data() method will raise an SMTPDataError if it doesn't receive
 | |
| 	the expected 354 code in the middle of the exchange.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	According to section 5.2.10 of RFC 1123 a smtp client must accept "any
 | |
| 	text, including no text at all" after the error code.  If the response
 | |
| 	of a HELO command contains no text self.helo_resp will be set to the
 | |
| 	empty string ("").  The patch fixes the test in the sendmail() method
 | |
| 	so that helo_resp is tested against None; if it has the empty string
 | |
| 	as value the sendmail() method would invoke the helo() method again.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	The code no longer accepts a -1 reply from the ehlo() method in
 | |
| 	sendmail().
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	[Text about removing SMTPRecipientsRefused deleted --GvR]
 | |
| 	"""
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	and also:
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	"""
 | |
| 	smtplib.py appends an extra blank line to the outgoing mail if the
 | |
| 	`msg' argument to the sendmail method already contains a trailing
 | |
| 	newline.  This patch should fix the problem.
 | |
| 	"""
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	The Dragon writes:
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	"""
 | |
| 		Mostly I just re-added the SMTPRecipientsRefused exception
 | |
| 	(the exeption object now has the appropriate info in it ) [Per had
 | |
| 	removed this in his patch --GvR] and tweaked the behavior of the
 | |
| 	sendmail method whence it throws the newly added SMTPHeloException (it
 | |
| 	was closing the connection, which it shouldn't.  whatever catches the
 | |
| 	exception should do that. )
 | |
| 
 | |
| 		I pondered the change of the return values to tuples all around,
 | |
| 	and after some thinking I decided that regularizing the return values was
 | |
| 	too much of the Right Thing (tm) to not do.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 		My one concern is that code expecting an integer & getting a tuple
 | |
| 	may fail silently.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	(i.e. if it's doing :
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	      x.somemethod() >= 400:
 | |
| 	expecting an integer, the expression will always be true if it gets a
 | |
| 	tuple instead. )
 | |
| 
 | |
| 		However, most smtplib code I've seen only really uses the
 | |
| 	sendmail() method, so this wouldn't bother it.  Usually code I've seen
 | |
| 	that calls the other methods usually only calls helo() and ehlo() for
 | |
| 	doing ESMTP, a feature which was not in the smtplib included with 1.5.1,
 | |
| 	and thus I would think not much code uses it yet.
 | |
| 	"""
 | |
| 
 | |
| Tue Apr  6 19:38:18 1999  Guido van Rossum  <guido@eric.cnri.reston.va.us>
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	* Lib/test/test_ntpath.py:
 | |
| 	Fix the tests now that splitdrive() no longer treats UNC paths special.
 | |
| 	(Some tests converted to splitunc() tests.)
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	* Lib/ntpath.py:
 | |
| 	Withdraw the UNC support from splitdrive().  Instead, a new function
 | |
| 	splitunc() parses UNC paths.  The contributor of the UNC parsing in
 | |
| 	splitdrive() doesn't like it, but I haven't heard a good reason to
 | |
| 	keep it, and it causes some problems.  (I think there's a
 | |
| 	philosophical problem -- to me, the split*() functions are purely
 | |
| 	syntactical, and the fact that \\foo is not a valid path doesn't mean
 | |
| 	that it shouldn't be considered an absolute path.)
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	Also (quite separately, but strangely related to the philosophical
 | |
| 	issue above) fix abspath() so that if win32api exists, it doesn't fail
 | |
| 	when the path doesn't actually exist -- if GetFullPathName() fails,
 | |
| 	fall back on the old strategy (join with getcwd() if necessary, and
 | |
| 	then use normpath()).
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	* configure.in, configure, config.h.in, acconfig.h:
 | |
| 	For BeOS PowerPC.  Chris Herborth.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Mon Apr  5 21:54:14 1999  Guido van Rossum  <guido@eric.cnri.reston.va.us>
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	* Modules/timemodule.c:
 | |
| 	Jonathan Giddy notes, and Chris Lawrence agrees, that some comments on
 | |
| 	#else/#endif are wrong, and that #if HAVE_TM_ZONE should be #ifdef.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	* Misc/ACKS:
 | |
| 	Bunch of new contributors, including 9 who contributed to the Docs,
 | |
| 	reported by Fred.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Mon Apr  5 18:37:59 1999  Fred Drake  <fdrake@eric.cnri.reston.va.us>
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	* Lib/gzip.py:
 | |
| 	Oops, missed mode parameter to open().
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	* Lib/gzip.py:
 | |
| 	Made the default mode 'rb' instead of 'r', for better cross-platform
 | |
| 	support.  (Based on comment on the documentation by Bernhard Reiter
 | |
| 	<bernhard@csd.uwm.edu>).
 | |
| 
 | |
| Fri Apr  2 22:18:25 1999  Guido van Rossum  <guido@eric.cnri.reston.va.us>
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	* Tools/scripts/dutree.py:
 | |
| 	For reasons I dare not explain, this script should always execute
 | |
| 	main() when imported (in other words, it is not usable as a module).
 | |
| 
 | |
| Thu Apr  1 15:32:30 1999  Guido van Rossum  <guido@eric.cnri.reston.va.us>
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	* Lib/test/test_cpickle.py: Jonathan Giddy write:
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	In test_cpickle.py, the module os got imported, but the line to remove
 | |
| 	the temp file has gone missing.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Tue Mar 30 20:17:31 1999  Guido van Rossum  <guido@eric.cnri.reston.va.us>
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	* Lib/BaseHTTPServer.py: Per Cederqvist writes:
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	If you send something like "PUT / HTTP/1.0" to something derived from
 | |
| 	BaseHTTPServer that doesn't define do_PUT, you will get a response
 | |
| 	that begins like this:
 | |
| 
 | |
| 		HTTP/1.0 501 Unsupported method ('do_PUT')
 | |
| 		Server: SimpleHTTP/0.3 Python/1.5
 | |
| 		Date: Tue, 30 Mar 1999 18:53:53 GMT
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	The server should complain about 'PUT' instead of 'do_PUT'.  This
 | |
| 	patch should fix the problem.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Mon Mar 29 20:33:21 1999  Guido van Rossum  <guido@eric.cnri.reston.va.us>
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	* Lib/smtplib.py: Patch by Per Cederqvist, who writes:
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	"""
 | |
| 	 - It needlessly used the makefile() method for each response that is
 | |
| 	   read from the SMTP server.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	 - If the remote SMTP server closes the connection unexpectedly the
 | |
| 	   code raised an IndexError.  It now raises an SMTPServerDisconnected
 | |
| 	   exception instead.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	 - The code now checks that all lines in a multiline response actually
 | |
| 	   contains an error code.
 | |
| 	"""
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	The Dragon approves.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Mon Mar 29 20:25:40 1999  Fred Drake  <fdrake@eric.cnri.reston.va.us>
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	* Lib/compileall.py:
 | |
| 	When run as a script, report failures in the exit code as well.
 | |
| 	Patch largely based on changes by Andrew Dalke, as discussed in the
 | |
| 	distutils-sig.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Mon Mar 29 20:23:41 1999  Guido van Rossum  <guido@eric.cnri.reston.va.us>
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	* Lib/urllib.py:
 | |
| 	Hack so that if a 302 or 301 redirect contains a relative URL, the
 | |
| 	right thing "just happens" (basejoin() with old URL).
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	* Modules/cPickle.c:
 | |
| 	Protection against picling to/from closed (real) file.
 | |
| 	The problem was reported by Moshe Zadka.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	* Lib/test/test_cpickle.py:
 | |
| 	Test protection against picling to/from closed (real) file.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	* Modules/timemodule.c: Chris Lawrence writes:
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	"""
 | |
| 	The GNU folks, in their infinite wisdom, have decided not to implement
 | |
| 	altzone in libc6; this would not be horrible, except that timezone
 | |
| 	(which is implemented) includes the current DST setting (i.e. timezone
 | |
| 	for Central is 18000 in summer and 21600 in winter).  So Python's
 | |
| 	timezone and altzone variables aren't set correctly during DST.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	Here's a patch relative to 1.5.2b2 that (a) makes timezone and altzone
 | |
| 	show the "right" thing on Linux (by using the tm_gmtoff stuff
 | |
| 	available in BSD, which is how the GLIBC manual claims things should
 | |
| 	be done) and (b) should cope with the southern hemisphere.  In pursuit
 | |
| 	of (b), I also took the liberty of renaming the "summer" and "winter"
 | |
| 	variables to "july" and "jan".  This patch should also make certain
 | |
| 	time calculations on Linux actually work right (like the tz-aware
 | |
| 	functions in the rfc822 module).
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	(It's hard to find DST that's currently being used in the southern
 | |
| 	hemisphere; I tested using Africa/Windhoek.)
 | |
| 	"""
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	* Lib/test/output/test_gzip:
 | |
| 	Jonathan Giddy discovered this file was missing.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	* Modules/shamodule.c:
 | |
| 	Avoid warnings from AIX compiler.  Reported by Vladimir (AIX is my
 | |
| 	middlename) Marangozov, patch coded by Greg Stein.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	* Tools/idle/ScriptBinding.py, Tools/idle/PyShell.py:
 | |
| 	At Tim Peters' recommendation, add a dummy flush() method to PseudoFile.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Sun Mar 28 17:55:32 1999  Guido van Rossum  <guido@eric.cnri.reston.va.us>
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	* Tools/scripts/ndiff.py: Tim Peters writes:
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	I should have waited overnight <wink/sigh>.  Nothing wrong with the one I
 | |
| 	sent, but I couldn't resist going on to add new -r1 / -r2 cmdline options
 | |
| 	for recreating the original files from ndiff's output.  That's attached, if
 | |
| 	you're game!  Us Windows guys don't usually have a sed sitting around
 | |
| 	<wink>.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Sat Mar 27 13:34:01 1999  Guido van Rossum  <guido@eric.cnri.reston.va.us>
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	* Tools/scripts/ndiff.py: Tim Peters writes:
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	Attached is a cleaned-up version of ndiff (added useful module
 | |
| 	docstring, now echo'ed in case of cmd line mistake); added -q option
 | |
| 	to suppress initial file identification lines; + other minor cleanups,
 | |
| 	& a slightly faster match engine.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Fri Mar 26 22:36:00 1999  Fred Drake  <fdrake@eric.cnri.reston.va.us>
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	* Tools/scripts/dutree.py:
 | |
| 	During display, if EPIPE is raised, it's probably because a pager was
 | |
| 	killed.  Discard the error in that case, but propogate it otherwise.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Fri Mar 26 16:20:45 1999  Guido van Rossum  <guido@eric.cnri.reston.va.us>
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	* Lib/test/output/test_userlist, Lib/test/test_userlist.py:
 | |
| 	Test suite for UserList.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	* Lib/UserList.py: Use isinstance() where appropriate.
 | |
| 	Reformatted with 4-space indent.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Fri Mar 26 16:11:40 1999  Barry Warsaw  <bwarsaw@eric.cnri.reston.va.us>
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	* Tools/pynche/PyncheWidget.py:
 | |
| 	Helpwin.__init__(): The text widget should get focus.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	* Tools/pynche/pyColorChooser.py:
 | |
| 	Removed unnecessary import `from PyncheWidget import PyncheWidget'
 | |
| 
 | |
| Fri Mar 26 15:32:05 1999  Guido van Rossum  <guido@eric.cnri.reston.va.us>
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	* Lib/test/output/test_userdict, Lib/test/test_userdict.py:
 | |
| 	Test suite for UserDict
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	* Lib/UserDict.py: Improved a bunch of things.
 | |
| 	The constructor now takes an optional dictionary.
 | |
| 	Use isinstance() where appropriate.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Thu Mar 25 22:38:49 1999  Guido van Rossum  <guido@eric.cnri.reston.va.us>
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	* Lib/test/output/test_pickle, Lib/test/output/test_cpickle, Lib/test/test_pickle.py, Lib/test/test_cpickle.py:
 | |
| 	Basic regr tests for pickle/cPickle
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	* Lib/pickle.py:
 | |
| 	Don't use "exec" in find_class().  It's slow, unnecessary, and (as AMK
 | |
| 	points out) it doesn't work in JPython Applets.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Thu Mar 25 21:50:27 1999  Andrew Kuchling  <akuchlin@eric.cnri.reston.va.us>
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	* Lib/test/test_gzip.py:
 | |
| 	Added a simple test suite for gzip.  It simply opens a temp file,
 | |
| 	writes a chunk of compressed data, closes it, writes another chunk, and
 | |
| 	reads the contents back to verify that they are the same.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	* Lib/gzip.py:
 | |
| 	Based on a suggestion from bruce@hams.com, make a trivial change to
 | |
| 	allow using the 'a' flag as a mode for opening a GzipFile.  gzip
 | |
| 	files, surprisingly enough, can be concatenated and then decompressed;
 | |
| 	the effect is to concatenate the two chunks of data.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	If we support it on writing, it should also be supported on reading.
 | |
| 	This *wasn't* trivial, and required rearranging the code in the
 | |
| 	reading path, particularly the _read() method.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	Raise IOError instead of RuntimeError in two cases, 'Not a gzipped file'
 | |
| 	and 'Unknown compression method'
 | |
| 
 | |
| Thu Mar 25 21:25:01 1999  Guido van Rossum  <guido@eric.cnri.reston.va.us>
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	* Lib/test/test_b1.py:
 | |
| 	Add tests for float() and complex() with string args (Nick/Stephanie
 | |
| 	Lockwood).
 | |
| 
 | |
| Thu Mar 25 21:21:08 1999  Andrew Kuchling  <akuchlin@eric.cnri.reston.va.us>
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	* Modules/zlibmodule.c:
 | |
| 	Add an .unused_data attribute to decompressor objects.  If .unused_data
 | |
| 	is not an empty string, this means that you have arrived at the
 | |
| 	end of the stream of compressed data, and the contents of .unused_data are
 | |
| 	whatever follows the compressed stream.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Thu Mar 25 21:16:07 1999  Guido van Rossum  <guido@eric.cnri.reston.va.us>
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	* Python/bltinmodule.c:
 | |
| 	Patch by Nick and Stephanie Lockwood to implement complex() with a string
 | |
| 	argument.  This closes TODO item 2.19.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Wed Mar 24 19:09:00 1999  Guido van Rossum  <guido@eric.cnri.reston.va.us>
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	* Tools/webchecker/wcnew.py: Added Samuel Bayer's new webchecker.
 | |
| 	Unfortunately his code breaks wcgui.py in a way that's not easy
 | |
| 	to fix.  I expect that this is a temporary situation --
 | |
| 	eventually Sam's changes will be merged back in.
 | |
| 	(The changes add a -t option to specify exceptions to the -x
 | |
| 	option, and explicit checking for #foo style fragment ids.)
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	* Objects/dictobject.c:
 | |
| 	Vladimir Marangozov contributed updated comments.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	* Objects/bufferobject.c: Folded long lines.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	* Lib/test/output/test_sha, Lib/test/test_sha.py:
 | |
| 	Added Jeremy's test code for the sha module.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	* Modules/shamodule.c, Modules/Setup.in:
 | |
| 	Added Greg Stein and Andrew Kuchling's sha module.
 | |
| 	Fix comments about zlib version and URL.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	* Lib/test/test_bsddb.py: Remove the temp file when we're done.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	* Include/pythread.h: Conform to standard boilerplate.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	* configure.in, configure, BeOS/linkmodule, BeOS/ar-fake:
 | |
| 	Chris Herborth: the new compiler in R4.1 needs some new options to work...
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	* Modules/socketmodule.c:
 | |
| 	Implement two suggestions by Jonathan Giddy: (1) in AIX, clear the
 | |
| 	data struct before calling gethostby{name,addr}_r(); (2) ignore the
 | |
| 	3/5/6 args determinations made by the configure script and switch on
 | |
| 	platform identifiers instead:
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	AIX, OSF have 3 args
 | |
| 	Sun, SGI have 5 args
 | |
| 	Linux has 6 args
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	On all other platforms, undef HAVE_GETHOSTBYNAME_R altogether.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	* Modules/socketmodule.c:
 | |
| 	Vladimir Marangozov implements the AIX 3-arg gethostbyname_r code.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	* Lib/mailbox.py:
 | |
| 	Add readlines() to _Subfile class.  Not clear who would need it, but
 | |
| 	Chris Lawrence sent me a broken version; this one is a tad simpler and
 | |
| 	more conforming to the standard.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Tue Mar 23 23:05:34 1999  Jeremy Hylton  <jhylton@eric.cnri.reston.va.us>
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	* Lib/gzip.py: use struct instead of bit-manipulate in Python
 | |
| 
 | |
| Tue Mar 23 19:00:55 1999  Guido van Rossum  <guido@eric.cnri.reston.va.us>
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	* Modules/Makefile.pre.in:
 | |
| 	Add $(EXE) to various occurrences of python so it will work on Cygwin
 | |
| 	with egcs (after setting EXE=.exe).  Patch by Norman Vine.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	* configure, configure.in:
 | |
| 	Ack!  It never defined HAVE_GETHOSTBYNAME_R so that code was never tested!
 | |
| 
 | |
| Mon Mar 22 22:25:39 1999  Guido van Rossum  <guido@eric.cnri.reston.va.us>
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	* Include/thread.h:
 | |
| 	Adding thread.h -- unused but for b/w compatibility.
 | |
| 	As requested by Bill Janssen.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	* configure.in, configure:
 | |
| 	Add code to test for all sorts of gethostbyname_r variants,
 | |
| 	donated by David Arnold.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	* config.h.in, acconfig.h:
 | |
| 	Add symbols for gethostbyname_r variants (sigh).
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	* Modules/socketmodule.c: Clean up pass for the previous patches.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	- Use HAVE_GETHOSTBYNAME_R_6_ARG instead of testing for Linux and
 | |
| 	glibc2.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	- If gethostbyname takes 3 args, undefine HAVE_GETHOSTBYNAME_R --
 | |
| 	don't know what code should be used.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	- New symbol USE_GETHOSTBYNAME_LOCK defined iff the lock should be used.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	- Modify the gethostbyaddr() code to also hold on to the lock until
 | |
| 	after it is safe to release, overlapping with the Python lock.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	(Note: I think that it could in theory be possible that Python code
 | |
| 	executed while gethostbyname_lock is held could attempt to reacquire
 | |
| 	the lock -- e.g. in a signal handler or destructor.  I will simply say
 | |
| 	"don't do that then.")
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	* Modules/socketmodule.c: Jonathan Giddy writes:
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	Here's a patch to fix the race condition, which wasn't fixed by Rob's
 | |
| 	patch.  It holds the gethostbyname lock until the results are copied out,
 | |
| 	which means that this lock and the Python global lock are held at the same
 | |
| 	time.  This shouldn't be a problem as long as the gethostbyname lock is
 | |
| 	always acquired when the global lock is not held.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Mon Mar 22 19:25:30 1999  Andrew Kuchling  <akuchlin@eric.cnri.reston.va.us>
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	* Modules/zlibmodule.c:
 | |
| 	Fixed the flush() method of compression objects; the test for
 | |
| 	    the end of loop was incorrect, and failed when the flushmode != Z_FINISH.
 | |
| 	    Logic cleaned up and commented.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	* Lib/test/test_zlib.py:
 | |
| 	Added simple test for the flush() method of compression objects, trying the
 | |
| 	    different flush values Z_NO_FLUSH, Z_SYNC_FLUSH, Z_FULL_FLUSH.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Mon Mar 22 15:28:08 1999  Guido van Rossum  <guido@eric.cnri.reston.va.us>
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	* Lib/shlex.py:
 | |
| 	Bug reported by Tobias Thelen: missing "self." in assignment target.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Fri Mar 19 21:50:11 1999  Guido van Rossum  <guido@eric.cnri.reston.va.us>
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	* Modules/arraymodule.c:
 | |
| 	Use an unsigned cast to avoid a warning in VC++.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	* Lib/dospath.py, Lib/ntpath.py:
 | |
| 	New code for split() by Tim Peters, behaves more like posixpath.split().
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	* Objects/floatobject.c:
 | |
| 	Fix a problem with Vladimir's PyFloat_Fini code: clear the free list; if
 | |
| 	a block cannot be freed, add its free items back to the free list.
 | |
| 	This is necessary to avoid leaking when Python is reinitialized later.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	* Objects/intobject.c:
 | |
| 	Fix a problem with Vladimir's PyInt_Fini code: clear the free list; if
 | |
| 	a block cannot be freed, add its free items back to the free list, and
 | |
| 	add its valid ints back to the small_ints array if they are in range.
 | |
| 	This is necessary to avoid leaking when Python is reinitialized later.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	* Lib/types.py:
 | |
| 	Added BufferType, the type returned by the new builtin buffer().  Greg Stein.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	* Python/bltinmodule.c:
 | |
| 	New builtin buffer() creates a derived read-only buffer from any
 | |
| 	object that supports the buffer interface (e.g. strings, arrays).
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	* Objects/bufferobject.c:
 | |
| 	Added check for negative offset for PyBuffer_FromObject and check for
 | |
| 	negative size for PyBuffer_FromMemory.  Greg Stein.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Thu Mar 18 15:10:44 1999  Guido van Rossum  <guido@eric.cnri.reston.va.us>
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	* Lib/urlparse.py: Sjoerd Mullender writes:
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	If a filename on Windows starts with \\, it is converted to a URL
 | |
| 	which starts with ////.  If this URL is passed to urlparse.urlparse
 | |
| 	you get a path that starts with // (and an empty netloc).  If you pass
 | |
| 	the result back to urlparse.urlunparse, you get a URL that starts with
 | |
| 	//, which is parsed differently by urlparse.urlparse.  The fix is to
 | |
| 	add the (empty) netloc with accompanying slashes if the path in
 | |
| 	urlunparse starts with //.  Do this for all schemes that use a netloc.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	* Lib/nturl2path.py: Sjoerd Mullender writes:
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	Pathnames of files on other hosts in the same domain
 | |
| 	(\\host\path\to\file) are not translated correctly to URLs and back.
 | |
| 	The URL should be something like file:////host/path/to/file.
 | |
| 	Note that a combination of drive letter and remote host is not
 | |
| 	possible.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Wed Mar 17 22:30:10 1999  Guido van Rossum  <guido@eric.cnri.reston.va.us>
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	* Lib/urlparse.py:
 | |
| 	Delete non-standard-conforming code in urljoin() that would use the
 | |
| 	netloc from the base url as the default netloc for the resulting url
 | |
| 	even if the schemes differ.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	Once upon a time, when the web was wild, this was a valuable hack
 | |
| 	because some people had a URL referencing an ftp server colocated with
 | |
| 	an http server without having the host in the ftp URL (so they could
 | |
| 	replicate it or change the hostname easily).
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	More recently, after the file: scheme got added back to the list of
 | |
| 	schemes that accept a netloc, it turns out that this caused weirdness
 | |
| 	when joining an http: URL with a file: URL -- the resulting file: URL
 | |
| 	would always inherit the host from the http: URL because the file:
 | |
| 	scheme supports a netloc but in practice never has one.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	There are two reasons to get rid of the old, once-valuable hack,
 | |
| 	instead of removing the file: scheme from the uses_netloc list.  One,
 | |
| 	the RFC says that file: uses the netloc syntax, and does not endorse
 | |
| 	the old hack.  Two, neither netscape 4.5 nor IE 4.0 support the old
 | |
| 	hack.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	* Include/ceval.h, Include/abstract.h:
 | |
| 	Add DLL level b/w compat for PySequence_In and PyEval_CallObject
 | |
| 
 | |
| Tue Mar 16 21:54:50 1999  Guido van Rossum  <guido@eric.cnri.reston.va.us>
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	* Lib/lib-tk/Tkinter.py: Bug reported by Jim Robinson:
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	An attempt to execute grid_slaves with arguments (0,0) results in
 | |
| 	*all* of the slaves being returned, not just the slave associated with
 | |
| 	row 0, column 0.  This is because the test for arguments in the method
 | |
| 	does not test to see if row (and column) does not equal None, but
 | |
| 	rather just whether is evaluates to non-false.  A value of 0 fails
 | |
| 	this test.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Tue Mar 16 14:17:48 1999  Fred Drake  <fdrake@eric.cnri.reston.va.us>
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	* Modules/cmathmodule.c:
 | |
| 	Docstring fix:  acosh() returns the hyperbolic arccosine, not the
 | |
| 	hyperbolic cosine.  Problem report via David Ascher by one of his
 | |
| 	students.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Mon Mar 15 21:40:59 1999  Guido van Rossum  <guido@eric.cnri.reston.va.us>
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	* configure.in:
 | |
| 	Should test for gethost*by*name_r, not for gethostname_r (which
 | |
| 	doesn't exist and doesn't make sense).
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	* Modules/socketmodule.c:
 | |
| 	Patch by Rob Riggs for Linux -- glibc2 has a different argument
 | |
| 	converntion for gethostbyname_r() etc. than Solaris!
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	* Python/thread_pthread.h: Rob Riggs wrote:
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	"""
 | |
| 	Spec says that on success pthread_create returns 0. It does not say
 | |
| 	that an error code will be < 0. Linux glibc2 pthread_create() returns
 | |
| 	ENOMEM (12) when one exceed process limits. (It looks like it should
 | |
| 	return EAGAIN, but that's another story.)
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	For reference, see:
 | |
| 	http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/7908799/xsh/pthread_create.html
 | |
| 	"""
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	[I have a feeling that similar bugs were fixed before; perhaps someone
 | |
| 	could check that all error checks no check for != 0?]
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	* Tools/bgen/bgen/bgenObjectDefinition.py:
 | |
| 	New mixin class that defines cmp and hash that use
 | |
| 	the ob_itself pointer.  This allows (when using the mixin)
 | |
| 	different Python objects pointing to the same C object and
 | |
| 	behaving well as dictionary keys.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	Or so sez Jack Jansen...
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	* Lib/urllib.py: Yet another patch by Sjoerd Mullender:
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	Don't convert URLs to URLs using pathname2url.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Fri Mar 12 22:15:43 1999  Guido van Rossum  <guido@eric.cnri.reston.va.us>
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	* Lib/cmd.py: Patch by Michael Scharf.  He writes:
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	    The module cmd requires for each do_xxx command a help_xxx
 | |
| 	    function. I think this is a little old fashioned.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	    Here is a patch: use the docstring as help if no help_xxx
 | |
| 	    function can be found.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	[I'm tempted to rip out all the help_* functions from pdb, but I'll
 | |
| 	resist it.  Any takers?  --Guido]
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	* Tools/freeze/freeze.py: Bug submitted by Wayne Knowles, who writes:
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	   Under Windows, python freeze.py -o hello hello.py
 | |
| 	   creates all the correct files in the hello subdirectory, but the
 | |
| 	   Makefile has the directory prefix in it for frozen_extensions.c
 | |
| 	   nmake fails because it tries to locate hello/frozen_extensions.c
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	(His fix adds a call to os.path.basename() in the appropriate place.)
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	* Objects/floatobject.c, Objects/intobject.c:
 | |
| 	Vladimir has restructured his code somewhat so that the blocks are now
 | |
| 	represented by an explicit structure.  (There are still too many casts
 | |
| 	in the code, but that may be unavoidable.)
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	Also added code so that with -vv it is very chatty about what it does.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	* Demo/zlib/zlibdemo.py, Demo/zlib/minigzip.py:
 | |
| 	Change #! line to modern usage; also chmod +x
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	* Demo/pdist/rrcs, Demo/pdist/rcvs, Demo/pdist/rcsbump:
 | |
| 	Change #! line to modern usage
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	* Lib/nturl2path.py, Lib/urllib.py: From: Sjoerd Mullender
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	The filename to URL conversion didn't properly quote special
 | |
| 	characters.
 | |
| 	The URL to filename didn't properly unquote special chatacters.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	* Objects/floatobject.c:
 | |
| 	OK, try again.  Vladimir gave me a fix for the alignment bus error,
 | |
| 	so here's his patch again.  This time it works (at least on Solaris,
 | |
| 	Linux and Irix).
 | |
| 
 | |
| Thu Mar 11 23:21:23 1999  Guido van Rossum  <guido@eric.cnri.reston.va.us>
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	* Tools/idle/PathBrowser.py:
 | |
| 	Don't crash when sys.path contains an empty string.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	* Tools/idle/PathBrowser.py:
 | |
| 	- Don't crash in the case where a superclass is a string instead of a
 | |
| 	pyclbr.Class object; this can happen when the superclass is
 | |
| 	unrecognizable (to pyclbr), e.g. when module renaming is used.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	- Show a watch cursor when calling pyclbr (since it may take a while
 | |
| 	recursively parsing imported modules!).
 | |
| 
 | |
| Thu Mar 11 16:04:04 1999  Fred Drake  <fdrake@eric.cnri.reston.va.us>
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	* Lib/mimetypes.py:
 | |
| 	Added .rdf and .xsl as application/xml types.  (.rdf is for the
 | |
| 	Resource Description Framework, a metadata encoding, and .xsl is for
 | |
| 	the Extensible Stylesheet Language.)
 | |
| 
 | |
| Thu Mar 11 13:26:23 1999  Guido van Rossum  <guido@eric.cnri.reston.va.us>
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	* Lib/test/output/test_popen2, Lib/test/test_popen2.py:
 | |
| 	Test for popen2 module, by Chris Tismer.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	* Objects/floatobject.c:
 | |
| 	Alas, Vladimir's patch caused a bus error (probably double
 | |
| 	alignment?), and I didn't test it.  Withdrawing it for now.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Wed Mar 10 22:55:47 1999  Guido van Rossum  <guido@eric.cnri.reston.va.us>
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	* Objects/floatobject.c:
 | |
| 	Patch by Vladimir Marangoz to allow freeing of the allocated blocks of
 | |
| 	floats on finalization.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	* Objects/intobject.c:
 | |
| 	Patch by Vladimir Marangoz to allow freeing of the allocated blocks of
 | |
| 	integers on finalization.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	* Tools/idle/EditorWindow.py, Tools/idle/Bindings.py:
 | |
| 	Add PathBrowser to File module
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	* Tools/idle/PathBrowser.py:
 | |
| 	"Path browser" - 4 scrolled lists displaying:
 | |
| 	    directories on sys.path
 | |
| 	    modules in selected directory
 | |
| 	    classes in selected module
 | |
| 	    methods of selected class
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	Sinlge clicking in a directory, module or class item updates the next
 | |
| 	column with info about the selected item.  Double clicking in a
 | |
| 	module, class or method item opens the file (and selects the clicked
 | |
| 	item if it is a class or method).
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	I guess eventually I should be using a tree widget for this, but the
 | |
| 	ones I've seen don't work well enough, so for now I use the old
 | |
| 	Smalltalk or NeXT style multi-column hierarchical browser.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	* Tools/idle/MultiScrolledLists.py:
 | |
| 	New utility: multiple scrolled lists in parallel
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	* Tools/idle/ScrolledList.py: - White background.
 | |
| 	- Display "(None)" (or text of your choosing) when empty.
 | |
| 	- Don't set the focus.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Tue Mar  9 19:31:21 1999  Guido van Rossum  <guido@eric.cnri.reston.va.us>
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	* Lib/urllib.py:
 | |
| 	open_http also had the 'data is None' test backwards.  don't call with the
 | |
| 	extra argument if data is None.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	* Demo/embed/demo.c:
 | |
| 	Call Py_SetProgramName() instead of redefining getprogramname(),
 | |
| 	reflecting changes in the runtime around 1.5 or earlier.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	* Python/ceval.c:
 | |
| 	Always test for an error return (usually NULL or -1) without setting
 | |
| 	an exception.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	* Modules/timemodule.c: Patch by Chris Herborth for BeOS code.
 | |
| 	He writes:
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	I had an off-by-1000 error in floatsleep(),
 | |
| 	and the problem with time.clock() is that it's not implemented properly
 | |
| 	on QNX... ANSI says it's supposed to return _CPU_ time used by the
 | |
| 	process, but on QNX it returns the amount of real time used... so I was
 | |
| 	confused.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	* Tools/bgen/bgen/macsupport.py: Small change by Jack Jansen.
 | |
| 	Test for self.returntype behaving like OSErr rather than being it.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Thu Feb 25 16:14:58 1999  Jeremy Hylton  <jhylton@eric.cnri.reston.va.us>
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	* Lib/urllib.py:
 | |
| 	http_error had the 'data is None' test backwards.  don't call with the
 | |
| 	extra argument if data is None.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	* Lib/urllib.py: change indentation from 8 spaces to 4 spaces
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	* Lib/urllib.py: pleasing the tabnanny
 | |
| 
 | |
| Thu Feb 25 14:26:02 1999  Fred Drake  <fdrake@eric.cnri.reston.va.us>
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	* Lib/colorsys.py:
 | |
| 	Oops, one more "x, y, z" to convert...
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	* Lib/colorsys.py:
 | |
| 	Adjusted comment at the top to be less confusing, following Fredrik
 | |
| 	Lundh's example.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	Converted comment to docstring.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Wed Feb 24 18:49:15 1999  Fred Drake  <fdrake@eric.cnri.reston.va.us>
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	* Lib/toaiff.py:
 | |
| 	Use sndhdr instead of the obsolete whatsound module.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Wed Feb 24 18:42:38 1999  Jeremy Hylton  <jhylton@eric.cnri.reston.va.us>
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	* Lib/urllib.py:
 | |
| 	When performing a POST request, i.e. when the second argument to
 | |
| 	urlopen is used to specify form data, make sure the second argument is
 | |
| 	threaded through all of the http_error_NNN calls.  This allows error
 | |
| 	handlers like the redirect and authorization handlers to properly
 | |
| 	re-start the connection.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Wed Feb 24 16:25:17 1999  Guido van Rossum  <guido@eric.cnri.reston.va.us>
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	* Lib/mhlib.py: Patch by Lars Wirzenius:
 | |
| 
 | |
| 		o the initial comment is wrong: creating messages is already
 | |
| 		  implemented
 | |
| 
 | |
| 		o Message.getbodytext: if the mail or it's part contains an
 | |
| 		  empty content-transfer-encoding header, the code used to
 | |
| 		  break; the change below treats an empty encoding value the same
 | |
| 		  as the other types that do not need decoding
 | |
| 
 | |
| 		o SubMessage.getbodytext was missing the decode argument; the
 | |
| 		  change below adds it; I also made it unconditionally return
 | |
| 		  the raw text if decoding was not desired, because my own
 | |
| 		  routines needed that (and it was easier than rewriting my
 | |
| 		  own routines ;-)
 | |
| 
 | |
| Wed Feb 24 00:35:43 1999  Barry Warsaw  <bwarsaw@eric.cnri.reston.va.us>
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	* Python/bltinmodule.c (initerrors):
 | |
| 	Make sure that the exception tuples ("base-classes" when
 | |
| 	string-based exceptions are used) reflect the real class hierarchy,
 | |
| 	i.e. that SystemExit derives from Exception not StandardError.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	* Lib/exceptions.py:
 | |
| 	Document the correct class hierarchy for SystemExit.  It is not an
 | |
| 	error and so it derives from Exception and not SystemError.  The
 | |
| 	docstring was incorrect but the implementation was fine.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Tue Feb 23 23:07:51 1999  Guido van Rossum  <guido@eric.cnri.reston.va.us>
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	* Lib/shutil.py:
 | |
| 	Add import sys, needed by reference to sys.exc_info() in rmtree().
 | |
| 	Discovered by Mitch Chapman.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	* config.h.in:
 | |
| 	Now that we don't have AC_CHECK_LIB(m, pow), the HAVE_LIBM symbol
 | |
| 	disappears.  It wasn't used anywhere anyway...
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	* Modules/arraymodule.c:
 | |
| 	Carefully check for overflow when allocating the memory for fromfile
 | |
| 	-- someone tried to pass in sys.maxint and got bitten by the bogus
 | |
| 	calculations.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	* configure.in:
 | |
| 	Get rid of AC_CHECK_LIB(m, pow) since this is taken care of later with
 | |
| 	LIBM (from --with-libm=...); this actually broke the customizability
 | |
| 	offered by the latter option.  Thanks go to Clay Spence for reporting
 | |
| 	this.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	* Lib/test/test_dl.py:
 | |
| 	1. Print the error message (carefully) when a dl.open() fails in verbose mode.
 | |
| 	2. When no test case worked, raise ImportError instead of failing.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	* Python/bltinmodule.c:
 | |
| 	Patch by Tim Peters to improve the range checks for range() and
 | |
| 	xrange(), especially for platforms where int and long are different
 | |
| 	sizes (so sys.maxint isn't actually the theoretical limit for the
 | |
| 	length of a list, but the largest C int is -- sys.maxint is the
 | |
| 	largest Python int, which is actually a C long).
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	* Makefile.in:
 | |
| 	1. Augment the DG/UX rule so it doesn't break the BeOS build.
 | |
| 	2. Add $(EXE) to various occurrences of python so it will work on
 | |
| 	   Cygwin with egcs (after setting EXE=.exe).  These patches by
 | |
| 	   Norman Vine.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	* Lib/posixfile.py:
 | |
| 	According to Jeffrey Honig, bsd/os 2.0 - 4.0 should be added to the
 | |
| 	list (of bsd variants that have a different lock structure).
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	* Lib/test/test_fcntl.py:
 | |
| 	According to Jeffrey Honig, bsd/os 4.0 should be added to the list.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	* Modules/timemodule.c:
 | |
| 	Patch by Tadayoshi Funaba (with some changes) to be smarter about
 | |
| 	guessing what happened when strftime() returns 0.  Is it buffer
 | |
| 	overflow or was the result simply 0 bytes long?  (This happens for an
 | |
| 	empty format string, or when the format string is a single %Z and the
 | |
| 	timezone is unknown.)  if the buffer is at least 256 times as long as
 | |
| 	the format, assume the latter.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Mon Feb 22 19:01:42 1999  Guido van Rossum  <guido@eric.cnri.reston.va.us>
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	* Lib/urllib.py:
 | |
| 	As Des Barry points out, we need to call pathname2url(file) in two
 | |
| 	calls to addinfourl() in open_file().
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	* Modules/Setup.in: Document *static* -- in two places!
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	* Modules/timemodule.c:
 | |
| 	We don't support leap seconds, so the seconds field of a time 9-tuple
 | |
| 	should be in the range [0-59].  Noted by Tadayoshi Funaba.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	* Modules/stropmodule.c:
 | |
| 	In atoi(), don't use isxdigit() to test whether the last character
 | |
| 	converted was a "digit" -- use isalnum().  This test is there only to
 | |
| 	guard against "+" or "-" being interpreted as a valid int literal.
 | |
| 	Reported by Takahiro Nakayama.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	* Lib/os.py:
 | |
| 	As Finn Bock points out, _P_WAIT etc. don't have a leading underscore
 | |
| 	so they don't need to be treated specially here.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Mon Feb 22 15:38:58 1999  Fred Drake  <fdrake@eric.cnri.reston.va.us>
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	* Misc/NEWS:
 | |
| 	Typo:  "apparentlt" --> "apparently"
 | |
| 
 | |
| Mon Feb 22 15:38:46 1999  Guido van Rossum  <guido@eric.cnri.reston.va.us>
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	* Lib/urlparse.py: Steve Clift pointed out that 'file' allows a netloc.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	* Modules/posixmodule.c:
 | |
| 	The docstring for ttyname(..) claims a second "mode" argument. The
 | |
| 	actual code does not allow such an argument.  (Finn Bock.)
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	* Lib/lib-old/poly.py:
 | |
| 	Dang.  Even though this is obsolete code, somebody found a bug, and I
 | |
| 	fix it.  Oh well.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Thu Feb 18 20:51:50 1999  Fred Drake  <fdrake@eric.cnri.reston.va.us>
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	* Lib/pyclbr.py:
 | |
| 	Bow to font-lock at the end of the docstring, since it throws stuff
 | |
| 	off.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	Make sure the path paramter to readmodule() is a list before adding it
 | |
| 	with sys.path, or the addition could fail.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| ======================================================================
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| From 1.5.2b1 to 1.5.2b2
 | |
| =======================
 | |
| 
 | |
| General
 | |
| -------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Many memory leaks fixed.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Many small bugs fixed.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Command line option -OO (or -O -O) suppresses inclusion of doc
 | |
| strings in resulting bytecode.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Windows-specific changes
 | |
| ------------------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - New built-in module winsound provides an interface to the Win32
 | |
| PlaySound() call.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Re-enable the audioop module in the config.c file.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - On Windows, support spawnv() and associated P_* symbols.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Fixed the conversion of times() return values on Windows.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Removed freeze from the installer -- it doesn't work without the
 | |
| source tree.  (See FAQ 8.11.)
 | |
| 
 | |
| - On Windows 95/98, the Tkinter module now is smart enough to find
 | |
| Tcl/Tk even when the PATH environment variable hasn't been set -- when
 | |
| the import of _tkinter fails, it searches in a standard locations,
 | |
| patches os.environ["PATH"], and tries again.  When it still fails, a
 | |
| clearer error message is produced.  This should avoid most
 | |
| installation problems with Tkinter use (e.g. in IDLE).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The -i option doesn't make any calls to set[v]buf() for stdin --
 | |
| this apparently screwed up _kbhit() and the _tkinter main loop.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The ntpath module (and hence, os.path on Windows) now parses out UNC
 | |
| paths (e.g. \\host\mountpoint\dir\file) as "drive letters", so that
 | |
| splitdrive() will \\host\mountpoint as the drive and \dir\file as the
 | |
| path.  ** EXPERIMENTAL **
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Added a hack to the exit code so that if (1) the exit status is
 | |
| nonzero and (2) we think we have our own DOS box (i.e. we're not
 | |
| started from a command line shell), we print a message and wait for
 | |
| the user to hit a key before the DOS box is closed.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Updated the installer to WISE 5.0g.  Added a dialog warning about
 | |
| the imminent Tcl installation.  Added a dialog to specify the program
 | |
| group name in the start menu.  Upgraded the Tcl installer to Tcl
 | |
| 8.0.4.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Changes to intrinsics
 | |
| ---------------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The repr() or str() of a module object now shows the __file__
 | |
| attribute (i.e., the file which it was loaded), or the string
 | |
| "(built-in)" if there is no __file__ attribute.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The range() function now avoids overflow during its calculations (if
 | |
| at all possible).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - New info string sys.hexversion, which is an integer encoding the
 | |
| version in hexadecimal.  In other words, hex(sys.hexversion) ==
 | |
| 0x010502b2 for Python 1.5.2b2.
 | |
| 
 | |
| New or improved ports
 | |
| ---------------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Support for Nextstep descendants (future Mac systems).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Improved BeOS support.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Support dynamic loading of shared libraries on NetBSD platforms that 
 | |
| use ELF (i.e., MIPS and Alpha systems).
 | |
| 
 | |
| Configuration/build changes
 | |
| ---------------------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The Lib/test directory is no longer included in the default module
 | |
| search path (sys.path) -- "test" has been a package ever since 1.5.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Now using autoconf 2.13.
 | |
| 
 | |
| New library modules
 | |
| -------------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - New library modules asyncore and asynchat: these form Sam Rushing's
 | |
| famous asynchronous socket library.  Sam has gracefully allowed me to
 | |
| incorporate these in the standard Python library.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - New module statvfs contains indexing constants for [f]statvfs()
 | |
| return tuple.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Changes to the library
 | |
| ----------------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The wave module (platform-independent support for Windows sound
 | |
| files) has been fixed to actually make it work.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The sunau module (platform-independent support for Sun/NeXT sound
 | |
| files) has been fixed to work across platforms.  Also, a weird
 | |
| encoding bug in the header of the audio test data file has been
 | |
| corrected.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Fix a bug in the urllib module that occasionally tripped up
 | |
| webchecker and other ftp retrieves.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - ConfigParser's get() method now accepts an optional keyword argument
 | |
| (vars) that is substituted on top of the defaults that were setup in
 | |
| __init__.  You can now also have recusive references in your
 | |
| configuration file.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Some improvements to the Queue module, including a put_nowait()
 | |
| module and an optional "block" second argument, to get() and put(),
 | |
| defaulting to 1.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The updated xmllib module is once again compatible with the version
 | |
| present in Python 1.5.1 (this was accidentally broken in 1.5.2b1).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The bdb module (base class for the debugger) now supports
 | |
| canonicalizing pathnames used in breakpoints.  The derived class must
 | |
| override the new canonical() method for this to work.  Also changed
 | |
| clear_break() to the backwards compatible old signature, and added
 | |
| clear_bpbynumber() for the new functionality.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - In sgmllib (and hence htmllib), recognize attributes even if they
 | |
| don't have space in front of them.  I.e.  '<a
 | |
| name="foo"href="bar.html">' will now have two attributes recognized.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - In the debugger (pdb), change clear syntax to support three
 | |
| alternatives: clear; clear file:line; clear bpno bpno ...
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The os.path module now pretends to be a submodule within the os
 | |
| "package", so you can do things like "from os.path import exists".
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The standard exceptions now have doc strings.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - In the smtplib module, exceptions are now classes.  Also avoid
 | |
| inserting a non-standard space after "TO" in rcpt() command.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The rfc822 module's getaddrlist() method now uses all occurrences of
 | |
| the specified header instead of just the first.  Some other bugfixes
 | |
| too (to handle more weird addresses found in a very large test set,
 | |
| and to avoid crashes on certain invalid dates), and a small test
 | |
| module has been added.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Fixed bug in urlparse in the common-case code for HTTP URLs; it
 | |
| would lose the query, fragment, and/or parameter information.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The sndhdr module no longer supports whatraw() -- it depended on a
 | |
| rare extenral program.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The UserList module/class now supports the extend() method, like
 | |
| real list objects.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The uu module now deals better with trailing garbage generated by
 | |
| some broke uuencoders.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The telnet module now has an my_interact() method which uses threads
 | |
| instead of select.  The interact() method uses this by default on
 | |
| Windows (where the single-threaded version doesn't work).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Add a class to mailbox.py for dealing with qmail directory
 | |
| mailboxes.  The test code was extended to notice these being used as
 | |
| well.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Changes to extension modules
 | |
| ----------------------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Support for the [f]statvfs() system call, where it exists.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Fixed some bugs in cPickle where bad input could cause it to dump
 | |
| core.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Fixed cStringIO to make the writelines() function actually work.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Added strop.expandtabs() so string.expandtabs() is now much faster.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Added fsync() and fdatasync(), if they appear to exist.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Support for "long files" (64-bit seek pointers).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Fixed a bug in the zlib module's flush() function.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Added access() system call.  It returns 1 if access granted, 0 if
 | |
| not.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The curses module implements an optional nlines argument to
 | |
| w.scroll().  (It then calls wscrl(win, nlines) instead of scoll(win).)
 | |
| 
 | |
| Changes to tools
 | |
| ----------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Some changes to IDLE; see Tools/idle/NEWS.txt.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Latest version of Misc/python-mode.el included.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Changes to Tkinter
 | |
| ------------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Avoid tracebacks when an image is deleted after its root has been
 | |
| destroyed.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Changes to the Python/C API
 | |
| ---------------------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - When parentheses are used in a PyArg_Parse[Tuple]() call, any
 | |
| sequence is now accepted, instead of requiring a tuple.  This is in
 | |
| line with the general trend towards accepting arbitrary sequences.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Added PyModule_GetFilename().
 | |
| 
 | |
| - In PyNumber_Power(), remove unneeded and even harmful test for float
 | |
| to the negative power (which is already and better done in
 | |
| floatobject.c).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - New version identification symbols; read patchlevel.h for info.  The
 | |
| version numbers are now exported by Python.h.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Rolled back the API version change -- it's back to 1007!
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The frozenmain.c function calls PyInitFrozenExtensions().
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Added 'N' format character to Py_BuildValue -- like 'O' but doesn't
 | |
| INCREF.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| ======================================================================
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| From 1.5.2a2 to 1.5.2b1
 | |
| =======================
 | |
| 
 | |
| Changes to intrinsics
 | |
| ---------------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - New extension NotImplementedError, derived from RuntimeError.  Not
 | |
| used, but recommended use is for "abstract" methods to raise this.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The parser will now spit out a warning or error when -t or -tt is
 | |
| used for parser input coming from a string, too.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The code generator now inserts extra SET_LINENO opcodes when
 | |
| compiling multi-line argument lists.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - When comparing bound methods, use identity test on the objects, not
 | |
| equality test.
 | |
| 
 | |
| New or improved ports
 | |
| ---------------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Chris Herborth has redone his BeOS port; it now works on PowerPC
 | |
| (R3/R4) and x86 (R4 only).  Threads work too in this port.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Renaming
 | |
| --------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Thanks to Chris Herborth, the thread primitives now have proper Py*
 | |
| names in the source code (they already had those for the linker,
 | |
| through some smart macros; but the source still had the old, un-Py
 | |
| names).
 | |
| 
 | |
| Configuration/build changes
 | |
| ---------------------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Improved support for FreeBSD/3.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Check for pthread_detach instead of pthread_create in libc.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The makesetup script now searches EXECINCLUDEPY before INCLUDEPY.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Misc/Makefile.pre.in now also looks at Setup.thread and Setup.local.
 | |
| Otherwise modules such as thread didn't get incorporated in extensions.
 | |
| 
 | |
| New library modules
 | |
| -------------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - shlex.py by Eric Raymond provides a lexical analyzer class for
 | |
| simple shell-like syntaxes.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - netrc.py by Eric Raymond provides a parser for .netrc files.  (The
 | |
| undocumented Netrc class in ftplib.py is now obsolete.)
 | |
| 
 | |
| - codeop.py is a new module that contains the compile_command()
 | |
| function that was previously in code.py.  This is so that JPython can
 | |
| provide its own version of this function, while still sharing the
 | |
| higher-level classes in code.py.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - turtle.py is a new module for simple turtle graphics.  I'm still
 | |
| working on it; let me know if you use this to teach Python to children 
 | |
| or other novices without prior programming experience.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Obsoleted library modules
 | |
| -------------------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - poly.py and zmod.py have been moved to Lib/lib-old to emphasize
 | |
| their status of obsoleteness.  They don't do a particularly good job
 | |
| and don't seem particularly relevant to the Python core.
 | |
| 
 | |
| New tools
 | |
| ---------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - I've added IDLE: my Integrated DeveLopment Environment for Python.
 | |
| Requires Tcl/Tk (and Tkinter).  Works on Windows and Unix (and should
 | |
| work on Macintosh, but I haven't been able to test it there; it does
 | |
| depend on new features in 1.5.2 and perhaps even new features in
 | |
| 1.5.2b1, especially the new code module).  This is very much a work in
 | |
| progress.  I'd like to hear how people like it compared to PTUI (or
 | |
| any other IDE they are familiar with).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - New tools by Barry Warsaw:
 | |
| 
 | |
|   = audiopy: controls the Solaris Audio device
 | |
|   = pynche:  The PYthonically Natural Color and Hue Editor
 | |
|   = world:   Print mappings between country names and DNS country codes
 | |
| 
 | |
| New demos
 | |
| ---------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Demo/scripts/beer.py prints the lyrics to an arithmetic drinking
 | |
| song.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Demo/tkinter/guido/optionmenu.py shows how to do an option menu in
 | |
| Tkinter.  (By Fredrik Lundh -- not by me!)
 | |
| 
 | |
| Changes to the library
 | |
| ----------------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - compileall.py now avoids recompiling .py files that haven't changed;
 | |
| it adds a -f option to force recompilation.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - New version of xmllib.py by Sjoerd Mullender (0.2 with latest
 | |
| patches).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - nntplib.py: statparse() no longer lowercases the message-id.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - types.py: use type(__stdin__) for FileType.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - urllib.py: fix translations for filenames with "funny" characters.
 | |
| Patch by Sjoerd Mullender.  Note that if you subclass one of the
 | |
| URLopener classes, and you have copied code from the old urllib.py,
 | |
| your subclass may stop working.  A long-term solution is to provide
 | |
| more methods so that you don't have to copy code.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - cgi.py: In read_multi, allow a subclass to override the class we
 | |
| instantiate when we create a recursive instance, by setting the class
 | |
| variable 'FieldStorageClass' to the desired class.  By default, this
 | |
| is set to None, in which case we use self.__class__ (as before).
 | |
| Also, a patch by Jim Fulton to pass additional arguments to recursive
 | |
| calls to the FieldStorage constructor from its read_multi method.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - UserList.py: In __getslice__, use self.__class__ instead of
 | |
| UserList.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - In SimpleHTTPServer.py, the server specified in test() should be
 | |
| BaseHTTPServer.HTTPServer, in case the request handler should want to
 | |
| reference the two attributes added by BaseHTTPServer.server_bind.  (By
 | |
| Jeff Rush, for Bobo).  Also open the file in binary mode, so serving
 | |
| images from a Windows box might actually work.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - In CGIHTTPServer.py, the list of acceptable formats is -split-
 | |
| on spaces but -joined- on commas, resulting in double commas
 | |
| in the joined text.  (By Jeff Rush.)
 | |
| 
 | |
| - SocketServer.py, patch by Jeff Bauer: a minor change to declare two
 | |
| new threaded versions of Unix Server classes, using the ThreadingMixIn
 | |
| class: ThreadingUnixStreamServer, ThreadingUnixDatagramServer.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - bdb.py: fix bomb on deleting a temporary breakpoint: there's no
 | |
| method do_delete(); do_clear() was meant.  By Greg Ward.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - getopt.py: accept a non-list sequence for the long options (request
 | |
| by Jack Jansen).  Because it might be a common mistake to pass a
 | |
| single string, this situation is treated separately.  Also added
 | |
| docstrings (copied from the library manual) and removed the (now
 | |
| redundant) module comments.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - tempfile.py: improvements to avoid security leaks.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - code.py: moved compile_command() to new module codeop.py.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - pickle.py: support pickle format 1.3 (binary float added).  By Jim
 | |
| Fulton. Also get rid of the undocumented obsolete Pickler dump_special
 | |
| method.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - uu.py: Move 'import sys' to top of module, as noted by Tim Peters.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - imaplib.py: fix problem with some versions of IMAP4 servers that
 | |
| choose to mix the case in their CAPABILITIES response.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - cmp.py: use (f1, f2) as cache key instead of f1 + ' ' + f2.  Noted
 | |
| by Fredrik Lundh.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Changes to extension modules
 | |
| ----------------------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - More doc strings for several modules were contributed by Chris
 | |
| Petrilli: math, cmath, fcntl.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Fixed a bug in zlibmodule.c that could cause core dumps on
 | |
| decompression of rarely occurring input.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - cPickle.c: new version from Jim Fulton, with Open Source copyright
 | |
| notice.  Also, initialize self->safe_constructors early on to prevent
 | |
| crash in early dealloc.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - cStringIO.c: new version from Jim Fulton, with Open Source copyright
 | |
| notice.  Also fixed a core dump in cStringIO.c when doing seeks.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - mpzmodule.c: fix signed character usage in mpz.mpz(stringobjecty).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - readline.c: Bernard Herzog pointed out that rl_parse_and_bind
 | |
| modifies its argument string (bad function!), so we make a temporary
 | |
| copy.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - sunaudiodev.c: Barry Warsaw added more smarts to get the device and
 | |
| control pseudo-device, per audio(7I).
 | |
| 
 | |
| Changes to tools
 | |
| ----------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - New, improved version of Barry Warsaw's Misc/python-mode.el (editing 
 | |
| support for Emacs).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - tabnanny.py: added a -q ('quiet') option to tabnanny, which causes
 | |
| only the names of offending files to be printed.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - freeze: when printing missing modules, also print the module they
 | |
| were imported from.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - untabify.py: patch by Detlef Lannert to implement -t option
 | |
| (set tab size).
 | |
| 
 | |
| Changes to Tkinter
 | |
| ------------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - grid_bbox(): support new Tk API: grid bbox ?column row? ?column2
 | |
| row2?
 | |
| 
 | |
| - _tkinter.c: RajGopal Srinivasan noted that the latest code (1.5.2a2)
 | |
| doesn't work when running in a non-threaded environment.  He added
 | |
| some #ifdefs that fix this.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Changes to the Python/C API
 | |
| ---------------------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bumped API version number to 1008 -- enough things have changed!
 | |
| 
 | |
| - There's a new macro, PyThreadState_GET(), which does the same work
 | |
| as PyThreadState_Get() without the overhead of a function call (it
 | |
| also avoids the error check).  The two top calling locations of
 | |
| PyThreadState_Get() have been changed to use this macro.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - All symbols intended for export from a DLL or shared library are now
 | |
| marked as such (with the DL_IMPORT() macro) in the header file that
 | |
| declares them.  This was needed for the BeOS port, and should also
 | |
| make some other ports easier.  The PC port no longer needs the file
 | |
| with exported symbols (PC/python_nt.def).  There's also a DL_EXPORT
 | |
| macro which is only used for init methods in extension modules, and
 | |
| for Py_Main().
 | |
| 
 | |
| Invisible changes to internals
 | |
| ------------------------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Fixed a bug in new_buffersize() in fileobject.c which could
 | |
| return a buffer size that was way too large.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Use PySys_WriteStderr instead of fprintf in most places.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - dictobject.c: remove dead code discovered by Vladimir Marangozov.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - tupleobject.c: make tuples less hungry -- an extra item was
 | |
| allocated but never used.  Tip by Vladimir Marangozov.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - mymath.h: Metrowerks PRO4 finally fixes the hypot snafu.  (Jack
 | |
| Jansen)
 | |
| 
 | |
| - import.c: Jim Fulton fixes a reference count bug in
 | |
| PyEval_GetGlobals.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - glmodule.c: check in the changed version after running the stubber
 | |
| again -- this solves the conflict with curses over the 'clear' entry
 | |
| point much nicer.  (Jack Jansen had checked in the changes to cstubs
 | |
| eons ago, but I never regenrated glmodule.c :-( )
 | |
| 
 | |
| - frameobject.c: fix reference count bug in PyFrame_New.  Vladimir
 | |
| Marangozov.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - stropmodule.c: add a missing DECREF in an error exit.  Submitted by
 | |
| Jonathan Giddy.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| ======================================================================
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| From 1.5.2a1 to 1.5.2a2
 | |
| =======================
 | |
| 
 | |
| General
 | |
| -------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - It is now a syntax error to have a function argument without a
 | |
| default following one with a default.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - __file__ is now set to the .py file if it was parsed (it used to
 | |
| always be the .pyc/.pyo file).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Don't exit with a fatal error during initialization when there's a
 | |
| problem with the exceptions.py module.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - New environment variable PYTHONOPTIMIZE can be used to set -O.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - New version of python-mode.el for Emacs.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Miscellaneous fixed bugs
 | |
| ------------------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - No longer print the (confusing) error message about stack underflow
 | |
| while compiling.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Some threading and locking bugs fixed.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - When errno is zero, report "Error", not "Success".
 | |
| 
 | |
| Documentation
 | |
| -------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Documentation will be released separately.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Doc strings added to array and md5 modules by Chris Petrilli.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Ports and build procedure
 | |
| -------------------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Stop installing when a move or copy fails.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - New version of the OS/2 port code by Jeff Rush.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The makesetup script handles absolute filenames better.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The 'new' module is now enabled by default in the Setup file.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - I *think* I've solved the problem with the Linux build blowing up
 | |
| sometimes due to a conflict between sigcheck/intrcheck and
 | |
| signalmodule.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Built-in functions
 | |
| ------------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The second argument to apply() can now be any sequence, not just a
 | |
| tuple.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Built-in types
 | |
| --------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Lists have a new method: L1.extend(L2) is equivalent to the common
 | |
| idiom L1[len(L1):] = L2.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Better error messages when a sequence is indexed with a non-integer.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bettter error message when calling a non-callable object (include
 | |
| the type in the message).
 | |
| 
 | |
| Python services
 | |
| ---------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - New version of cPickle.c fixes some bugs.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - pickle.py: improved instantiation error handling.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - code.py: reworked quite a bit.  New base class
 | |
| InteractiveInterpreter and derived class InteractiveConsole.  Fixed
 | |
| several problems in compile_command().
 | |
| 
 | |
| - py_compile.py: print error message and continue on syntax errors.
 | |
| Also fixed an old bug with the fstat code (it was never used).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - pyclbr.py: support submodules of packages.
 | |
| 
 | |
| String Services
 | |
| ---------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - StringIO.py: raise the right exception (ValueError) for attempted
 | |
| I/O on closed StringIO objects.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - re.py: fixed a bug in subn(), which caused .groups() to fail inside
 | |
| the replacement function called by sub().
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The struct module has a new format 'P': void * in native mode.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Generic OS Services
 | |
| -------------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Module time: Y2K robustness.  2-digit year acceptance depends on
 | |
| value of time.accept2dyear, initialized from env var PYTHONY2K,
 | |
| default 0.  Years 00-68 mean 2000-2068, while 69-99 mean 1969-1999
 | |
| (POSIX or X/Open recommendation).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - os.path: normpath(".//x") should return "x", not "/x".
 | |
| 
 | |
| - getpass.py: fall back on default_getpass() when sys.stdin.fileno()
 | |
| doesn't work.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - tempfile.py: regenerate the template after a fork() call.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Optional OS Services
 | |
| --------------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - In the signal module, disable restarting interrupted system calls
 | |
| when we have siginterrupt().
 | |
| 
 | |
| Debugger
 | |
| --------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - No longer set __args__; this feature is no longer supported and can
 | |
| affect the debugged code.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - cmd.py, pdb.py and bdb.py have been overhauled by Richard Wolff, who
 | |
| added aliases and some other useful new features, e.g. much better
 | |
| breakpoint support: temporary breakpoint, disabled breakpoints,
 | |
| breakpoints with ignore counts, and conditions; breakpoints can be set
 | |
| on a file before it is loaded.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Profiler
 | |
| --------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Changes so that JPython can use it.  Also fix the calibration code
 | |
| so it actually works again
 | |
| .
 | |
| Internet Protocols and Support
 | |
| ------------------------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - imaplib.py: new version from Piers Lauder.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - smtplib.py: change sendmail() method to accept a single string or a
 | |
| list or strings as the destination (commom newbie mistake).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - poplib.py: LIST with a msg argument fixed.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - urlparse.py: some optimizations for common case (http).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - urllib.py: support content-length in info() for ftp protocol;
 | |
| support for a progress meter through a third argument to
 | |
| urlretrieve(); commented out gopher test (the test site is dead).
 | |
| 
 | |
| Internet Data handling
 | |
| ----------------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - sgmllib.py: support tags with - or . in their name.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - mimetypes.py: guess_type() understands 'data' URLs.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Restricted Execution
 | |
| --------------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The classes rexec.RModuleLoader and rexec.RModuleImporter no
 | |
| longer exist.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Tkinter
 | |
| -------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - When reporting an exception, store its info in sys.last_*.  Also,
 | |
| write all of it to stderr.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Added NS, EW, and NSEW constants, for grid's sticky option.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Fixed last-minute bug in 1.5.2a1 release: need to include "mytime.h".
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Make bind variants without a sequence return a tuple of sequences
 | |
| (formerly it returned a string, which wasn't very convenient).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Add image commands to the Text widget (these are new in Tk 8.0).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Added new listbox and canvas methods: {xview,yview}_{scroll,moveto}.)
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Improved the thread code (but you still can't call update() from
 | |
| another thread on Windows).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Fixed unnecessary references to _default_root in the new dialog
 | |
| modules.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Miscellaneous problems fixed.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| Windows General
 | |
| ---------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Call LoadLibraryEx(..., ..., LOAD_WITH_ALTERED_SEARCH_PATH) to
 | |
| search for dependent dlls in the directory containing the .pyd.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - In debugging mode, call DebugBreak() in Py_FatalError().
 | |
| 
 | |
| Windows Installer
 | |
| -----------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Install zlib.dll in the DLLs directory instead of in the win32
 | |
| system directory, to avoid conflicts with other applications that have 
 | |
| their own zlib.dll.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Test Suite
 | |
| ----------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - test_long.py: new test for long integers, by Tim Peters.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - regrtest.py: improved so it can be used for other test suites as
 | |
| well.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - test_strftime.py: use re to compare test results, to support legal
 | |
| variants (e.g. on Linux).
 | |
| 
 | |
| Tools and Demos
 | |
| ---------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Four new scripts in Tools/scripts: crlf.py and lfcr.py (to
 | |
| remove/add Windows style '\r\n' line endings), untabify.py (to remove
 | |
| tabs), and rgrep.yp (reverse grep).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Improvements to Tools/freeze/.  Each Python module is now written to
 | |
| its own C file.  This prevents some compilers or assemblers from
 | |
| blowing up on large frozen programs, and saves recompilation time if
 | |
| only a few modules are changed.  Other changes too, e.g. new command
 | |
| line options -x and -i.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Much improved (and smaller!) version of Tools/scripts/mailerdaemon.py.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Python/C API
 | |
| ------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - New mechanism to support extensions of the type object while
 | |
| remaining backward compatible with extensions compiled for previous
 | |
| versions of Python 1.5.  A flags field indicates presence of certain
 | |
| fields.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Addition to the buffer API to differentiate access to bytes and
 | |
| 8-bit characters (in anticipation of Unicode characters).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - New argument parsing format t# ("text") to indicate 8-bit
 | |
| characters; s# simply means 8-bit bytes, for backwards compatibility.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - New object type, bufferobject.c is an example and can be used to
 | |
| create buffers from memory.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Some support for 64-bit longs, including some MS platforms.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Many calls to fprintf(stderr, ...) have been replaced with calls to
 | |
| PySys_WriteStderr(...).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The calling context for PyOS_Readline() has changed: it must now be
 | |
| called with the interpreter lock held!  It releases the lock around
 | |
| the call to the function pointed to by PyOS_ReadlineFunctionPointer
 | |
| (default PyOS_StdioReadline()).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - New APIs PyLong_FromVoidPtr() and PyLong_AsVoidPtr().
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Renamed header file "thread.h" to "pythread.h".
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The code string of code objects may now be anything that supports the
 | |
| buffer API.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| ======================================================================
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| From 1.5.1 to 1.5.2a1
 | |
| =====================
 | |
| 
 | |
| General
 | |
| -------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - When searching for the library, a landmark that is a compiled module
 | |
| (string.pyc or string.pyo) is also accepted.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - When following symbolic links to the python executable, use a loop
 | |
| so that a symlink to a symlink can work.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Added a hack so that when you type 'quit' or 'exit' at the
 | |
| interpreter, you get a friendly explanation of how to press Ctrl-D (or 
 | |
| Ctrl-Z) to exit.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - New and improved Misc/python-mode.el (Python mode for Emacs).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Revert a new feature in Unix dynamic loading: for one or two
 | |
| revisions, modules were loaded using the RTLD_GLOBAL flag.  It turned
 | |
| out to be a bad idea.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Miscellaneous fixed bugs
 | |
| ------------------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - All patches on the patch page have been integrated.  (But much more
 | |
| has been done!)
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Several memory leaks plugged (e.g. the one for classes with a
 | |
| __getattr__ method).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Removed the only use of calloc().  This triggered an obscure bug on
 | |
| multiprocessor Sparc Solaris 2.6.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Fix a peculiar bug that would allow "import sys.time" to succeed
 | |
| (believing the built-in time module to be a part of the sys package).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Fix a bug in the overflow checking when converting a Python long to
 | |
| a C long (failed to convert -2147483648L, and some other cases).
 | |
| 
 | |
| Documentation
 | |
| -------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Doc strings have been added to many extension modules: __builtin__,
 | |
| errno, select, signal, socket, sys, thread, time.  Also to methods of
 | |
| list objects (try [].append.__doc__).  A doc string on a type will now
 | |
| automatically be propagated to an instance if the instance has methods
 | |
| that are accessed in the usual way.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The documentation has been expanded and the formatting improved.
 | |
| (Remember that the documentation is now unbundled and has its own
 | |
| release cycle though; see http://www.python.org/doc/.)
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Added Misc/Porting -- a mini-FAQ on porting to a new platform.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Ports and build procedure
 | |
| -------------------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The BeOS port is now integrated.  Courtesy Chris Herborth.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Symbol files for FreeBSD 2.x and 3.x have been contributed
 | |
| (Lib/plat-freebsd[23]/*).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Support HPUX 10.20 DCE threads.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Finally fixed the configure script so that (on SGI) if -OPT:Olimit=0
 | |
| works, it won't also use -Olimit 1500 (which gives a warning for every
 | |
| file).  Also support the SGI_ABI environment variable better.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The makesetup script now understands absolute pathnames ending in .o
 | |
| in the module -- it assumes it's a file for which we have no source.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Other miscellaneous improvements to the configure script and
 | |
| Makefiles.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The test suite now uses a different sound sample.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Built-in functions
 | |
| ------------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Better checks for invalid input to int(), long(), string.atoi(),
 | |
| string.atol().  (Formerly, a sign without digits would be accepted as
 | |
| a legal ways to spell zero.)
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Changes to map() and filter() to use the length of a sequence only
 | |
| as a hint -- if an IndexError happens earlier, take that.  (Formerly,
 | |
| this was considered an error.)
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Experimental feature in getattr(): a third argument can specify a
 | |
| default (instead of raising AttributeError).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Implement round() slightly different, so that for negative ndigits
 | |
| no additional errors happen in the last step.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The open() function now adds the filename to the exception when it
 | |
| fails.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Built-in exceptions
 | |
| -------------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - New standard exceptions EnvironmentError and PosixError.
 | |
| EnvironmentError is the base class for IOError and PosixError;
 | |
| PosixError is the same as os.error.  All this so that either exception
 | |
| class can be instantiated with a third argument indicating a filename.
 | |
| The built-in function open() and most os/posix functions that take a
 | |
| filename argument now use this.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Built-in types
 | |
| --------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - List objects now have an experimental pop() method; l.pop() returns
 | |
| and removes the last item; l.pop(i) returns and removes the item at
 | |
| i.  Also, the sort() method is faster again.  Sorting is now also
 | |
| safer: it is impossible for the sorting function to modify the list
 | |
| while the sort is going on (which could cause core dumps).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Changes to comparisons: numbers are now smaller than any other type.
 | |
| This is done to prevent the circularity where [] < 0L < 1 < [] is
 | |
| true.  As a side effect, cmp(None, 0) is now positive instead of
 | |
| negative.  This *shouldn't* affect any working code, but I've found
 | |
| that the change caused several "sleeping" bugs to become active, so
 | |
| beware!
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Instance methods may now have other callable objects than just
 | |
| Python functions as their im_func.  Use new.instancemethod() or write
 | |
| your own C code to create them; new.instancemethod() may be called
 | |
| with None for the instance to create an unbound method.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Assignment to __name__, __dict__ or __bases__ of a class object is
 | |
| now allowed (with stringent type checks); also allow assignment to
 | |
| __getattr__ etc.  The cached values for __getattr__ etc. are
 | |
| recomputed after such assignments (but not for derived classes :-( ).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Allow assignment to some attributes of function objects: func_code,
 | |
| func_defaults and func_doc / __doc__.  (With type checks except for
 | |
| __doc__ / func_doc .)
 | |
| 
 | |
| Python services
 | |
| ---------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - New tests (in Lib/test): reperf.py (regular expression benchmark),
 | |
| sortperf.py (list sorting benchmark), test_MimeWriter.py (test case
 | |
| for the MimeWriter module).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Generalized test/regrtest.py so that it is useful for testing other
 | |
| packages.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The ihooks.py module now understands package imports.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - In code.py, add a class that subsumes Fredrik Lundh's
 | |
| PythonInterpreter class.  The interact() function now uses this.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - In rlcompleter.py, in completer(), return None instead of raising an
 | |
| IndexError when there are no more completions left.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Fixed the marshal module to test for certain common kinds of invalid
 | |
| input.  (It's still not foolproof!)
 | |
| 
 | |
| - In the operator module, add an alias (now the preferred name)
 | |
| "contains" for "sequenceincludes".
 | |
| 
 | |
| String Services
 | |
| ---------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - In the string and strop modules, in the replace() function, treat an
 | |
| empty pattern as an error (since it's not clear what was meant!).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Some speedups to re.py, especially the string substitution and split
 | |
| functions.  Also added new function/method findall(), to find all
 | |
| occurrences of a given substring.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - In cStringIO, add better argument type checking and support the
 | |
| readonly 'closed' attribute (like regular files).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - In the struct module, unsigned 1-2 byte sized formats no longer
 | |
| result in long integer values.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Miscellaneous services
 | |
| ----------------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - In whrandom.py, added new method and function randrange(), same as
 | |
| choice(range(start, stop, step)) but faster.  This addresses the
 | |
| problem that randint() was accidentally defined as taking an inclusive
 | |
| range.  Also, randint(a, b) is now redefined as randrange(a, b+1),
 | |
| adding extra range and type checking to its arguments!
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Add some semi-thread-safety to random.gauss() (it used to be able to 
 | |
| crash when invoked from separate threads; now the worst it can do is
 | |
| give a duplicate result occasionally).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Some restructuring and generalization done to cmd.py.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Major upgrade to ConfigParser.py; converted to using 're', added new 
 | |
| exceptions, support underscore in section header and option name.  No
 | |
| longer add 'name' option to every section; instead, add '__name__'.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - In getpass.py, don't use raw_input() to ask for the password -- we
 | |
| don't want it to show up in the readline history!  Also don't catch
 | |
| interrupts (the try-finally already does all necessary cleanup).
 | |
| 
 | |
| Generic OS Services
 | |
| -------------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - New functions in os.py: makedirs(), removedirs(), renames().  New
 | |
| variable: linesep (the line separator as found in binary files,
 | |
| i.e. '\n' on Unix, '\r\n' on DOS/Windows, '\r' on Mac.  Do *not* use
 | |
| this with files opened in (default) text mode; the line separator used
 | |
| will always be '\n'!
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Changes to the 'os.path' submodule of os.py: added getsize(),
 | |
| getmtime(), getatime() -- these fetch the most popular items from the
 | |
| stat return tuple.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - In the time module, add strptime(), if it exists.  (This parses a
 | |
| time according to a format -- the inverse of strftime().)  Also,
 | |
| remove the call to mktime() from strftime() -- it messed up the
 | |
| formatting of some non-local times.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - In the socket module, added a new function gethostbyname_ex().
 | |
| Also, don't use #ifdef to test for some symbols that are enums on some
 | |
| platforms (and should exist everywhere).
 | |
| 
 | |
| Optional OS Services
 | |
| --------------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Some fixes to gzip.py.  In particular, the readlines() method now
 | |
| returns the lines *with* trailing newline characters, like readlines()
 | |
| of regular file objects.  Also, it didn't work together with cPickle;
 | |
| fixed that.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - In whichdb.py, support byte-swapped dbhash (bsddb) files.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - In anydbm.py, look at the type of an existing database to determine
 | |
| which module to use to open it.  (The anydbm.error exception is now a
 | |
| tuple.)
 | |
| 
 | |
| Unix Services
 | |
| -------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - In the termios module, in tcsetattr(), initialize the structure vy
 | |
| calling tcgetattr().
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Added some of the "wait status inspection" macros as functions to
 | |
| the posix module (and thus to the os module): WEXITSTATUS(),
 | |
| WIFEXITED(), WIFSIGNALED(), WIFSTOPPED(), WSTOPSIG(), WTERMSIG().
 | |
| 
 | |
| - In the syslog module, make the default facility more intuitive
 | |
| (matching the docs).
 | |
| 
 | |
| Debugger
 | |
| --------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - In pdb.py, support for setting breaks on files/modules that haven't
 | |
| been loaded yet.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Internet Protocols and Support
 | |
| ------------------------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Changes in urllib.py; sped up unquote() and quote().  Fixed an
 | |
| obscure bug in quote_plus().  Added urlencode(dict) -- convenience
 | |
| function for sending a POST request with urlopen().  Use the getpass
 | |
| module to ask for a password.  Rewrote the (test) main program so that
 | |
| when used as a script, it can retrieve one or more URLs to stdout.
 | |
| Use -t to run the self-test.  Made the proxy code work again.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - In cgi.py, treat "HEAD" the same as "GET", so that CGI scripts don't
 | |
| fail when someone asks for their HEAD.  Also, for POST, set the
 | |
| default content-type to application/x-www-form-urlencoded.  Also, in
 | |
| FieldStorage.__init__(), when method='GET', always get the query
 | |
| string from environ['QUERY_STRING'] or sys.argv[1] -- ignore an
 | |
| explicitly passed in fp.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The smtplib.py module now supports ESMTP and has improved standard
 | |
| compliance, for picky servers.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Improved imaplib.py.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Fixed UDP support in SocketServer.py (it never worked).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Fixed a small bug in CGIHTTPServer.py.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Internet Data handling
 | |
| ----------------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - In rfc822.py, add a new class AddressList.  Also support a new
 | |
| overridable method, isheader().  Also add a get() method similar to
 | |
| dictionaries (and make getheader() an alias for it).  Also, be smarter
 | |
| about seekable (test whether fp.tell() works) and test for presence of
 | |
| unread() method before trying seeks.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - In sgmllib.py, restore the call to report_unbalanced() that was lost
 | |
| long ago.  Also some other improvements: handle <? processing
 | |
| instructions >, allow . and - in entity names, and allow \r\n as line
 | |
| separator.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Some restructuring and generalization done to multifile.py; support
 | |
| a 'seekable' flag.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Restricted Execution
 | |
| --------------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Improvements to rexec.py: package support; support a (minimal)
 | |
| sys.exc_info().  Also made the (test) main program a bit fancier (you
 | |
| can now use it to run arbitrary Python scripts in restricted mode).
 | |
| 
 | |
| Tkinter
 | |
| -------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - On Unix, Tkinter can now safely be used from a multi-threaded
 | |
| application.  (Formerly, no threads would make progress while
 | |
| Tkinter's mainloop() was active, because it didn't release the Python
 | |
| interpreter lock.)  Unfortunately, on Windows, threads other than the
 | |
| main thread should not call update() or update_idletasks() because
 | |
| this will deadlock the application.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - An interactive interpreter that uses readline and Tkinter no longer
 | |
| uses up all available CPU time.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Even if readline is not used, Tk windows created in an interactive
 | |
| interpreter now get continuously updated.  (This even works in Windows
 | |
| as long as you don't hit a key.)
 | |
| 
 | |
| - New demos in Demo/tkinter/guido/: brownian.py, redemo.py, switch.py.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - No longer register Tcl_finalize() as a low-level exit handler.  It
 | |
| may call back into Python, and that's a bad idea.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Allow binding of Tcl commands (given as a string).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Some minor speedups; replace explicitly coded getint() with int() in
 | |
| most places.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - In FileDialog.py, remember the directory of the selected file, if
 | |
| given.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Change the names of all methods in the Wm class: they are now
 | |
| wm_title(), etc.  The old names (title() etc.) are still defined as
 | |
| aliases.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Add a new method of interpreter objects, interpaddr().  This returns
 | |
| the address of the Tcl interpreter object, as an integer.  Not very
 | |
| useful for the Python programmer, but this can be called by another C
 | |
| extension that needs to make calls into the Tcl/Tk C API and needs to
 | |
| get the address of the Tcl interpreter object.  A simple cast of the
 | |
| return value to (Tcl_Interp *) will do the trick.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Windows General
 | |
| ---------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Don't insist on proper case for module source files if the filename
 | |
| is all uppercase (e.g. FOO.PY now matches foo; but FOO.py still
 | |
| doesn't).  This should address problems with this feature on
 | |
| oldfashioned filesystems (Novell servers?).
 | |
| 
 | |
| Windows Library
 | |
| ---------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - os.environ is now all uppercase, but accesses are case insensitive,
 | |
| and the putenv() calls made as a side effect of changing os.environ
 | |
| are case preserving.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Removed samefile(), sameopenfile(), samestat() from os.path (aka
 | |
| ntpath.py) -- these cannot be made to work reliably (at least I
 | |
| wouldn't know how).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Fixed os.pipe() so that it returns file descriptors acceptable to
 | |
| os.read() and os.write() (like it does on Unix), rather than Windows
 | |
| file handles.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Added a table of WSA error codes to socket.py.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - In the select module, put the (huge) file descriptor arrays on the
 | |
| heap.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The getpass module now raises KeyboardInterrupt when it sees ^C.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - In mailbox.py, fix tell/seek when using files opened in text mode.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - In rfc822.py, fix tell/seek when using files opened in text mode.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - In the msvcrt extension module, release the interpreter lock for
 | |
| calls that may block: _locking(), _getch(), _getche().  Also fix a
 | |
| bogus error return when open_osfhandle() doesn't have the right
 | |
| argument list.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Windows Installer
 | |
| -----------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The registry key used is now "1.5" instead of "1.5.x" -- so future
 | |
| versions of 1.5 and Mark Hammond's win32all installer don't need to be 
 | |
| resynchronized.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Windows Tools
 | |
| -------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Several improvements to freeze specifically for Windows.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Windows Build Procedure
 | |
| -----------------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The VC++ project files and the WISE installer have been moved to the
 | |
| PCbuild subdirectory, so they are distributed in the same subdirectory
 | |
| where they must be used.  This avoids confusion.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - New project files for Windows 3.1 port by Jim Ahlstrom.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Got rid of the obsolete subdirectory PC/setup_nt/.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The projects now use distinct filenames for the .exe, .dll, .lib and
 | |
| .pyd files built in debug mode (by appending "_d" to the base name,
 | |
| before the extension).  This makes it easier to switch between the two
 | |
| and get the right versions.  There's a pragma in config.h that directs
 | |
| the linker to include the appropriate .lib file (so python15.lib no
 | |
| longer needs to be explicit in your project).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The installer now installs more files (e.g. config.h).  The idea is
 | |
| that you shouldn't need the source distribution if you want build your
 | |
| own extensions in C or C++.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Tools and Demos
 | |
| ---------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - New script nm2def.py by Marc-Andre Lemburg, to construct
 | |
| PC/python_nt.def automatically (some hand editing still required).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - New tool ndiff.py: Tim Peters' text diffing tool.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Various and sundry improvements to the freeze script.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The script texi2html.py (which was part of the Doc tree but is no
 | |
| longer used there) has been moved to the Tools/scripts subdirectory.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Some generalizations in the webchecker code.  There's now a
 | |
| primnitive gui for websucker.py: wsgui.py.  (In Tools/webchecker/.)
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The ftpmirror.py script now handles symbolic links properly, and
 | |
| also files with multiple spaces in their names.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The 1.5.1 tabnanny.py suffers an assert error if fed a script whose
 | |
| last line is both indented and lacks a newline.  This is now fixed.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Python/C API
 | |
| ------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Added missing prototypes for PyEval_CallFunction() and
 | |
| PyEval_CallMethod().
 | |
| 
 | |
| - New macro PyList_SET_ITEM().
 | |
| 
 | |
| - New macros to access object members for PyFunction, PyCFunction
 | |
| objects.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - New APIs PyImport_AppendInittab() an PyImport_ExtendInittab() to
 | |
| dynamically add one or many entries to the table of built-in modules.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - New macro Py_InitModule3(name, methods, doc) which calls
 | |
| Py_InitModule4() with appropriate arguments.  (The -4 variant requires 
 | |
| you to pass an obscure version number constant which is always the same.)
 | |
| 
 | |
| - New APIs PySys_WriteStdout() and PySys_WriteStderr() to write to
 | |
| sys.stdout or sys.stderr using a printf-like interface.  (Used in
 | |
| _tkinter.c, for example.)
 | |
| 
 | |
| - New APIs for conversion between Python longs and C 'long long' if
 | |
| your compiler supports it.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - PySequence_In() is now called PySequence_Contains().
 | |
| (PySequence_In() is still supported for b/w compatibility; it is
 | |
| declared obsolete because its argument order is confusing.)
 | |
| 
 | |
| - PyDict_GetItem() and PyDict_GetItemString() are changed so that they
 | |
| *never* raise an exception -- (even if the hash() fails, simply clear
 | |
| the error).  This was necessary because there is lots of code out
 | |
| there that already assumes this.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Changes to PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_List() to use the
 | |
| length of a sequence only as a hint -- if an IndexError happens
 | |
| earlier, take that.  (Formerly, this was considered an error.)
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Reformatted abstract.c to give it a more familiar "look" and fixed
 | |
| many error checking bugs.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Add NULL pointer checks to all calls of a C function through a type
 | |
| object and extensions (e.g. nb_add).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The code that initializes sys.path now calls Py_GetPythonHome()
 | |
| instead of getenv("PYTHONHOME").  This, together with the new API
 | |
| Py_SetPythonHome(), makes it easier for embedding applications to
 | |
| change the notion of Python's "home" directory (where the libraries
 | |
| etc. are sought).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Fixed a very old bug in the parsing of "O?" format specifiers.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| ======================================================================
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| ========================================
 | |
| ==> Release 1.5.1 (October 31, 1998) <==
 | |
| ========================================
 | |
| 
 | |
| From 1.5 to 1.5.1
 | |
| =================
 | |
| 
 | |
| General
 | |
| -------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The documentation is now unbundled.  It has also been extensively
 | |
| modified (mostly to implement a new and more uniform formatting
 | |
| style).  We figure that most people will prefer to download one of the
 | |
| preformatted documentation sets (HTML, PostScript or PDF) and that
 | |
| only a minority have a need for the LaTeX or FrameMaker sources.  Of
 | |
| course, the unbundled documentation sources still released -- just not
 | |
| in the same archive file, and perhaps not on the same date.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - All bugs noted on the errors page (and many unnoted) are fixed.  All
 | |
| new bugs take their places.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - No longer a core dump when attempting to print (or repr(), or str())
 | |
| a list or dictionary that contains an instance of itself; instead, the
 | |
| recursive entry is printed as [...] or {...}.  See Py_ReprEnter() and
 | |
| Py_ReprLeave() below.  Comparisons of such objects still go beserk,
 | |
| since this requires a different kind of fix; fortunately, this is a
 | |
| less common scenario in practice.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Syntax change
 | |
| -------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The raise statement can now be used without arguments, to re-raise 
 | |
| a previously set exception.  This should be used after catching an
 | |
| exception with an except clause only, either in the except clause or
 | |
| later in the same function.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Import and module handling
 | |
| --------------------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The implementation of import has changed to use a mutex (when
 | |
| threading is supported).  This means that when two threads
 | |
| simultaneously import the same module, the import statements are
 | |
| serialized.  Recursive imports are not affected.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Rewrote the finalization code almost completely, to be much more
 | |
| careful with the order in which modules are destroyed.  Destructors
 | |
| will now generally be able to reference built-in names such as None
 | |
| without trouble.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Case-insensitive platforms such as Mac and Windows require the case
 | |
| of a module's filename to match the case of the module name as
 | |
| specified in the import statement (see below).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The code for figuring out the default path now distinguishes between
 | |
| files, modules, executable files, and directories.  When expecting a
 | |
| module, we also look for the .pyc or .pyo file.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Parser/tokenizer changes
 | |
| ------------------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The tokenizer can now warn you when your source code mixes tabs and
 | |
| spaces for indentation in a manner that depends on how much a tab is
 | |
| worth in spaces.  Use "python -t" or "python -v" to enable this
 | |
| option.  Use "python -tt" to turn the warnings into errors.  (See also
 | |
| tabnanny.py and tabpolice.py below.)
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Return unsigned characters from tok_nextc(), so '\377' isn't
 | |
| mistaken for an EOF character.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Fixed two pernicious bugs in the tokenizer that only affected AIX.
 | |
| One was actually a general bug that was triggered by AIX's smaller I/O
 | |
| buffer size.  The other was a bug in the AIX optimizer's loop
 | |
| unrolling code; swapping two statements made the problem go away.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Tools, demos and miscellaneous files
 | |
| ------------------------------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - There's a new version of Misc/python-mode.el (the Emacs mode for
 | |
| Python) which is much smarter about guessing the indentation style
 | |
| used in a particular file.  Lots of other cool features too!
 | |
| 
 | |
| - There are two new tools in Tools/scripts: tabnanny.py and
 | |
| tabpolice.py, implementing two different ways of checking whether a
 | |
| file uses indentation in a way that is sensitive to the interpretation
 | |
| of a tab.  The preferred module is tabnanny.py (by Tim Peters).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Some new demo programs:
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	Demo/tkinter/guido/paint.py -- Dave Mitchell
 | |
| 	Demo/sockets/unixserver.py -- Piet van Oostrum
 | |
| 	
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Much better freeze support.  The freeze script can now freeze
 | |
| hierarchical module names (with a corresponding change to import.c),
 | |
| and has a few extra options (e.g. to suppress freezing specific
 | |
| modules).  It also does much more on Windows NT.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Version 1.0 of the faq wizard is included (only very small changes
 | |
| since version 0.9.0).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - New feature for the ftpmirror script: when removing local files
 | |
| (i.e., only when -r is used), do a recursive delete.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Configuring and building Python
 | |
| -------------------------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Get rid of the check for -linet -- recent Sequent Dynix systems don't
 | |
| need this any more and apparently it screws up their configuration.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Some changes because gcc on SGI doesn't support '-all'.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Changed the build rules to use $(LIBRARY) instead of
 | |
|   -L.. -lpython$(VERSION)
 | |
| since the latter trips up the SunOS 4.1.x linker (sigh).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Fix the bug where the '# dgux is broken' comment in the Makefile
 | |
| tripped over Make on some platforms.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Changes for AIX: install the python.exp file; properly use
 | |
| $(srcdir); the makexp_aix script now removes C++ entries of the form
 | |
| Class::method.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Deleted some Makefile targets only used by the (long obsolete)
 | |
| gMakefile hacks.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Extension modules
 | |
| -----------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Performance and threading improvements to the socket and bsddb
 | |
| modules, by Christopher Lindblad of Infoseek.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Added operator.__not__ and operator.not_.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - In the thread module, when a thread exits due to an unhandled
 | |
| exception, don't store the exception information in sys.last_*; it
 | |
| prevents proper calling of destructors of local variables.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Fixed a number of small bugs in the cPickle module.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Changed find() and rfind() in the strop module so that
 | |
| find("x","",2) returns -1, matching the implementation in string.py.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - In the time module, be more careful with the result of ctime(), and
 | |
| test for HAVE_MKTIME before usinmg mktime().
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Doc strings contributed by Mitch Chapman to the termios, pwd, gdbm
 | |
| modules.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Added the LOG_SYSLOG constant to the syslog module, if defined.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Standard library modules
 | |
| ------------------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - All standard library modules have been converted to an indentation
 | |
| style using either only tabs or only spaces -- never a mixture -- if
 | |
| they weren't already consistent according to tabnanny.  This means
 | |
| that the new -t option (see above) won't complain about standard
 | |
| library modules.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - New standard library modules:
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	threading -- GvR and the thread-sig
 | |
| 		Java style thread objects -- USE THIS!!!
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	getpass -- Piers Lauder
 | |
| 		simple utilities to prompt for a password and to
 | |
| 		retrieve the current username
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	imaplib -- Piers Lauder
 | |
| 		interface for the IMAP4 protocol
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	poplib -- David Ascher, Piers Lauder
 | |
| 		interface for the POP3 protocol
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	smtplib -- Dragon De Monsyne
 | |
| 		interface for the SMTP protocol
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Some obsolete modules moved to a separate directory (Lib/lib-old)
 | |
| which is *not* in the default module search path:
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	Para
 | |
| 	addpack
 | |
| 	codehack
 | |
| 	fmt
 | |
| 	lockfile
 | |
| 	newdir
 | |
| 	ni
 | |
| 	rand
 | |
| 	tb
 | |
| 
 | |
| - New version of the PCRE code (Perl Compatible Regular Expressions --
 | |
| the re module and the supporting pcre extension) by Andrew Kuchling.
 | |
| Incompatible new feature in re.sub(): the handling of escapes in the
 | |
| replacement string has changed.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Interface change in the copy module: a __deepcopy__ method is now
 | |
| called with the memo dictionary as an argument.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Feature change in the tokenize module: differentiate between NEWLINE
 | |
| token (an official newline) and NL token (a newline that the grammar
 | |
| ignores).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Several bugfixes to the urllib module.  It is now truly thread-safe,
 | |
| and several bugs and a portability problem have been fixed.  New
 | |
| features, all due to Sjoerd Mullender: When creating a temporary file,
 | |
| it gives it an appropriate suffix.  Support the "data:" URL scheme.
 | |
| The open() method uses the tempcache.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - New version of the xmllib module (this time with a test suite!) by
 | |
| Sjoerd Mullender.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Added debugging code to the telnetlib module, to be able to trace
 | |
| the actual traffic.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - In the rfc822 module, added support for deleting a header (still no
 | |
| support for adding headers, though).  Also fixed a bug where an
 | |
| illegal address would cause a crash in getrouteaddr(), fixed a
 | |
| sign reversal in mktime_tz(), and use the local timezone by default
 | |
| (the latter two due to Bill van Melle).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The normpath() function in the dospath and ntpath modules no longer
 | |
| does case normalization -- for that, use the separate function
 | |
| normcase() (which always existed); normcase() has been sped up and
 | |
| fixed (it was the cause of a crash in Mark Hammond's installer in
 | |
| certain locales).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - New command supported by the ftplib module: rmd(); also fixed some
 | |
| minor bugs.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The profile module now uses a different timer function by default -- 
 | |
| time.clock() is generally better than os.times().  This makes it work
 | |
| better on Windows NT, too.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The tempfile module now recovers when os.getcwd() raises an
 | |
| exception.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Fixed some bugs in the random module; gauss() was subtly wrong, and
 | |
| vonmisesvariate() should return a full circle.  Courtesy Mike Miller,
 | |
| Lambert Meertens (gauss()), and Magnus Kessler (vonmisesvariate()).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Better default seed in the whrandom module, courtesy Andrew Kuchling.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Fix slow close() in shelve module.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The Unix mailbox class in the mailbox module is now more robust when
 | |
| a line begins with the string "From " but is definitely not the start
 | |
| of a new message.  The pattern used can be changed by overriding a
 | |
| method or class variable.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Added a rmtree() function to the copy module.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Fixed several typos in the pickle module.  Also fixed problems when
 | |
| unpickling in restricted execution environments.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Added docstrings and fixed a typo in the py_compile and compileall
 | |
| modules.  At Mark Hammond's repeated request, py_compile now append a
 | |
| newline to the source if it needs one.  Both modules support an extra
 | |
| parameter to specify the purported source filename (to be used in
 | |
| error messages).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Some performance tweaks by Jeremy Hylton to the gzip module.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Fixed a bug in the merge order of dictionaries in the ConfigParser
 | |
| module.  Courtesy Barry Warsaw.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - In the multifile module, support the optional second parameter to
 | |
| seek() when possible.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Several fixes to the gopherlib module by Lars Marius Garshol.  Also, 
 | |
| urlparse now correctly handles Gopher URLs with query strings.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Fixed a tiny bug in format_exception() in the traceback module.
 | |
| Also rewrite tb_lineno() to be compatible with JPython (and not
 | |
| disturb the current exception!); by Jim Hugunin.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The httplib module is more robust when servers send a short response 
 | |
| -- courtesy Tim O'Malley.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Tkinter and friends
 | |
| -------------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Various typos and bugs fixed.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - New module Tkdnd implements a drag-and-drop protocol (within one
 | |
| application only).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The event_*() widget methods have been restructured slightly -- they
 | |
| no longer use the default root.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The interfaces for the bind*() and unbind() widget methods have been
 | |
| redesigned; the bind*() methods now return the name of the Tcl command 
 | |
| created for the callback, and this can be passed as a optional
 | |
| argument to unbind() in order to delete the command (normally, such
 | |
| commands are automatically unbound when the widget is destroyed, but
 | |
| for some applications this isn't enough).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Variable objects now have trace methods to interface to Tcl's
 | |
| variable tracing facilities.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Image objects now have an optional keyword argument, 'master', to
 | |
| specify a widget (tree) to which they belong.  The image_names() and
 | |
| image_types() calls are now also widget methods.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - There's a new global call, Tkinter.NoDefaultRoot(), which disables
 | |
| all use of the default root by the Tkinter library.  This is useful to
 | |
| debug applications that are in the process of being converted from
 | |
| relying on the default root to explicit specification of the root
 | |
| widget.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The 'exit' command is deleted from the Tcl interpreter, since it
 | |
| provided a loophole by which one could (accidentally) exit the Python
 | |
| interpreter without invoking any cleanup code.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Tcl_Finalize() is now registered as a Python low-level exit handle,
 | |
| so Tcl will be finalized when Python exits.
 | |
| 
 | |
| The Python/C API
 | |
| ----------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - New function PyThreadState_GetDict() returns a per-thread dictionary
 | |
| intended for storing thread-local global variables.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - New functions Py_ReprEnter() and Py_ReprLeave() use the per-thread
 | |
| dictionary to allow recursive container types to detect recursion in
 | |
| their repr(), str() and print implementations.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - New function PyObject_Not(x) calculates (not x) according to Python's 
 | |
| standard rules (basically, it negates the outcome PyObject_IsTrue(x).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - New function _PyModule_Clear(), which clears a module's dictionary
 | |
| carefully without removing the __builtins__ entry.  This is implied
 | |
| when a module object is deallocated (this used to clear the dictionary
 | |
| completely).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - New function PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(), which extends
 | |
| PyImport_ExecCodeModule() by adding an extra parameter to pass it the
 | |
| true file.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - New functions Py_GetPythonHome() and Py_SetPythonHome(), intended to
 | |
| allow embedded applications to force a different value for PYTHONHOME.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - New global flag Py_FrozenFlag is set when this is a "frozen" Python
 | |
| binary; it suppresses warnings about not being able to find the
 | |
| standard library directories.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - New global flag Py_TabcheckFlag is incremented by the -t option and
 | |
| causes the tokenizer to issue warnings or errors about inconsistent
 | |
| mixing of tabs and spaces for indentation.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Miscellaneous minor changes and bug fixes
 | |
| -----------------------------------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Improved the error message when an attribute of an attribute-less
 | |
| object is requested -- include the name of the attribute and the type
 | |
| of the object in the message.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Sped up int(), long(), float() a bit.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Fixed a bug in list.sort() that would occasionally dump core.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Fixed a bug in PyNumber_Power() that caused numeric arrays to fail
 | |
| when taken tothe real power.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Fixed a number of bugs in the file reading code, at least one of
 | |
| which could cause a core dump on NT, and one of which would
 | |
| occasionally cause file.read() to return less than the full contents
 | |
| of the file.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Performance hack by Vladimir Marangozov for stack frame creation.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Make sure setvbuf() isn't used unless HAVE_SETVBUF is defined.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Windows 95/NT
 | |
| -------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The .lib files are now part of the distribution; they are collected
 | |
| in the subdirectory "libs" of the installation directory.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The extension modules (.pyd files) are now collected in a separate
 | |
| subdirectory of the installation directory named "DLLs".
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The case of a module's filename must now match the case of the
 | |
| module name as specified in the import statement.  This is an
 | |
| experimental feature -- if it turns out to break in too many
 | |
| situations, it will be removed (or disabled by default) in the future.
 | |
| It can be disabled on a per-case basis by setting the environment
 | |
| variable PYTHONCASEOK (to any value).
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| ======================================================================
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| =====================================
 | |
| ==> Release 1.5 (January 3, 1998) <==
 | |
| =====================================
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| From 1.5b2 to 1.5
 | |
| =================
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Newly documentated module: BaseHTTPServer.py, thanks to Greg Stein.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Added doc strings to string.py, stropmodule.c, structmodule.c,
 | |
| thanks to Charles Waldman.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Many nits fixed in the manuals, thanks to Fred Drake and many others
 | |
| (especially Rob Hooft and Andrew Kuchling).  The HTML version now uses
 | |
| HTML markup instead of inline GIF images for tables; only two images
 | |
| are left (for obsure bits of math).  The index of the HTML version has
 | |
| also been much improved.  Finally, it is once again possible to
 | |
| generate an Emacs info file from the library manual (but I don't
 | |
| commit to supporting this in future versions).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - New module: telnetlib.py (a simple telnet client library).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - New tool: Tools/versioncheck/, by Jack Jansen.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Ported zlibmodule.c and bsddbmodule.c to NT; The project file for MS
 | |
| DevStudio 5.0 now includes new subprojects to build the zlib and bsddb
 | |
| extension modules.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Many small changes again to Tkinter.py -- mostly bugfixes and adding
 | |
| missing routines.  Thanks to Greg McFarlane for reporting a bunch of
 | |
| problems and proofreading my fixes.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The re module and its documentation are up to date with the latest
 | |
| version released to the string-sig (Dec. 22).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Stop test_grp.py from failing when the /etc/group file is empty
 | |
| (yes, this happens!).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Fix bug in integer conversion (mystrtoul.c) that caused
 | |
| 4294967296==0 to be true!
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The VC++ 4.2 project file should be complete again.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - In tempfile.py, use a better template on NT, and add a new optional
 | |
| argument "suffix" with default "" to specify a specific extension for
 | |
| the temporary filename (needed sometimes on NT but perhaps also handy
 | |
| elsewhere).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Fixed some bugs in the FAQ wizard, and converted it to use re
 | |
| instead of regex.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Fixed a mysteriously undetected error in dlmodule.c (it was using a
 | |
| totally bogus routine name to raise an exception).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Fixed bug in import.c which wasn't using the new "dos-8x3" name yet.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Hopefully harmless changes to the build process to support shared
 | |
| libraries on DG/UX.  This adds a target to create
 | |
| libpython$(VERSION).so; however this target is *only* for DG/UX.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Fixed a bug in the new format string error checking in getargs.c.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - A simple fix for infinite recursion when printing __builtins__:
 | |
| reset '_' to None before printing and set it to the printed variable
 | |
| *after* printing (and only when printing is successful).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Fixed lib-tk/SimpleDialog.py to keep the dialog visible even if the
 | |
| parent window is not (Skip Montanaro).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Fixed the two most annoying problems with ftp URLs in
 | |
| urllib.urlopen(); an empty file now correctly raises an error, and it
 | |
| is no longer required to explicitly close the returned "file" object
 | |
| before opening another ftp URL to the same host and directory.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| ======================================================================
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| From 1.5b1 to 1.5b2
 | |
| ===================
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Fixed a bug in cPickle.c that caused it to crash right away because
 | |
| the version string had a different format.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Changes in pickle.py and cPickle.c: when unpickling an instance of a
 | |
| class that doesn't define the __getinitargs__() method, the __init__()
 | |
| constructor is no longer called.  This makes a much larger group of
 | |
| classes picklable by default, but may occasionally change semantics.
 | |
| To force calling __init__() on unpickling, define a __getinitargs__()
 | |
| method.  Other changes too, in particular cPickle now handles classes
 | |
| defined in packages correctly.  The same change applies to copying
 | |
| instances with copy.py.  The cPickle.c changes and some pickle.py
 | |
| changes are courtesy Jim Fulton.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Locale support in he "re" (Perl regular expressions) module.  Use 
 | |
| the flag re.L (or re.LOCALE) to enable locale-specific matching
 | |
| rules for \w and \b.  The in-line syntax for this flag is (?L).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The built-in function isinstance(x, y) now also succeeds when y is
 | |
| a type object and type(x) is y.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - repr() and str() of class and instance objects now reflect the
 | |
| package/module in which the class is defined.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Module "ni" has been removed.  (If you really need it, it's been
 | |
| renamed to "ni1".  Let me know if this causes any problems for you.
 | |
| Package authors are encouraged to write __init__.py files that
 | |
| support both ni and 1.5 package support, so the same version can be
 | |
| used with Python 1.4 as well as 1.5.)
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The thread module is now automatically included when threads are
 | |
| configured.  (You must remove it from your existing Setup file,
 | |
| since it is now in its own Setup.thread file.)
 | |
| 
 | |
| - New command line option "-x" to skip the first line of the script;
 | |
| handy to make executable scripts on non-Unix platforms.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - In importdl.c, add the RTLD_GLOBAL to the dlopen() flags.  I
 | |
| haven't checked how this affects things, but it should make symbols
 | |
| in one shared library available to the next one.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The Windows installer now installs in the "Program Files" folder on
 | |
| the proper volume by default.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The Windows configuration adds a new main program, "pythonw", and
 | |
| registers a new extension, ".pyw" that invokes this.  This is a
 | |
| pstandard Python interpreter that does not pop up a console window;
 | |
| handy for pure Tkinter applications.  All output to the original
 | |
| stdout and stderr is lost; reading from the original stdin yields
 | |
| EOF.  Also, both python.exe and pythonw.exe now have a pretty icon
 | |
| (a green snake in a box, courtesy Mark Hammond).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Lots of improvements to emacs-mode.el again.  See Barry's web page:
 | |
| http://www.python.org/ftp/emacs/pmdetails.html.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Lots of improvements and additions to the library reference manual;
 | |
| many by Fred Drake.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Doc strings for the following modules: rfc822.py, posixpath.py,
 | |
| ntpath.py, httplib.py.  Thanks to Mitch Chapman and Charles Waldman.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Some more regression testing.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - An optional 4th (maxsplit) argument to strop.replace().
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Fixed handling of maxsplit in string.splitfields().
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Tweaked os.environ so it can be pickled and copied.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The portability problems caused by indented preprocessor commands
 | |
| and C++ style comments should be gone now.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - In random.py, added Pareto and Weibull distributions.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The crypt module is now disabled in Modules/Setup.in by default; it
 | |
| is rarely needed and causes errors on some systems where users often
 | |
| don't know how to deal with those.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Some improvements to the _tkinter build line suggested by Case Roole.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - A full suite of platform specific files for NetBSD 1.x, submitted by 
 | |
| Anders Andersen.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - New Solaris specific header STROPTS.py.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Moved a confusing occurrence of *shared* from the comments in
 | |
| Modules/Setup.in (people would enable this one instead of the real
 | |
| one, and get disappointing results).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Changed the default mode for directories to be group-writable when
 | |
| the installation process creates them.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Check for pthread support in "-l_r" for FreeBSD/NetBSD, and support
 | |
| shared libraries for both.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Support FreeBSD and NetBSD in posixfile.py.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Support for the "event" command, new in Tk 4.2.  By Case Roole.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Add Tix_SafeInit() support to tkappinit.c.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Various bugs fixed in "re.py" and "pcre.c".
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Fixed a bug (broken use of the syntax table) in the old "regexpr.c".
 | |
| 
 | |
| - In frozenmain.c, stdin is made unbuffered too when PYTHONUNBUFFERED
 | |
| is set.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Provide default blocksize for retrbinary in ftplib.py (Skip
 | |
| Montanaro).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - In NT, pick the username up from different places in user.py (Jeff
 | |
| Bauer).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch to urlparse.urljoin() for ".." and "..#1", Marc Lemburg.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Many small improvements to Jeff Rush' OS/2 support.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - ospath.py is gone; it's been obsolete for so many years now...
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The reference manual is now set up to prepare better HTML (still
 | |
| using webmaker, alas).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Add special handling to /Tools/freeze for Python modules that are
 | |
| imported implicitly by the Python runtime: 'site' and 'exceptions'.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Tools/faqwiz 0.8.3 -- add an option to suppress URL processing
 | |
| inside <PRE>, by "Scott".
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Added ConfigParser.py, a generic parser for sectioned configuration
 | |
| files.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - In _localemodule.c, LC_MESSAGES is not always defined; put it
 | |
| between #ifdefs.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Typo in resource.c: RUSAGE_CHILDERN -> RUSAGE_CHILDREN.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Demo/scripts/newslist.py: Fix the way the version number is gotten
 | |
| out of the RCS revision.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - PyArg_Parse[Tuple] now explicitly check for bad characters at the
 | |
| end of the format string.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Revamped PC/example_nt to support VC++ 5.x.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - <listobject>.sort() now uses a modified quicksort by Raymund Galvin,
 | |
| after studying the GNU libg++ quicksort.  This should be much faster
 | |
| if there are lots of duplicates, and otherwise at least as good.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Added "uue" as an alias for "uuencode" to mimetools.py.  (Hm, the
 | |
| uudecode bug where it complaints about trailing garbage is still there 
 | |
| :-( ).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - pickle.py requires integers in text mode to be in decimal notation
 | |
| (it used to accept octal and hex, even though it would only generate
 | |
| decimal numbers).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - In string.atof(), don't fail when the "re" module is unavailable.
 | |
| Plug the ensueing security leak by supplying an empty __builtins__
 | |
| directory to eval().
 | |
| 
 | |
| - A bunch of small fixes and improvements to Tkinter.py.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Fixed a buffer overrun in PC/getpathp.c.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| ======================================================================
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| From 1.5a4 to 1.5b1
 | |
| ===================
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The Windows NT/95 installer now includes full HTML of all manuals.
 | |
| It also has a checkbox that lets you decide whether to install the
 | |
| interpreter and library.  The WISE installer script for the installer
 | |
| is included in the source tree as PC/python15.wse, and so are the
 | |
| icons used for Python files.  The config.c file for the Windows build
 | |
| is now complete with the pcre module.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - sys.ps1 and sys.ps2 can now arbitrary objects; their str() is
 | |
| evaluated for the prompt.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The reference manual is brought up to date (more or less -- it still
 | |
| needs work, e.g. in the area of package import).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The icons used by latex2html are now included in the Doc
 | |
| subdirectory (mostly so that tarring up the HTML files can be fully
 | |
| automated).  A simple index.html is also added to Doc (it only works
 | |
| after you have successfully run latex2html).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - For all you would-be proselytizers out there: a new version of
 | |
| Misc/BLURB describes Python more concisely, and Misc/comparisons
 | |
| compares Python to several other languages.  Misc/BLURB.WINDOWS
 | |
| contains a blurb specifically aimed at Windows programmers (by Mark
 | |
| Hammond).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - A new version of the Python mode for Emacs is included as
 | |
| Misc/python-mode.el.  There are too many new features to list here.
 | |
| See http://www.python.org/ftp/emacs/pmdetails.html for more info.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - New module fileinput makes iterating over the lines of a list of
 | |
| files easier.  (This still needs some more thinking to make it more
 | |
| extensible.)
 | |
| 
 | |
| - There's full OS/2 support, courtesy Jeff Rush.  To build the OS/2
 | |
| version, see PC/readme.txt and PC/os2vacpp.  This is for IBM's Visual
 | |
| Age C++ compiler.  I expect that Jeff will also provide a binary
 | |
| release for this platform.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - On Linux, the configure script now uses '-Xlinker -export-dynamic'
 | |
| instead of '-rdynamic' to link the main program so that it exports its
 | |
| symbols to shared libraries it loads dynamically.  I hope this doesn't
 | |
| break on older Linux versions; it is needed for mklinux and appears to
 | |
| work on Linux 2.0.30.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Some Tkinter resstructuring: the geometry methods that apply to a
 | |
| master are now properly usable on toplevel master widgets.  There's a
 | |
| new (internal) widget class, BaseWidget.  New, longer "official" names
 | |
| for the geometry manager methods have been added,
 | |
| e.g. "grid_columnconfigure()" instead of "columnconfigure()".  The old
 | |
| shorter names still work, and where there's ambiguity, pack wins over
 | |
| place wins over grid.  Also, the bind_class method now returns its
 | |
| value.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - New, RFC-822 conformant parsing of email addresses and address lists
 | |
| in the rfc822 module, courtesy Ben Escoto.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - New, revamped tkappinit.c with support for popular packages (PIL,
 | |
| TIX, BLT, TOGL).  For the last three, you need to execute the Tcl
 | |
| command "load {} Tix" (or Blt, or Togl) to gain access to them.
 | |
| The Modules/Setup line for the _tkinter module has been rewritten
 | |
| using the cool line-breaking feature of most Bourne shells.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - New socket method connect_ex() returns the error code from connect()
 | |
| instead of raising an exception on errors; this makes the logic
 | |
| required for asynchronous connects simpler and more efficient.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - New "locale" module with (still experimental) interface to the
 | |
| standard C library locale interface, courtesy Martin von Löwis.  This
 | |
| does not repeat my mistake in 1.5a4 of always calling
 | |
| setlocale(LC_ALL, "").  In fact, we've pretty much decided that
 | |
| Python's standard numerical formatting operations should always use
 | |
| the conventions for the C locale; the locale module contains utility
 | |
| functions to format numbers according to the user specified locale.
 | |
| (All this is accomplished by an explicit call to setlocale(LC_NUMERIC,
 | |
| "C") after locale-changing calls.)  See the library manual. (Alas, the
 | |
| promised changes to the "re" module for locale support have not been
 | |
| materialized yet.  If you care, volunteer!)
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Memory leak plugged in Py_BuildValue when building a dictionary.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Shared modules can now live inside packages (hierarchical module
 | |
| namespaces).  No changes to the shared module itself are needed.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Improved policy for __builtins__: this is a module in __main__ and a
 | |
| dictionary everywhere else.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Python no longer catches SIGHUP and SIGTERM by default.  This was
 | |
| impossible to get right in the light of thread contexts.  If you want
 | |
| your program to clean up when a signal happens, use the signal module
 | |
| to set up your own signal handler.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - New Python/C API PyNumber_CoerceEx() does not return an exception
 | |
| when no coercion is possible.  This is used to fix a problem where
 | |
| comparing incompatible numbers for equality would raise an exception
 | |
| rather than return false as in Python 1.4 -- it once again will return
 | |
| false.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The errno module is changed again -- the table of error messages
 | |
| (errorstr) is removed.  Instead, you can use os.strerror().  This
 | |
| removes redundance and a potential locale dependency.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - New module xmllib, to parse XML files.  By Sjoerd Mullender.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - New C API PyOS_AfterFork() is called after fork() in posixmodule.c.
 | |
| It resets the signal module's notion of what the current process ID
 | |
| and thread are, so that signal handlers will work after (and across)
 | |
| calls to os.fork().
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Fixed most occurrences of fatal errors due to missing thread state.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - For vgrind (a flexible source pretty printer) fans, there's a simple
 | |
| Python definition in Misc/vgrindefs, courtesy Neale Pickett.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Fixed memory leak in exec statement.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The test.pystone module has a new function, pystones(loops=LOOPS),
 | |
| which returns a (benchtime, stones) tuple.  The main() function now
 | |
| calls this and prints the report.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Package directories now *require* the presence of an __init__.py (or
 | |
| __init__.pyc) file before they are considered as packages.  This is
 | |
| done to prevent accidental subdirectories with common names from
 | |
| overriding modules with the same name.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Fixed some strange exceptions in __del__ methods in library modules
 | |
| (e.g. urllib).  This happens because the built-in names are already
 | |
| deleted by the time __del__ is called.  The solution (a hack, but it
 | |
| works) is to set some instance variables to 0 instead of None.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The table of built-in module initializers is replaced by a pointer
 | |
| variable.  This makes it possible to switch to a different table at
 | |
| run time, e.g. when a collection of modules is loaded from a shared
 | |
| library.  (No example code of how to do this is given, but it is
 | |
| possible.)  The table is still there of course, its name prefixed with
 | |
| an underscore and used to initialize the pointer.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The warning about a thread still having a frame now only happens in
 | |
| verbose mode.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Change the signal finialization so that it also resets the signal
 | |
| handlers.  After this has been called, our signal handlers are no
 | |
| longer active!
 | |
| 
 | |
| - New version of tokenize.py (by Ka-Ping Yee) recognizes raw string
 | |
| literals.  There's now also a test fort this module.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The copy module now also uses __dict__.update(state) instead of
 | |
| going through individual attribute assignments, for class instances
 | |
| without a __setstate__ method.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - New module reconvert translates old-style (regex module) regular
 | |
| expressions to new-style (re module, Perl-style) regular expressions.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Most modules that used to use the regex module now use the re
 | |
| module.  The grep module has a new pgrep() function which uses
 | |
| Perl-style regular expressions.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The (very old, backwards compatibility) regexp.py module has been
 | |
| deleted.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Restricted execution (rexec): added the pcre module (support for the
 | |
| re module) to the list of trusted extension modules.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - New version of Jim Fulton's CObject object type, adds
 | |
| PyCObject_FromVoidPtrAndDesc() and PyCObject_GetDesc() APIs.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Some patches to Lee Busby's fpectl mods that accidentally didn't
 | |
| make it into 1.5a4.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - In the string module, add an optional 4th argument to count(),
 | |
| matching find() etc.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Patch for the nntplib module by Charles Waldman to add optional user
 | |
| and password arguments to NNTP.__init__(), for nntp servers that need
 | |
| them.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The str() function for class objects now returns
 | |
| "modulename.classname" instead of returning the same as repr().
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The parsing of \xXX escapes no longer relies on sscanf().
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The "sharedmodules" subdirectory of the installation is renamed to
 | |
| "lib-dynload".  (You may have to edit your Modules/Setup file to fix
 | |
| this in an existing installation!)
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Fixed Don Beaudry's mess-up with the OPT test in the configure
 | |
| script.  Certain SGI platforms will still issue a warning for each
 | |
| compile; there's not much I can do about this since the compiler's
 | |
| exit status doesn't indicate that I was using an obsolete option.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Fixed Barry's mess-up with {}.get(), and added test cases for it.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Shared libraries didn't quite work under AIX because of the change
 | |
| in status of the GNU readline interface.  Fix due to by Vladimir
 | |
| Marangozov.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| ======================================================================
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| From 1.5a3 to 1.5a4
 | |
| ===================
 | |
| 
 | |
| - faqwiz.py: version 0.8; Recognize https:// as URL; <html>...</html>
 | |
| feature; better install instructions; removed faqmain.py (which was an
 | |
| older version).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - nntplib.py: Fixed some bugs reported by Lars Wirzenius (to Debian)
 | |
| about the treatment of lines starting with '.'.  Added a minimal test
 | |
| function.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - struct module: ignore most whitespace in format strings.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - urllib.py: close the socket and temp file in URLopener.retrieve() so
 | |
| that multiple retrievals using the same connection work.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - All standard exceptions are now classes by default; use -X to make
 | |
| them strings (for backward compatibility only).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - There's a new standard exception hierarchy, defined in the standard
 | |
| library module exceptions.py (which you never need to import
 | |
| explicitly).  See
 | |
| http://grail.cnri.reston.va.us/python/essays/stdexceptions.html for
 | |
| more info.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Three new C API functions:
 | |
| 
 | |
|   - int PyErr_GivenExceptionMatches(obj1, obj2)
 | |
| 
 | |
|     Returns 1 if obj1 and obj2 are the same object, or if obj1 is an
 | |
|     instance of type obj2, or of a class derived from obj2
 | |
| 
 | |
|   - int PyErr_ExceptionMatches(obj)
 | |
| 
 | |
|     Higher level wrapper around PyErr_GivenExceptionMatches() which uses
 | |
|     PyErr_Occurred() as obj1.  This will be the more commonly called
 | |
|     function.
 | |
| 
 | |
|   - void PyErr_NormalizeException(typeptr, valptr, tbptr)
 | |
| 
 | |
|     Normalizes exceptions, and places the normalized values in the
 | |
|     arguments.  If type is not a class, this does nothing.  If type is a
 | |
|     class, then it makes sure that value is an instance of the class by:
 | |
| 
 | |
|     1. if instance is of the type, or a class derived from type, it does
 | |
|        nothing.
 | |
| 
 | |
|     2. otherwise it instantiates the class, using the value as an
 | |
|        argument.  If value is None, it uses an empty arg tuple, and if
 | |
|        the value is a tuple, it uses just that.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Another new C API function: PyErr_NewException() creates a new
 | |
| exception class derived from Exception; when -X is given, it creates a
 | |
| new string exception.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - core interpreter: remove the distinction between tuple and list
 | |
| unpacking; allow an arbitrary sequence on the right hand side of any
 | |
| unpack instruction.  (UNPACK_LIST and UNPACK_TUPLE now do the same
 | |
| thing, which should really be called UNPACK_SEQUENCE.)
 | |
| 
 | |
| - classes: Allow assignments to an instance's __dict__ or __class__,
 | |
| so you can change ivars (including shared ivars -- shock horror) and
 | |
| change classes dynamically.  Also make the check on read-only
 | |
| attributes of classes less draconic -- only the specials names
 | |
| __dict__, __bases__, __name__ and __{get,set,del}attr__ can't be
 | |
| assigned.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Two new built-in functions: issubclass() and isinstance().  Both
 | |
| take classes as their second arguments.  The former takes a class as
 | |
| the first argument and returns true iff first is second, or is a
 | |
| subclass of second.  The latter takes any object as the first argument
 | |
| and returns true iff first is an instance of the second, or any
 | |
| subclass of second.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - configure: Added configuration tests for presence of alarm(),
 | |
| pause(), and getpwent().
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Doc/Makefile: changed latex2html targets.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - classes: Reverse the search order for the Don Beaudry hook so that
 | |
| the first class with an applicable hook wins.  Makes more sense.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Changed the checks made in Py_Initialize() and Py_Finalize().  It is
 | |
| now legal to call these more than once.  The first call to
 | |
| Py_Initialize() initializes, the first call to Py_Finalize()
 | |
| finalizes.  There's also a new API, Py_IsInitalized() which checks
 | |
| whether we are already initialized (in case you want to leave things
 | |
| as they were).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Completely disable the declarations for malloc(), realloc() and
 | |
| free().  Any 90's C compiler has these in header files, and the tests
 | |
| to decide whether to suppress the declarations kept failing on some
 | |
| platforms.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - *Before* (instead of after) signalmodule.o is added, remove both
 | |
| intrcheck.o and sigcheck.o.  This should get rid of warnings in ar or
 | |
| ld on various systems.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Added reop to PC/config.c
 | |
| 
 | |
| - configure: Decided to use -Aa -D_HPUX_SOURCE on HP-UX platforms.
 | |
| Removed outdated HP-UX comments from README.  Added Cray T3E comments.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Various renames of statically defined functions that had name
 | |
| conflicts on some systems, e.g. strndup (GNU libc), join (Cray),
 | |
| roundup (sys/types.h).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - urllib.py: Interpret three slashes in file: URL as local file (for
 | |
| Netscape on Windows/Mac).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - copy.py: Make sure the objects returned by __getinitargs__() are
 | |
| kept alive (in the memo) to avoid a certain kind of nasty crash.  (Not
 | |
| easily reproducable because it requires a later call to
 | |
| __getinitargs__() to return a tuple that happens to be allocated at
 | |
| the same address.)
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Added definition of AR to toplevel Makefile.  Renamed @buildno temp
 | |
| file to buildno1.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Moved Include/assert.h to Parser/assert.h, which seems to be the
 | |
| only place where it's needed.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Tweaked the dictionary lookup code again for some more speed
 | |
| (Vladimir Marangozov).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - NT build: Changed the way python15.lib is included in the other
 | |
| projects.  Per Mark Hammond's suggestion, add it to the extra libs in
 | |
| Settings instead of to the project's source files.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - regrtest.py: Change default verbosity so that there are only three
 | |
| levels left: -q, default and -v.  In default mode, the name of each
 | |
| test is now printed.  -v is the same as the old -vv.  -q is more quiet
 | |
| than the old default mode.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Removed the old FAQ from the distribution.  You now have to get it
 | |
| from the web!
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Removed the PC/make_nt.in file from the distribution; it is no
 | |
| longer needed.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Changed the build sequence so that shared modules are built last.
 | |
| This fixes things for AIX and doesn't hurt elsewhere.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Improved test for GNU MP v1 in mpzmodule.c
 | |
| 
 | |
| - fileobject.c: ftell() on Linux discards all buffered data; changed
 | |
| read() code to use lseek() instead to get the same effect
 | |
| 
 | |
| - configure.in, configure, importdl.c: NeXT sharedlib fixes
 | |
| 
 | |
| - tupleobject.c: PyTuple_SetItem asserts refcnt==1
 | |
| 
 | |
| - resource.c: Different strategy regarding whether to declare
 | |
| getrusage() and getpagesize() -- #ifdef doesn't work, Linux has
 | |
| conflicting decls in its headers.  Choice: only declare the return
 | |
| type, not the argument prototype, and not on Linux.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - importdl.c, configure*: set sharedlib extensions properly for NeXT
 | |
| 
 | |
| - configure*, Makefile.in, Modules/Makefile.pre.in: AIX shared libraries
 | |
| fixed; moved addition of PURIFY to LINKCC to configure
 | |
| 
 | |
| - reopmodule.c, regexmodule.c, regexpr.c, zlibmodule.c: needed casts
 | |
| added to shup up various compilers.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - _tkinter.c: removed buggy mac #ifndef
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Doc: various Mac documentation changes, added docs for 'ic' module
 | |
| 
 | |
| - PC/make_nt.in: deleted
 | |
| 
 | |
| - test_time.py, test_strftime.py: tweaks to catch %Z (which may return
 | |
| "")
 | |
| 
 | |
| - test_rotor.py: print b -> print `b`
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Tkinter.py: (tagOrId) -> (tagOrId,)
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Tkinter.py: the Tk class now also has a configure() method and
 | |
| friends (they have been moved to the Misc class to accomplish this).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - dict.get(key[, default]) returns dict[key] if it exists, or default
 | |
| if it doesn't.  The default defaults to None.  This is quicker for
 | |
| some applications than using either has_key() or try:...except
 | |
| KeyError:....
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Tools/webchecker/: some small changes to webchecker.py; added
 | |
| websucker.py (a simple web site mirroring script).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Dictionary objects now have a get() method (also in UserDict.py).
 | |
| dict.get(key, default) returns dict[key] if it exists and default
 | |
| otherwise; default defaults to None.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Tools/scripts/logmerge.py: print the author, too.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Changes to import: support for "import a.b.c" is now built in.  See
 | |
| http://grail.cnri.reston.va.us/python/essays/packages.html
 | |
| for more info.  Most important deviations from "ni.py": __init__.py is
 | |
| executed in the package's namespace instead of as a submodule; and
 | |
| there's no support for "__" or "__domain__".  Note that "ni.py" is not
 | |
| changed to match this -- it is simply declared obsolete (while at the
 | |
| same time, it is documented...:-( ).
 | |
| Unfortunately, "ihooks.py" has not been upgraded (but see "knee.py"
 | |
| for an example implementation of hierarchical module import written in
 | |
| Python).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - More changes to import: the site.py module is now imported by
 | |
| default when Python is initialized; use -S to disable it.  The site.py
 | |
| module extends the path with several more directories: site-packages
 | |
| inside the lib/python1.5/ directory, site-python in the lib/
 | |
| directory, and pathnames mentioned in *.pth files found in either of
 | |
| those directories.  See
 | |
| http://grail.cnri.reston.va.us/python/essays/packages.html
 | |
| for more info.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Changes to standard library subdirectory names: those subdirectories
 | |
| that are not packages have been renamed with a hypen in their name,
 | |
| e.g. lib-tk, lib-stdwin, plat-win, plat-linux2, plat-sunos5, dos-8x3.
 | |
| The test suite is now a package -- to run a test, you must now use
 | |
| "import test.test_foo".
 | |
| 
 | |
| - A completely new re.py module is provided (thanks to Andrew
 | |
| Kuchling, Tim Peters and Jeffrey Ollie) which uses Philip Hazel's
 | |
| "pcre" re compiler and engine.  For a while, the "old" re.py (which
 | |
| was new in 1.5a3!) will be kept around as re1.py.  The "old" regex
 | |
| module and underlying parser and engine are still present -- while
 | |
| regex is now officially obsolete, it will probably take several major
 | |
| release cycles before it can be removed.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The posix module now has a strerror() function which translates an
 | |
| error code to a string.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The emacs.py module (which was long obsolete) has been removed.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The universal makefile Misc/Makefile.pre.in now features an
 | |
| "install" target.  By default, installed shared libraries go into
 | |
| $exec_prefix/lib/python$VERSION/site-packages/.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The install-sh script is installed with the other configuration
 | |
| specific files (in the config/ subdirectory).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - It turns out whatsound.py and sndhdr.py were identical modules.
 | |
| Since there's also an imghdr.py file, I propose to make sndhdr.py the
 | |
| official one.  For compatibility, whatsound.py imports * from
 | |
| sndhdr.py.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Class objects have a new attribute, __module__, giving the name of
 | |
| the module in which they were declared.  This is useful for pickle and
 | |
| for printing the full name of a class exception.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Many extension modules no longer issue a fatal error when their
 | |
| initialization fails; the importing code now checks whether an error
 | |
| occurred during module initialization, and correctly propagates the
 | |
| exception to the import statement.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Most extension modules now raise class-based exceptions (except when
 | |
| -X is used).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Subtle changes to PyEval_{Save,Restore}Thread(): always swap the
 | |
| thread state -- just don't manipulate the lock if it isn't there.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Fixed a bug in Python/getopt.c that made it do the wrong thing when
 | |
| an option was a single '-'.  Thanks to Andrew Kuchling.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - New module mimetypes.py will guess a MIME type from a filename's
 | |
| extension.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Windows: the DLL version is now settable via a resource rather than
 | |
| being hardcoded.  This can be used for "branding" a binary Python
 | |
| distribution.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - urllib.py is now threadsafe -- it now uses re instead of regex, and
 | |
| sys.exc_info() instead of sys.exc_{type,value}.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Many other library modules that used to use
 | |
| sys.exc_{type,value,traceback} are now more thread-safe by virtue of
 | |
| using sys.exc_info().
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The functions in popen2 have an optional buffer size parameter.
 | |
| Also, the command argument can now be either a string (passed to the
 | |
| shell) or a list of arguments (passed directly to execv).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Alas, the thread support for _tkinter released with 1.5a3 didn't
 | |
| work.  It's been rewritten.  The bad news is that it now requires a
 | |
| modified version of a file in the standard Tcl distribution, which you
 | |
| must compile with a -I option pointing to the standard Tcl source
 | |
| tree.  For this reason, the thread support is disabled by default.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The errno extension module adds two tables: errorcode maps errno
 | |
| numbers to errno names (e.g. EINTR), and errorstr maps them to
 | |
| message strings.  (The latter is redundant because the new call
 | |
| posix.strerror() now does the same, but alla...)  (Marc-Andre Lemburg)
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The readline extension module now provides some interfaces to
 | |
| internal readline routines that make it possible to write a completer
 | |
| in Python.  An example completer, rlcompleter.py, is provided.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	When completing a simple identifier, it completes keywords,
 | |
| 	built-ins and globals in __main__; when completing
 | |
| 	NAME.NAME..., it evaluates (!) the expression up to the last
 | |
| 	dot and completes its attributes.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	It's very cool to do "import string" type "string.", hit the
 | |
| 	completion key (twice), and see the list of names defined by
 | |
| 	the string module!
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	Tip: to use the tab key as the completion key, call
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	    readline.parse_and_bind("tab: complete")
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The traceback.py module has a new function tb_lineno() by Marc-Andre
 | |
| Lemburg which extracts the line number from the linenumber table in
 | |
| the code object.  Apparently the traceback object doesn't contains the
 | |
| right linenumber when -O is used.  Rather than guessing whether -O is
 | |
| on or off, the module itself uses tb_lineno() unconditionally.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Fixed Demo/tkinter/matt/canvas-moving-or-creating.py: change bind()
 | |
| to tag_bind() so it works again.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The pystone script is now a standard library module.  Example use:
 | |
| "import test.pystone; test.pystone.main()".
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The import of the readline module in interactive mode is now also
 | |
| attempted when -i is specified.  (Yes, I know, giving in to Marc-Andre
 | |
| Lemburg, who asked for this. :-)
 | |
| 
 | |
| - rfc822.py: Entirely rewritten parseaddr() function by Sjoerd
 | |
| Mullender, to be closer to the standard.  This fixes the getaddr()
 | |
| method.  Unfortunately, getaddrlist() is as broken as ever, since it
 | |
| splits on commas without regard for RFC 822 quoting conventions.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - pprint.py: correctly emit trailing "," in singleton tuples.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - _tkinter.c: export names for its type objects, TkappType and
 | |
| TkttType.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - pickle.py: use __module__ when defined; fix a particularly hard to
 | |
| reproduce bug that confuses the memo when temporary objects are
 | |
| returned by custom pickling interfaces; and a semantic change: when
 | |
| unpickling the instance variables of an instance, use
 | |
| inst.__dict__.update(value) instead of a for loop with setattr() over
 | |
| the value.keys().  This is more consistent (the pickling doesn't use
 | |
| getattr() either but pickles inst.__dict__) and avoids problems with
 | |
| instances that have a __setattr__ hook.  But it *is* a semantic change
 | |
| (because the setattr hook is no longer used).  So beware!
 | |
| 
 | |
| - config.h is now installed (at last) in
 | |
| $exec_prefix/include/python1.5/.  For most sites, this means that it
 | |
| is actually in $prefix/include/python1.5/, with all the other Python
 | |
| include files, since $prefix and $exec_prefix are the same by
 | |
| default.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The imp module now supports parts of the functionality to implement
 | |
| import of hierarchical module names.  It now supports find_module()
 | |
| and load_module() for all types of modules.  Docstrings have been
 | |
| added for those functions in the built-in imp module that are still
 | |
| relevant (some old interfaces are obsolete).  For a sample
 | |
| implementation of hierarchical module import in Python, see the new
 | |
| library module knee.py.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The % operator on string objects now allows arbitrary nested parens
 | |
| in a %(...)X style format.  (Brad Howes)
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Reverse the order in which Setup and Setup.local are passed to the
 | |
| makesetup script.  This allows variable definitions in Setup.local to
 | |
| override definitions in Setup.  (But you'll still have to edit Setup
 | |
| if you want to disable modules that are enabled by default, or if such
 | |
| modules need non-standard options.)
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Added PyImport_ImportModuleEx(name, globals, locals, fromlist); this
 | |
| is like PyImport_ImporModule(name) but receives the globals and locals
 | |
| dict and the fromlist arguments as well.  (The name is a char*; the
 | |
| others are PyObject*s).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The 'p' format in the struct extension module alloded to above is
 | |
| new in 1.5a4.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The types.py module now uses try-except in a few places to make it
 | |
| more likely that it can be imported in restricted mode.  Some type
 | |
| names are undefined in that case, e.g. CodeType (inaccessible),
 | |
| FileType (not always accessible), and TracebackType and FrameType
 | |
| (inaccessible).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - In urllib.py: added separate administration of temporary files
 | |
| created y URLopener.retrieve() so cleanup() can properly remove them.
 | |
| The old code removed everything in tempcache which was a bad idea if
 | |
| the user had passed a non-temp file into it.  Also, in basejoin(),
 | |
| interpret relative paths starting in "../".  This is necessary if the
 | |
| server uses symbolic links.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The Windows build procedure and project files are now based on
 | |
| Microsoft Visual C++ 5.x.  The build now takes place in the PCbuild
 | |
| directory.  It is much more robust, and properly builds separate Debug
 | |
| and Release versions.  (The installer will be added shortly.)
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Added casts and changed some return types in regexpr.c to avoid
 | |
| compiler warnings or errors on some platforms.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The AIX build tools for shared libraries now supports VPATH.  (Donn
 | |
| Cave)
 | |
| 
 | |
| - By default, disable the "portable" multimedia modules audioop,
 | |
| imageop, and rgbimg, since they don't work on 64-bit platforms.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Fixed a nasty bug in cStringIO.c when code was actually using the
 | |
| close() method (the destructors would try to free certain fields a
 | |
| second time).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - For those who think they need it, there's a "user.py" module.  This
 | |
| is *not* imported by default, but can be imported to run user-specific
 | |
| setup commands, ~/.pythonrc.py.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Various speedups suggested by Fredrik Lundh, Marc-Andre Lemburg,
 | |
| Vladimir Marangozov, and others.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Added os.altsep; this is '/' on DOS/Windows, and None on systems
 | |
| with a sane filename syntax.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - os.py: Write out the dynamic OS choice, to avoid exec statements.
 | |
| Adding support for a new OS is now a bit more work, but I bet that
 | |
| 'dos' or 'nt' will cover most situations...
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The obsolete exception AccessError is now really gone.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Tools/faqwiz/: New installation instructions show how to maintain
 | |
| multiple FAQs.  Removed bootstrap script from end of faqwiz.py module.
 | |
| Added instructions to bootstrap script, too.  Version bumped to 0.8.1.
 | |
| Added <html>...</html> feature suggested by Skip Montanaro.  Added
 | |
| leading text for Roulette, default to 'Hit Reload ...'.  Fix typo in
 | |
| default SRCDIR.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Documentation for the relatively new modules "keyword" and "symbol"
 | |
| has been added (to the end of the section on the parser extension
 | |
| module).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - In module bisect.py, but functions have two optional argument 'lo'
 | |
| and 'hi' which allow you to specify a subsequence of the array to
 | |
| operate on.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - In ftplib.py, changed most methods to return their status (even when
 | |
| it is always "200 OK") rather than swallowing it.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - main() now calls setlocale(LC_ALL, ""), if setlocale() and
 | |
| <locale.h> are defined.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Changes to configure.in, the configure script, and both
 | |
| Makefile.pre.in files, to support SGI's SGI_ABI platform selection
 | |
| environment variable.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| ======================================================================
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| From 1.4 to 1.5a3
 | |
| =================
 | |
| 
 | |
| Security
 | |
| --------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - If you are using the setuid script C wrapper (Misc/setuid-prog.c),
 | |
| please use the new version.  The old version has a huge security leak.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Miscellaneous
 | |
| -------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Because of various (small) incompatible changes in the Python
 | |
| bytecode interpreter, the magic number for .pyc files has changed
 | |
| again.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The default module search path is now much saner.  Both on Unix and
 | |
| Windows, it is essentially derived from the path to the executable
 | |
| (which can be overridden by setting the environment variable
 | |
| $PYTHONHOME).  The value of $PYTHONPATH on Windows is now inserted in
 | |
| front of the default path, like in Unix (instead of overriding the
 | |
| default path).  On Windows, the directory containing the executable is
 | |
| added to the end of the path.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - A new version of python-mode.el for Emacs has been included.  Also,
 | |
| a new file ccpy-style.el has been added to configure Emacs cc-mode for
 | |
| the preferred style in Python C sources.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - On Unix, when using sys.argv[0] to insert the script directory in
 | |
| front of sys.path, expand a symbolic link.  You can now install a
 | |
| program in a private directory and have a symbolic link to it in a
 | |
| public bin directory, and it will put the private directory in the
 | |
| module search path.  Note that the symlink is expanded in sys.path[0]
 | |
| but not in sys.argv[0], so you can still tell the name by which you
 | |
| were invoked.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - It is now recommended to use ``#!/usr/bin/env python'' instead of
 | |
| ``#!/usr/local/bin/python'' at the start of executable scripts, except
 | |
| for CGI scripts.  It has been determined that the use of /usr/bin/env
 | |
| is more portable than that of /usr/local/bin/python -- scripts almost
 | |
| never have to be edited when the Python interpreter lives in a
 | |
| non-standard place.  Note that this doesn't work for CGI scripts since
 | |
| the python executable often doesn't live in the HTTP server's default
 | |
| search path.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The silly -s command line option and the corresponding
 | |
| PYTHONSUPPRESS environment variable (and the Py_SuppressPrint global
 | |
| flag in the Python/C API) are gone.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Most problems on 64-bit platforms should now be fixed.  Andrew
 | |
| Kuchling helped.  Some uncommon extension modules are still not
 | |
| clean (image and audio ops?).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Fixed a bug where multiple anonymous tuple arguments would be mixed up
 | |
| when using the debugger or profiler (reported by Just van Rossum).
 | |
| The simplest example is ``def f((a,b),(c,d)): print a,b,c,d''; this
 | |
| would print the wrong value when run under the debugger or profiler.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The hacks that the dictionary implementation used to speed up
 | |
| repeated lookups of the same C string were removed; these were a
 | |
| source of subtle problems and don't seem to serve much of a purpose
 | |
| any longer.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - All traces of support for the long dead access statement have been
 | |
| removed from the sources.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Plugged the two-byte memory leak in the tokenizer when reading an
 | |
| interactive EOF.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - There's a -O option to the interpreter that removes SET_LINENO
 | |
| instructions and assert statements (see below); it uses and produces
 | |
| .pyo files instead of .pyc files.  The speedup is only a few percent
 | |
| in most cases.  The line numbers are still available in the .pyo file,
 | |
| as a separate table (which is also available in .pyc files).  However,
 | |
| the removal of the SET_LINENO instructions means that the debugger
 | |
| (pdb) can't set breakpoints on lines in -O mode.  The traceback module
 | |
| contains a function to extract a line number from the code object
 | |
| referenced in a traceback object.  In the future it should be possible
 | |
| to write external bytecode optimizers that create better optimized
 | |
| .pyo files, and there should be more control over optimization;
 | |
| consider the -O option a "teaser".  Without -O, the assert statement
 | |
| actually generates code that first checks __debug__; if this variable
 | |
| is false, the assertion is not checked.  __debug__ is a built-in
 | |
| variable whose value is initialized to track the -O flag (it's true
 | |
| iff -O is not specified).  With -O, no code is generated for assert
 | |
| statements, nor for code of the form ``if __debug__: <something>''.
 | |
| Sorry, no further constant folding happens.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| Performance
 | |
| -----------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - It's much faster (almost twice for pystone.py -- see
 | |
| Tools/scripts).  See the entry on string interning below.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Some speedup by using separate free lists for method objects (both
 | |
| the C and the Python variety) and for floating point numbers.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Big speedup by allocating frame objects with a single malloc() call.
 | |
| The Python/C API for frames is changed (you shouldn't be using this
 | |
| anyway).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Significant speedup by inlining some common opcodes for common operand 
 | |
| types (e.g.  i+i, i-i, and list[i]).  Fredrik Lundh.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Small speedup by reordering the method tables of some common
 | |
| objects (e.g. list.append is now first).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Big optimization to the read() method of file objects.  A read()
 | |
| without arguments now attempts to use fstat to allocate a buffer of
 | |
| the right size; for pipes and sockets, it will fall back to doubling
 | |
| the buffer size.  While that the improvement is real on all systems,
 | |
| it is most dramatic on Windows.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| Documentation
 | |
| -------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Many new pieces of library documentation were contributed, mostly by
 | |
| Andrew Kuchling.  Even cmath is now documented!  There's also a
 | |
| chapter of the library manual, "libundoc.tex", which provides a
 | |
| listing of all undocumented modules, plus their status (e.g. internal,
 | |
| obsolete, or in need of documentation).  Also contributions by Sue
 | |
| Williams, Skip Montanaro, and some module authors who succumbed to
 | |
| pressure to document their own contributed modules :-).  Note that
 | |
| printing the documentation now kills fewer trees -- the margins have
 | |
| been reduced.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - I have started documenting the Python/C API. Unfortunately this project 
 | |
| hasn't been completed yet.  It will be complete before the final release of 
 | |
| Python 1.5, though.  At the moment, it's better to read the LaTeX source 
 | |
| than to attempt to run it through LaTeX and print the resulting dvi file.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The posix module (and hence os.py) now has doc strings!  Thanks to Neil 
 | |
| Schemenauer.  I received a few other contributions of doc strings.  In most 
 | |
| other places, doc strings are still wishful thinking...
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| Language changes
 | |
| ----------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Private variables with leading double underscore are now a permanent 
 | |
| feature of the language.  (These were experimental in release 1.4.  I have 
 | |
| favorable experience using them; I can't label them "experimental" 
 | |
| forever.)
 | |
| 
 | |
| - There's new string literal syntax for "raw strings".  Prefixing a string 
 | |
| literal with the letter r (or R) disables all escape processing in the 
 | |
| string; for example, r'\n' is a two-character string consisting of a 
 | |
| backslash followed by the letter n.  This combines with all forms of string 
 | |
| quotes; it is actually useful for triple quoted doc strings which might 
 | |
| contain references to \n or \t.  An embedded quote prefixed with a 
 | |
| backslash does not terminate the string, but the backslash is still 
 | |
| included in the string; for example, r'\'' is a two-character string 
 | |
| consisting of a backslash and a quote.  (Raw strings are also 
 | |
| affectionately known as Robin strings, after their inventor, Robin 
 | |
| Friedrich.)
 | |
| 
 | |
| - There's a simple assert statement, and a new exception
 | |
| AssertionError.  For example, ``assert foo > 0'' is equivalent to ``if
 | |
| not foo > 0: raise AssertionError''.  Sorry, the text of the asserted
 | |
| condition is not available; it would be too complicated to generate
 | |
| code for this (since the code is generated from a parse tree).
 | |
| However, the text is displayed as part of the traceback!
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The raise statement has a new feature: when using "raise SomeClass,
 | |
| somevalue" where somevalue is not an instance of SomeClass, it
 | |
| instantiates SomeClass(somevalue).  In 1.5a4, if somevalue is an
 | |
| instance of a *derived* class of SomeClass, the exception class raised
 | |
| is set to somevalue.__class__, and SomeClass is ignored after that.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Duplicate keyword arguments are now detected at compile time;
 | |
| f(a=1,a=2) is now a syntax error.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| Changes to built-in features
 | |
| ----------------------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - There's a new exception FloatingPointError (used only by Lee Busby's
 | |
| patches to catch floating point exceptions, at the moment).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The obsolete exception ConflictError (presumably used by the long
 | |
| obsolete access statement) has been deleted.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - There's a new function sys.exc_info() which returns the tuple 
 | |
| (sys.exc_type, sys.exc_value, sys.exc_traceback) in a thread-safe way.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - There's a new variable sys.executable, pointing to the executable file 
 | |
| for the Python interpreter.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The sort() methods for lists no longer uses the C library qsort(); I
 | |
| wrote my own quicksort implementation, with lots of help (in the form
 | |
| of a kind of competition) from Tim Peters.  This solves a bug in
 | |
| dictionary comparisons on some Solaris versions when Python is built
 | |
| with threads, and makes sorting lists even faster.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The semantics of comparing two dictionaries have changed, to make
 | |
| comparison of unequal dictionaries faster.  A shorter dictionary is
 | |
| always considered smaller than a larger dictionary.  For dictionaries
 | |
| of the same size, the smallest differing element determines the
 | |
| outcome (which yields the same results as before in this case, without
 | |
| explicit sorting).  Thanks to Aaron Watters for suggesting something
 | |
| like this.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The semantics of try-except have changed subtly so that calling a
 | |
| function in an exception handler that itself raises and catches an
 | |
| exception no longer overwrites the sys.exc_* variables.  This also
 | |
| alleviates the problem that objects referenced in a stack frame that
 | |
| caught an exception are kept alive until another exception is caught
 | |
| -- the sys.exc_* variables are restored to their previous value when
 | |
| returning from a function that caught an exception.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - There's a new "buffer" interface.  Certain objects (e.g. strings and
 | |
| arrays) now support the "buffer" protocol.  Buffer objects are acceptable 
 | |
| whenever formerly a string was required for a write operation; mutable 
 | |
| buffer objects can be the target of a read operation using the call
 | |
| f.readinto(buffer).  A cool feature is that regular expression matching now 
 | |
| also work on array objects.  Contribution by Jack Jansen.  (Needs 
 | |
| documentation.)
 | |
| 
 | |
| - String interning: dictionary lookups are faster when the lookup
 | |
| string object is the same object as the key in the dictionary, not
 | |
| just a string with the same value.  This is done by having a pool of
 | |
| "interned" strings.  Most names generated by the interpreter are now
 | |
| automatically interned, and there's a new built-in function intern(s)
 | |
| that returns the interned version of a string.  Interned strings are
 | |
| not a different object type, and interning is totally optional, but by
 | |
| interning most keys a speedup of about 15% was obtained for the
 | |
| pystone benchmark.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Dictionary objects have several new methods; clear() and copy() have
 | |
| the obvious semantics, while update(d) merges the contents of another
 | |
| dictionary d into this one, overriding existing keys.  The dictionary
 | |
| implementation file is now called dictobject.c rather than the
 | |
| confusing mappingobject.c.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The intrinsic function dir() is much smarter; it looks in __dict__,
 | |
| __members__ and __methods__.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The intrinsic functions int(), long() and float() can now take a
 | |
| string argument and then do the same thing as string.atoi(),
 | |
| string.atol(), and string.atof().  No second 'base' argument is
 | |
| allowed, and complex() does not take a string (nobody cared enough).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - When a module is deleted, its globals are now deleted in two phases.
 | |
| In the first phase, all variables whose name begins with exactly one
 | |
| underscore are replaced by None; in the second phase, all variables
 | |
| are deleted.  This makes it possible to have global objects whose
 | |
| destructors depend on other globals.  The deletion order within each
 | |
| phase is still random.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - It is no longer an error for a function to be called without a
 | |
| global variable __builtins__ -- an empty directory will be provided
 | |
| by default.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Guido's corollary to the "Don Beaudry hook": it is now possible to
 | |
| do metaprogramming by using an instance as a base class.  Not for the
 | |
| faint of heart; and undocumented as yet, but basically if a base class
 | |
| is an instance, its class will be instantiated to create the new
 | |
| class.  Jim Fulton will love it -- it also works with instances of his
 | |
| "extension classes", since it is triggered by the presence of a
 | |
| __class__ attribute on the purported base class.  See
 | |
| Demo/metaclasses/index.html for an explanation and see that directory
 | |
| for examples.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Another change is that the Don Beaudry hook is now invoked when
 | |
| *any* base class is special.  (Up to 1.5a3, the *last* special base
 | |
| class is used; in 1.5a4, the more rational choice of the *first*
 | |
| special base class is used.)
 | |
| 
 | |
| - New optional parameter to the readlines() method of file objects.
 | |
| This indicates the number of bytes to read (the actual number of bytes
 | |
| read will be somewhat larger due to buffering reading until the end of
 | |
| the line).  Some optimizations have also been made to speed it up (but
 | |
| not as much as read()).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Complex numbers no longer have the ".conj" pseudo attribute; use
 | |
| z.conjugate() instead, or complex(z.real, -z.imag).  Complex numbers
 | |
| now *do* support the __members__ and __methods__ special attributes.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The complex() function now looks for a __complex__() method on class
 | |
| instances before giving up.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Long integers now support arbitrary shift counts, so you can now
 | |
| write 1L<<1000000, memory permitting.  (Python 1.4 reports "outrageous
 | |
| shift count for this.)
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The hex() and oct() functions have been changed so that for regular
 | |
| integers, they never emit a minus sign.  For example, on a 32-bit
 | |
| machine, oct(-1) now returns '037777777777' and hex(-1) returns
 | |
| '0xffffffff'.  While this may seem inconsistent, it is much more
 | |
| useful.  (For long integers, a minus sign is used as before, to fit
 | |
| the result in memory :-)
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The hash() function computes better hashes for several data types,
 | |
| including strings, floating point numbers, and complex numbers.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| New extension modules
 | |
| ---------------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - New extension modules cStringIO.c and cPickle.c, written by Jim
 | |
| Fulton and other folks at Digital Creations.  These are much more
 | |
| efficient than their Python counterparts StringIO.py and pickle.py,
 | |
| but don't support subclassing.  cPickle.c clocks up to 1000 times
 | |
| faster than pickle.py; cStringIO.c's improvement is less dramatic but
 | |
| still significant.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - New extension module zlibmodule.c, interfacing to the free zlib
 | |
| library (gzip compatible compression).  There's also a module gzip.py
 | |
| which provides a higher level interface.  Written by Andrew Kuchling
 | |
| and Jeremy Hylton.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - New module readline; see the "miscellaneous" section above.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - New Unix extension module resource.c, by Jeremy Hylton, provides
 | |
| access to getrlimit(), getrusage(), setrusage(), getpagesize(), and
 | |
| related symbolic constants.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - New extension puremodule.c, by Barry Warsaw, which interfaces to the
 | |
| Purify(TM) C API.  See also the file Misc/PURIFY.README.  It is also
 | |
| possible to enable Purify by simply setting the PURIFY Makefile
 | |
| variable in the Modules/Setup file.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| Changes in extension modules
 | |
| ----------------------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The struct extension module has several new features to control byte
 | |
| order and word size.  It supports reading and writing IEEE floats even
 | |
| on platforms where this is not the native format.  It uses uppercase
 | |
| format codes for unsigned integers of various sizes (always using
 | |
| Python long ints for 'I' and 'L'), 's' with a size prefix for strings,
 | |
| and 'p' for "Pascal strings" (with a leading length byte, included in
 | |
| the size; blame Hannu Krosing; new in 1.5a4).  A prefix '>' forces
 | |
| big-endian data and '<' forces little-endian data; these also select
 | |
| standard data sizes and disable automatic alignment (use pad bytes as
 | |
| needed).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The array module supports uppercase format codes for unsigned data
 | |
| formats (like the struct module).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The fcntl extension module now exports the needed symbolic
 | |
| constants.  (Formerly these were in FCNTL.py which was not available
 | |
| or correct for all platforms.)
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The extension modules dbm, gdbm and bsddb now check that the
 | |
| database is still open before making any new calls.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The dbhash module is no more.  Use bsddb instead.  (There's a third
 | |
| party interface for the BSD 2.x code somewhere on the web; support for
 | |
| bsddb will be deprecated.)
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The gdbm module now supports a sync() method.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The socket module now has some new functions: getprotobyname(), and
 | |
| the set {ntoh,hton}{s,l}().
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Various modules now export their type object: socket.SocketType,
 | |
| array.ArrayType.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The socket module's accept() method now returns unknown addresses as
 | |
| a tuple rather than raising an exception.  (This can happen in
 | |
| promiscuous mode.)  Theres' also a new function getprotobyname().
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The pthread support for the thread module now works on most platforms.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - STDWIN is now officially obsolete.  Support for it will eventually
 | |
| be removed from the distribution.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The binascii extension module is now hopefully fully debugged.
 | |
| (XXX Oops -- Fredrik Lundh promised me a uuencode fix that I never
 | |
| received.)
 | |
| 
 | |
| - audioop.c: added a ratecv() function; better handling of overflow in
 | |
| add().
 | |
| 
 | |
| - posixmodule.c: now exports the O_* flags (O_APPEND etc.).  On
 | |
| Windows, also O_TEXT and O_BINARY.  The 'error' variable (the
 | |
| exception is raises) is renamed -- its string value is now "os.error",
 | |
| so newbies don't believe they have to import posix (or nt) to catch
 | |
| it when they see os.error reported as posix.error.  The execve()
 | |
| function now accepts any mapping object for the environment.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - A new version of the al (audio library) module for SGI was
 | |
| contributed by Sjoerd Mullender.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The regex module has a new function get_syntax() which retrieves the
 | |
| syntax setting set by set_syntax().  The code was also sanitized,
 | |
| removing worries about unclean error handling.  See also below for its
 | |
| successor, re.py.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The "new" module (which creates new objects of various types) once
 | |
| again has a fully functioning new.function() method.  Dangerous as
 | |
| ever!  Also, new.code() has several new arguments.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - A problem has been fixed in the rotor module: on systems with signed
 | |
| characters, rotor-encoded data was not portable when the key contained
 | |
| 8-bit characters.  Also, setkey() now requires its argument rather
 | |
| than having broken code to default it.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The sys.builtin_module_names variable is now a tuple.  Another new
 | |
| variables in sys is sys.executable (the full path to the Python
 | |
| binary, if known).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The specs for time.strftime() have undergone some revisions.  It
 | |
| appears that not all format characters are supported in the same way
 | |
| on all platforms.  Rather than reimplement it, we note these
 | |
| differences in the documentation, and emphasize the shared set of
 | |
| features.  There's also a thorough test set (that occasionally finds
 | |
| problems in the C library implementation, e.g. on some Linuxes),
 | |
| thanks to Skip Montanaro.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The nis module seems broken when used with NIS+; unfortunately
 | |
| nobody knows how to fix it.  It should still work with old NIS.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| New library modules
 | |
| -------------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - New (still experimental) Perl-style regular expression module,
 | |
| re.py, which uses a new interface for matching as well as a new
 | |
| syntax; the new interface avoids the thread-unsafety of the regex
 | |
| interface.  This comes with a helper extension reopmodule.c and vastly
 | |
| rewritten regexpr.c.  Most work on this was done by Jeffrey Ollie, Tim
 | |
| Peters, and Andrew Kuchling.  See the documentation libre.tex.  In
 | |
| 1.5, the old regex module is still fully supported; in the future, it
 | |
| will become obsolete.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - New module gzip.py; see zlib above.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - New module keyword.py exports knowledge about Python's built-in
 | |
| keywords.  (New version by Ka-Ping Yee.)
 | |
| 
 | |
| - New module pprint.py (with documentation) which supports
 | |
| pretty-printing of lists, tuples, & dictionaries recursively.  By Fred
 | |
| Drake.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - New module code.py.  The function code.compile_command() can
 | |
| determine whether an interactively entered command is complete or not,
 | |
| distinguishing incomplete from invalid input.  (XXX Unfortunately,
 | |
| this seems broken at this moment, and I don't have the time to fix
 | |
| it.  It's probably better to add an explicit interface to the parser
 | |
| for this.)
 | |
| 
 | |
| - There is now a library module xdrlib.py which can read and write the
 | |
| XDR data format as used by Sun RPC, for example.  It uses the struct
 | |
| module.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| Changes in library modules
 | |
| --------------------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Module codehack.py is now completely obsolete.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The pickle.py module has been updated to make it compatible with the
 | |
| new binary format that cPickle.c produces.  By default it produces the
 | |
| old all-ASCII format compatible with the old pickle.py, still much
 | |
| faster than pickle.py; it will read both formats automatically.  A few
 | |
| other updates have been made.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - A new helper module, copy_reg.py, is provided to register extensions
 | |
| to the pickling code.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Revamped module tokenize.py is much more accurate and has an
 | |
| interface that makes it a breeze to write code to colorize Python
 | |
| source code.  Contributed by Ka-Ping Yee.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - In ihooks.py, ModuleLoader.load_module() now closes the file under
 | |
| all circumstances.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The tempfile.py module has a new class, TemporaryFile, which creates
 | |
| an open temporary file that will be deleted automatically when
 | |
| closed.  This works on Windows and MacOS as well as on Unix.  (Jim
 | |
| Fulton.)
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Changes to the cgi.py module: Most imports are now done at the
 | |
| top of the module, which provides a speedup when using ni (Jim
 | |
| Fulton).  The problem with file upload to a Windows platform is solved
 | |
| by using the new tempfile.TemporaryFile class; temporary files are now
 | |
| always opened in binary mode (Jim Fulton).  The cgi.escape() function
 | |
| now takes an optional flag argument that quotes '"' to '"'.  It
 | |
| is now possible to invoke cgi.py from a command line script, to test
 | |
| cgi scripts more easily outside an http server.  There's an optional
 | |
| limit to the size of uploads to POST (Skip Montanaro).  Added a
 | |
| 'strict_parsing' option to all parsing functions (Jim Fulton).  The
 | |
| function parse_qs() now uses urllib.unquote() on the name as well as
 | |
| the value of fields (Clarence Gardner).  The FieldStorage class now
 | |
| has a __len__() method.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - httplib.py: the socket object is no longer closed; all HTTP/1.*
 | |
| responses are now accepted; and it is now thread-safe (by not using
 | |
| the regex module).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - BaseHTTPModule.py: treat all HTTP/1.* versions the same.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The popen2.py module is now rewritten using a class, which makes
 | |
| access to the standard error stream and the process id of the
 | |
| subprocess possible.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Added timezone support to the rfc822.py module, in the form of a
 | |
| getdate_tz() method and a parsedate_tz() function; also a mktime_tz().
 | |
| Also added recognition of some non-standard date formats, by Lars
 | |
| Wirzenius, and RFC 850 dates (Chris Lawrence).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - mhlib.py: various enhancements, including almost compatible parsing
 | |
| of message sequence specifiers without invoking a subprocess.  Also
 | |
| added a createmessage() method by Lars Wirzenius.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The StringIO.StringIO class now supports readline(nbytes).  (Lars 
 | |
| Wirzenius.)  (Of course, you should be using cStringIO for performance.)
 | |
| 
 | |
| - UserDict.py supports the new dictionary methods as well.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Improvements for whrandom.py by Tim Peters: use 32-bit arithmetic to
 | |
| speed it up, and replace 0 seed values by 1 to avoid degeneration.
 | |
| A bug was fixed in the test for invalid arguments.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Module ftplib.py: added support for parsing a .netrc file (Fred
 | |
| Drake).  Also added an ntransfercmd() method to the FTP class, which
 | |
| allows access to the expected size of a transfer when available, and a
 | |
| parse150() function to the module which parses the corresponding 150
 | |
| response.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - urllib.py: the ftp cache is now limited to 10 entries.  Added
 | |
| quote_plus() and unquote_plus() functions which are like quote() and
 | |
| unquote() but also replace spaces with '+' or vice versa, for
 | |
| encoding/decoding CGI form arguments.  Catch all errors from the ftp
 | |
| module.  HTTP requests now add the Host: header line.  The proxy
 | |
| variable names are now mapped to lower case, for Windows.  The
 | |
| spliturl() function no longer erroneously throws away all data past
 | |
| the first newline.  The basejoin() function now intereprets "../"
 | |
| correctly.  I *believe* that the problems with "exception raised in
 | |
| __del__" under certain circumstances have been fixed (mostly by
 | |
| changes elsewher in the interpreter).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - In urlparse.py, there is a cache for results in urlparse.urlparse();
 | |
| its size limit is set to 20.  Also, new URL schemes shttp, https, and
 | |
| snews are "supported".
 | |
| 
 | |
| - shelve.py: use cPickle and cStringIO when available.  Also added
 | |
| a sync() method, which calls the database's sync() method if there is
 | |
| one.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The mimetools.py module now uses the available Python modules for
 | |
| decoding quoted-printable, uuencode and base64 formats, rather than
 | |
| creating a subprocess.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The python debugger (pdb.py, and its base class bdb.py) now support
 | |
| conditional breakpoints.  See the docs.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The modules base64.py, uu.py and quopri.py can now be used as simple
 | |
| command line utilities.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Various small fixes to the nntplib.py module that I can't bother to
 | |
| document in detail.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Sjoerd Mullender's mimify.py module now supports base64 encoding and 
 | |
| includes functions to handle the funny encoding you sometimes see in mail 
 | |
| headers.  It is now documented.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - mailbox.py: Added BabylMailbox.  Improved the way the mailbox is
 | |
| gotten from the environment.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Many more modules now correctly open files in binary mode when this
 | |
| is necessary on non-Unix platforms.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The copying functions in the undocumented module shutil.py are
 | |
| smarter.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The Writer classes in the formatter.py module now have a flush()
 | |
| method.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The sgmllib.py module accepts hyphens and periods in the middle of
 | |
| attribute names.  While this is against the SGML standard, there is
 | |
| some HTML out there that uses this...
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The interface for the Python bytecode disassembler module, dis.py,
 | |
| has been enhanced quite a bit.  There's now one main function,
 | |
| dis.dis(), which takes almost any kind of object (function, module,
 | |
| class, instance, method, code object) and disassembles it; without
 | |
| arguments it disassembles the last frame of the last traceback.  The
 | |
| other functions have changed slightly, too.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The imghdr.py module recognizes new image types: BMP, PNG.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The string.py module has a new function replace(str, old, new,
 | |
| [maxsplit]) which does substring replacements.  It is actually
 | |
| implemented in C in the strop module.  The functions [r]find() an
 | |
| [r]index() have an optional 4th argument indicating the end of the
 | |
| substring to search, alsoo implemented by their strop counterparts.
 | |
| (Remember, never import strop -- import string uses strop when
 | |
| available with zero overhead.)
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The string.join() function now accepts any sequence argument, not
 | |
| just lists and tuples.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The string.maketrans() requires its first two arguments to be
 | |
| present.  The old version didn't require them, but there's not much
 | |
| point without them, and the documentation suggests that they are
 | |
| required, so we fixed the code to match the documentation.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The regsub.py module has a function clear_cache(), which clears its
 | |
| internal cache of compiled regular expressions.  Also, the cache now
 | |
| takes the current syntax setting into account.  (However, this module
 | |
| is now obsolete -- use the sub() or subn() functions or methods in the
 | |
| re module.)
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The undocumented module Complex.py has been removed, now that Python
 | |
| has built-in complex numbers.  A similar module remains as
 | |
| Demo/classes/Complex.py, as an example.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| Changes to the build process
 | |
| ----------------------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The way GNU readline is configured is totally different.  The
 | |
| --with-readline configure option is gone.  It is now an extension
 | |
| module, which may be loaded dynamically.  You must enable it (and
 | |
| specify the correct libraries to link with) in the Modules/Setup file.
 | |
| Importing the module installs some hooks which enable command line
 | |
| editing.  When the interpreter shell is invoked interactively, it
 | |
| attempts to import the readline module; when this fails, the default
 | |
| input mechanism is used.  The hook variables are PyOS_InputHook and
 | |
| PyOS_ReadlineFunctionPointer.  (Code contributed by Lee Busby, with
 | |
| ideas from William Magro.)
 | |
| 
 | |
| - New build procedure: a single library, libpython1.5.a, is now built,
 | |
| which contains absolutely everything except for a one-line main()
 | |
| program (which calls Py_Main(argc, argv) to start the interpreter
 | |
| shell).  This makes life much simpler for applications that need to
 | |
| embed Python.  The serial number of the build is now included in the
 | |
| version string (sys.version).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - As far as I can tell, neither gcc -Wall nor the Microsoft compiler
 | |
| emits a single warning any more when compiling Python.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - A number of new Makefile variables have been added for special
 | |
| situations, e.g. LDLAST is appended to the link command.  These are
 | |
| used by editing the Makefile or passing them on the make command
 | |
| line.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - A set of patches from Lee Busby has been integrated that make it
 | |
| possible to catch floating point exceptions.  Use the configure option
 | |
| --with-fpectl to enable the patches; the extension modules fpectl and
 | |
| fpetest provide control to enable/disable and test the feature,
 | |
| respectively.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The support for shared libraries under AIX is now simpler and more
 | |
| robust.  Thanks to Vladimir Marangozov for revamping his own patches!
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The Modules/makesetup script now reads a file Setup.local as well as
 | |
| a file Setup.  Most changes to the Setup script can be done by editing
 | |
| Setup.local instead, which makes it easier to carry a particular setup
 | |
| over from one release to the next.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The Modules/makesetup script now copies any "include" lines it
 | |
| encounters verbatim into the output Makefile.  It also recognizes .cxx
 | |
| and .cpp as C++ source files.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The configure script is smarter about C compiler options; e.g. with
 | |
| gcc it uses -O2 and -g when possible, and on some other platforms it
 | |
| uses -Olimit 1500 to avoid a warning from the optimizer about the main
 | |
| loop in ceval.c (which has more than 1000 basic blocks).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The configure script now detects whether malloc(0) returns a NULL
 | |
| pointer or a valid block (of length zero).  This avoids the nonsense
 | |
| of always adding one byte to all malloc() arguments on most platforms.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The configure script has a new option, --with-dec-threads, to enable
 | |
| DEC threads on DEC Alpha platforms.  Also, --with-threads is now an
 | |
| alias for --with-thread (this was the Most Common Typo in configure
 | |
| arguments).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Many changes in Doc/Makefile; amongst others, latex2html is now used
 | |
| to generate HTML from all latex documents.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| Change to the Python/C API
 | |
| --------------------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Because some interfaces have changed, the PYTHON_API macro has been
 | |
| bumped.  Most extensions built for the old API version will still run,
 | |
| but I can't guarantee this.  Python prints a warning message on
 | |
| version mismatches; it dumps core when the version mismatch causes a
 | |
| serious problem :-)
 | |
| 
 | |
| - I've completed the Grand Renaming, with the help of Roger Masse and
 | |
| Barry Warsaw.  This makes reading or debugging the code much easier.
 | |
| Many other unrelated code reorganizations have also been carried out.
 | |
| The allobjects.h header file is gone; instead, you would have to
 | |
| include Python.h followed by rename2.h.  But you're better off running
 | |
| Tools/scripts/fixcid.py -s Misc/RENAME on your source, so you can omit
 | |
| the rename2.h; it will disappear in the next release.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Various and sundry small bugs in the "abstract" interfaces have been
 | |
| fixed.  Thanks to all the (involuntary) testers of the Python 1.4
 | |
| version!  Some new functions have been added, e.g. PySequence_List(o),
 | |
| equivalent to list(o) in Python.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - New API functions PyLong_FromUnsignedLong() and
 | |
| PyLong_AsUnsignedLong().
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The API functions in the file cgensupport.c are no longer
 | |
| supported.  This file has been moved to Modules and is only ever
 | |
| compiled when the SGI specific 'gl' module is built.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - PyObject_Compare() can now raise an exception.  Check with
 | |
| PyErr_Occurred().  The comparison function in an object type may also
 | |
| raise an exception.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The slice interface uses an upper bound of INT_MAX when no explicit
 | |
| upper bound is given (e.x. for a[1:]).  It used to ask the object for
 | |
| its length and do the calculations.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Support for multiple independent interpreters.  See Doc/api.tex,
 | |
| functions Py_NewInterpreter() and Py_EndInterpreter().  Since the
 | |
| documentation is incomplete, also see the new Demo/pysvr example
 | |
| (which shows how to use these in a threaded application) and the
 | |
| source code.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - There is now a Py_Finalize() function which "de-initializes"
 | |
| Python.  It is possible to completely restart the interpreter
 | |
| repeatedly by calling Py_Finalize() followed by Py_Initialize().  A
 | |
| change of functionality in Py_Initialize() means that it is now a
 | |
| fatal error to call it while the interpreter is already initialized.
 | |
| The old, half-hearted Py_Cleanup() routine is gone.  Use of Py_Exit()
 | |
| is deprecated (it is nothing more than Py_Finalize() followed by
 | |
| exit()).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - There are no known memory leaks left.  While Py_Finalize() doesn't
 | |
| free *all* allocated memory (some of it is hard to track down),
 | |
| repeated calls to Py_Finalize() and Py_Initialize() do not create
 | |
| unaccessible heap blocks.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - There is now explicit per-thread state.  (Inspired by, but not the
 | |
| same as, Greg Stein's free threading patches.)
 | |
| 
 | |
| - There is now better support for threading C applications.  There are
 | |
| now explicit APIs to manipulate the interpreter lock.  Read the source
 | |
| or the Demo/pysvr example; the new functions are
 | |
| PyEval_{Acquire,Release}{Lock,Thread}().
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The test macro DEBUG has changed to Py_DEBUG, to avoid interference
 | |
| with other libraries' DEBUG macros.  Likewise for any other test
 | |
| macros that didn't yet start with Py_.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - New wrappers around malloc() and friends: Py_Malloc() etc. call
 | |
| malloc() and call PyErr_NoMemory() when it fails; PyMem_Malloc() call
 | |
| just malloc().  Use of these wrappers could be essential if multiple
 | |
| memory allocators exist (e.g. when using certain DLL setups under
 | |
| Windows).  (Idea by Jim Fulton.)
 | |
| 
 | |
| - New C API PyImport_Import() which uses whatever __import__() hook
 | |
| that is installed for the current execution environment.  By Jim
 | |
| Fulton.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - It is now possible for an extension module's init function to fail
 | |
| non-fatally, by calling one of the PyErr_* functions and returning.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The PyInt_AS_LONG() and PyFloat_AS_DOUBLE() macros now cast their
 | |
| argument to the proper type, like the similar PyString macros already
 | |
| did.  (Suggestion by Marc-Andre Lemburg.)  Similar for PyList_GET_SIZE
 | |
| and PyList_GET_ITEM.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Some of the Py_Get* function, like Py_GetVersion() (but not yet
 | |
| Py_GetPath()) are now declared as returning a const char *.  (More
 | |
| should follow.)
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Changed the run-time library to check for exceptions after object
 | |
| comparisons.  PyObject_Compare() can now return an exception; use
 | |
| PyErr_Occurred() to check (there is *no* special return value).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - PyFile_WriteString() and Py_Flushline() now return error indicators
 | |
| instead of clearing exceptions.  This fixes an obscure bug where using
 | |
| these would clear a pending exception, discovered by Just van Rossum.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - There's a new function, PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords(), which parses
 | |
| an argument list including keyword arguments.  Contributed by Geoff
 | |
| Philbrick.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - PyArg_GetInt() is gone.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - It's no longer necessary to include graminit.h when calling one of
 | |
| the extended parser API functions.  The three public grammar start
 | |
| symbols are now in Python.h as Py_single_input, Py_file_input, and
 | |
| Py_eval_input.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The CObject interface has a new function,
 | |
| PyCObject_Import(module, name).  It calls PyCObject_AsVoidPtr()
 | |
| on the object referenced by "module.name".
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| Tkinter
 | |
| -------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - On popular demand, _tkinter once again installs a hook for readline
 | |
| that processes certain Tk events while waiting for the user to type
 | |
| (using PyOS_InputHook).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - A patch by Craig McPheeters plugs the most obnoxious memory leaks,
 | |
| caused by command definitions referencing widget objects beyond their
 | |
| lifetime.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - New standard dialog modules: tkColorChooser.py, tkCommonDialog.py,
 | |
| tkMessageBox.py, tkFileDialog.py, tkSimpleDialog.py These interface
 | |
| with the new Tk dialog scripts, and provide more "native platform"
 | |
| style file selection dialog boxes on some platforms.  Contributed by
 | |
| Fredrik Lundh.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Tkinter.py: when the first Tk object is destroyed, it sets the
 | |
| hiddel global _default_root to None, so that when another Tk object is
 | |
| created it becomes the new default root.  Other miscellaneous
 | |
| changes and fixes.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The Image class now has a configure method.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Added a bunch of new winfo options to Tkinter.py; we should now be
 | |
| up to date with Tk 4.2.  The new winfo options supported are:
 | |
| mananger, pointerx, pointerxy, pointery, server, viewable, visualid,
 | |
| visualsavailable.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The broken bind() method on Canvas objects defined in the Canvas.py
 | |
| module has been fixed.  The CanvasItem and Group classes now also have
 | |
| an unbind() method.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The problem with Tkinter.py falling back to trying to import
 | |
| "tkinter" when "_tkinter" is not found has been fixed -- it no longer
 | |
| tries "tkinter", ever.  This makes diagnosing the problem "_tkinter
 | |
| not configured" much easier and will hopefully reduce the newsgroup
 | |
| traffic on this topic.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The ScrolledText module once again supports the 'cnf' parameter, to
 | |
| be compatible with the examples in Mark Lutz' book (I know, I know,
 | |
| too late...)
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The _tkinter.c extension module has been revamped.  It now support
 | |
| Tk versions 4.1 through 8.0; support for 4.0 has been dropped.  It
 | |
| works well under Windows and Mac (with the latest Tk ports to those
 | |
| platforms).  It also supports threading -- it is safe for one
 | |
| (Python-created) thread to be blocked in _tkinter.mainloop() while
 | |
| other threads modify widgets.  To make the changes visible, those
 | |
| threads must use update_idletasks()method.  (The patch for threading
 | |
| in 1.5a3 was broken; in 1.5a4, it is back in a different version,
 | |
| which requires access to the Tcl sources to get it to work -- hence it
 | |
| is disabled by default.)
 | |
| 
 | |
| - A bug in _tkinter.c has been fixed, where Split() with a string
 | |
| containing an unmatched '"' could cause an exception or core dump.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Unfortunately, on Windows and Mac, Tk 8.0 no longer supports
 | |
| CreateFileHandler, so _tkinter.createfilehandler is not available on
 | |
| those platforms when using Tk 8.0 or later.  I will have to rethink
 | |
| how to interface with Tcl's lower-level event mechanism, or with its
 | |
| channels (which are like Python's file-like objects).  Jack Jansen has
 | |
| provided a fix for the Mac, so createfilehandler *is* actually
 | |
| supported there; maybe I can adapt his fix for Windows.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| Tools and Demos
 | |
| ---------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - A new regression test suite is provided, which tests most of the
 | |
| standard and built-in modules.  The regression test is run by invoking
 | |
| the script Lib/test/regrtest.py.  Barry Warsaw wrote the test harnass;
 | |
| he and Roger Masse contributed most of the new tests.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - New tool: faqwiz -- the CGI script that is used to maintain the
 | |
| Python FAQ (http://grail.cnri.reston.va.us/cgi-bin/faqw.py).  In
 | |
| Tools/faqwiz.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - New tool: webchecker -- a simple extensible web robot that, when
 | |
| aimed at a web server, checks that server for dead links.  Available
 | |
| are a command line utility as well as a Tkinter based GUI version.  In
 | |
| Tools/webchecker.  A simplified version of this program is dissected
 | |
| in my article in O'Reilly's WWW Journal, the issue on Scripting
 | |
| Languages (Vol 2, No 2); Scripting the Web with Python (pp 97-120).
 | |
| Includes a parser for robots.txt files by Skip Montanaro.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - New small tools: cvsfiles.py (prints a list of all files under CVS
 | |
| n a particular directory tree), treesync.py (a rather Guido-specific
 | |
| script to synchronize two source trees, one on Windows NT, the other
 | |
| one on Unix under CVS but accessible from the NT box), and logmerge.py
 | |
| (sort a collection of RCS or CVS logs by date).  In Tools/scripts.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The freeze script now also works under Windows (NT).  Another
 | |
| feature allows the -p option to be pointed at the Python source tree
 | |
| instead of the installation prefix.  This was loosely based on part of
 | |
| xfreeze by Sam Rushing and Bill Tutt.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - New examples (Demo/extend) that show how to use the generic
 | |
| extension makefile (Misc/Makefile.pre.in).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Tools/scripts/h2py.py now supports C++ comments.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Tools/scripts/pystone.py script is upgraded to version 1.1; there
 | |
| was a bug in version 1.0 (distributed with Python 1.4) that leaked
 | |
| memory.  Also, in 1.1, the LOOPS variable is incremented to 10000.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Demo/classes/Rat.py completely rewritten by Sjoerd Mullender.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| Windows (NT and 95)
 | |
| -------------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - New project files for Developer Studio (Visual C++) 5.0 for Windows
 | |
| NT (the old VC++ 4.2 Makefile is also still supported, but will
 | |
| eventually be withdrawn due to its bulkiness).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - See the note on the new module search path in the "Miscellaneous" section 
 | |
| above.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Support for Win32s (the 32-bit Windows API under Windows 3.1) is
 | |
| basically withdrawn.  If it still works for you, you're lucky.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - There's a new extension module, msvcrt.c, which provides various 
 | |
| low-level operations defined in the Microsoft Visual C++ Runtime Library.  
 | |
| These include locking(), setmode(), get_osfhandle(), set_osfhandle(), and 
 | |
| console I/O functions like kbhit(), getch() and putch().
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The -u option not only sets the standard I/O streams to unbuffered
 | |
| status, but also sets them in binary mode.  (This can also be done
 | |
| using msvcrt.setmode(), by the way.)
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The, sys.prefix and sys.exec_prefix variables point to the directory 
 | |
| where Python is installed, or to the top of the source tree, if it was run 
 | |
| from there.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The various os.path modules (posixpath, ntpath, macpath) now support
 | |
| passing more than two arguments to the join() function, so
 | |
| os.path.join(a, b, c) is the same as os.path.join(a, os.path.join(b,
 | |
| c)).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The ntpath module (normally used as os.path) supports ~ to $HOME 
 | |
| expansion in expanduser().
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The freeze tool now works on Windows.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - See also the Tkinter category for a sad note on
 | |
| _tkinter.createfilehandler().
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The truncate() method for file objects now works on Windows.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Py_Initialize() is no longer called when the DLL is loaded.  You
 | |
| must call it yourself.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The time module's clock() function now has good precision through
 | |
| the use of the Win32 API QueryPerformanceCounter().
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Mark Hammond will release Python 1.5 versions of PythonWin and his
 | |
| other Windows specific code: the win32api extensions, COM/ActiveX
 | |
| support, and the MFC interface.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| Mac
 | |
| ---
 | |
| 
 | |
| - As always, the Macintosh port will be done by Jack Jansen.  He will
 | |
| make a separate announcement for the Mac specific source code and the
 | |
| binary distribution(s) when these are ready.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| ======================================================================
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| =====================================
 | |
| ==> Release 1.4 (October 25 1996) <==
 | |
| =====================================
 | |
| 
 | |
| (Starting in reverse chronological order:)
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Changed disclaimer notice.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Added SHELL=/bin/sh to Misc/Makefile.pre.in -- some Make versions
 | |
| default to the user's login shell.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - In Lib/tkinter/Tkinter.py, removed bogus binding of <Delete> in Text
 | |
| widget, and bogus bspace() function.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - In Lib/cgi.py, bumped __version__ to 2.0 and restored a truncated
 | |
| paragraph.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Fixed the NT Makefile (PC/vc40.mak) for VC 4.0 to set /MD for all
 | |
| subprojects, and to remove the (broken) experimental NumPy
 | |
| subprojects.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - In Lib/py_compile.py, cast mtime to long() so it will work on Mac
 | |
| (where os.stat() returns mtimes as floats.)
 | |
| - Set self.rfile unbuffered (like self.wfile) in SocketServer.py, to
 | |
| fix POST in CGIHTTPServer.py.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Version 2.83 of Misc/python-mode.el for Emacs is included.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - In Modules/regexmodule.c, fixed symcomp() to correctly handle a new
 | |
| group starting immediately after a group tag.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - In Lib/SocketServer.py, changed the mode for rfile to unbuffered.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - In Objects/stringobject.c, fixed the compare function to do the
 | |
| first char comparison in unsigned mode, for consistency with the way
 | |
| other characters are compared by memcmp().
 | |
| 
 | |
| - In Lib/tkinter/Tkinter.py, fixed Scale.get() to support floats.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - In Lib/urllib.py, fix another case where openedurl wasn't set.
 | |
| 
 | |
| (XXX Sorry, the rest is in totally random order.  No time to fix it.)
 | |
| 
 | |
| - SyntaxError exceptions detected during code generation
 | |
| (e.g. assignment to an expression) now include a line number.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Don't leave trailing / or \ in script directory inserted in front of
 | |
| sys.path.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Added a note to Tools/scripts/classfix.py abouts its historical
 | |
| importance.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Added Misc/Makefile.pre.in, a universal Makefile for extensions
 | |
| built outside the distribution.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Rewritten Misc/faq2html.py, by Ka-Ping Yee.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Install shared modules with mode 555 (needed for performance on some
 | |
| platforms).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Some changes to standard library modules to avoid calling append()
 | |
| with more than one argument -- while supported, this should be
 | |
| outlawed, and I don't want to set a bad example.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - bdb.py (and hence pdb.py) supports calling run() with a code object
 | |
| instead of a code string.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Fixed an embarrassing bug cgi.py which prevented correct uploading
 | |
| of binary files from Netscape (which doesn't distinguish between
 | |
| binary and text files).  Also added dormant logging support, which
 | |
| makes it easier to debug the cgi module itself.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Added default writer to constructor of NullFormatter class.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Use binary mode for socket.makefile() calls in ftplib.py.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The ihooks module no longer "installs" itself upon import -- this
 | |
| was an experimental feature that helped ironing out some bugs but that
 | |
| slowed down code that imported it without the need to install it
 | |
| (e.g. the rexec module).  Also close the file in some cases and add
 | |
| the __file__ attribute to loaded modules.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The test program for mailbox.py is now more useful.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Added getparamnames() to Message class in mimetools.py -- it returns
 | |
| the names of parameters to the content-type header.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Fixed a typo in ni that broke the loop stripping "__." from names.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Fix sys.path[0] for scripts run via pdb.py's new main program.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - profile.py can now also run a script, like pdb.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Fix a small bug in pyclbr -- don't add names starting with _ when
 | |
| emulating from ... import *.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Fixed a series of embarrassing typos in rexec's handling of standard
 | |
| I/O redirection.  Added some more "safe" built-in modules: cmath,
 | |
| errno, operator.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Fixed embarrassing typo in shelve.py.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Added SliceType and EllipsisType to types.py.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - In urllib.py, added handling for error 301 (same as 302); added
 | |
| geturl() method to get the URL after redirection.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Fixed embarrassing typo in xdrlib.py.  Also fixed typo in Setup.in
 | |
| for _xdrmodule.c and removed redundant #include from _xdrmodule.c.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Fixed bsddbmodule.c to add binary mode indicator on platforms that
 | |
| have it.  This should make it working on Windows NT.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Changed last uses of #ifdef NT to #ifdef MS_WINDOWS or MS_WIN32,
 | |
| whatever applies.  Also rationalized some other tests for various MS
 | |
| platforms.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Added the sources for the NT installer script used for Python
 | |
| 1.4beta3.  Not tested with this release, but better than nothing.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - A compromise in pickle's defenses against Trojan horses: a
 | |
| user-defined function is now okay where a class is expected.  A
 | |
| built-in function is not okay, to prevent pickling something that
 | |
| will execute os.system("rm -f *") when unpickling.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - dis.py will print the name of local variables referenced by local
 | |
| load/store/delete instructions.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Improved portability of SimpleHTTPServer module to non-Unix
 | |
| platform.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The thread.h interface adds an extra argument to down_sema().  This
 | |
| only affects other C code that uses thread.c; the Python thread module
 | |
| doesn't use semaphores (which aren't provided on all platforms where
 | |
| Python threads are supported).  Note: on NT, this change is not
 | |
| implemented.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Fixed some typos in abstract.h; corrected signature of
 | |
| PyNumber_Coerce, added PyMapping_DelItem.  Also fixed a bug in
 | |
| abstract.c's PyObject_CallMethod().
 | |
| 
 | |
| - apply(classname, (), {}) now works even if the class has no
 | |
| __init__() method.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Implemented complex remainder and divmod() (these would dump core!).
 | |
| Conversion of complex numbers to int, long int or float now raises an
 | |
| exception, since there is no meaningful way to do it without losing
 | |
| information.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Fixed bug in built-in complex() function which gave the wrong result
 | |
| for two real arguments.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Change the hash algorithm for strings -- the multiplier is now
 | |
| 1000003 instead of 3, which gives better spread for short strings.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - New default path for Windows NT, the registry structure now supports
 | |
| default paths for different install packages.  (Mark Hammond -- the
 | |
| next PythonWin release will use this.)
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Added more symbols to the python_nt.def file.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - When using GNU readline, set rl_readline_name to "python".
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The Ellipses built-in name has been renamed to Ellipsis -- this is
 | |
| the correct singular form.  Thanks to Ka-Ping Yee, who saved us from
 | |
| eternal embarrassment.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bumped the PYTHON_API_VERSION to 1006, due to the Ellipses ->
 | |
| Ellipsis name change.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Updated the library reference manual.  Added documentation of
 | |
| restricted mode (rexec, Bastion) and the formatter module (for use
 | |
| with the htmllib module).  Fixed the documentation of htmllib
 | |
| (finally).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The reference manual is now maintained in FrameMaker.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Upgraded scripts Doc/partparse.py and Doc/texi2html.py.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Slight improvements to Doc/Makefile.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Added fcntl.lockf(). This should be used for Unix file locking
 | |
| instead of the posixfile module; lockf() is more portable.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The getopt module now supports long option names, thanks to Lars
 | |
| Wizenius.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Plenty of changes to Tkinter and Canvas, mostly due to Fred Drake
 | |
| and Nils Fischbeck.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Use more bits of time.time() in whrandom's default seed().
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Performance hack for regex module's regs attribute.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Don't close already closed socket in socket module.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Correctly handle separators containing embedded nulls in
 | |
| strop.split, strop.find and strop.rfind.  Also added more detail to
 | |
| error message for strop.atoi and friends.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Moved fallback definition for hypot() to Python/hypot.c.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Added fallback definition for strdup, in Python/strdup.c.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Fixed some bugs where a function would return 0 to indicate an error
 | |
| where it should return -1.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Test for error returned by time.localtime(), and rationalized its MS
 | |
| tests.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Added Modules/Setup.local file, which is processed after Setup.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Corrected bug in toplevel Makefile.in -- execution of regen script
 | |
| would not use the right PATH and PYTHONPATH.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Various and sundry NeXT configuration changes (sigh).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Support systems where libreadline needs neither termcap nor curses.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Improved ld_so_aix script and python.exp file (for AIX).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - More stringent test for working <stdarg.h> in configure script.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Removed Demo/www subdirectory -- it was totally out of date.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Improved demos and docs for Fred Drake's parser module; fixed one
 | |
| typo in the module itself.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| =========================================
 | |
| ==> Release 1.4beta3 (August 26 1996) <==
 | |
| =========================================
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| (XXX This is less readable that it should.  I promise to restructure
 | |
| it for the final 1.4 release.)
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| What's new in 1.4beta3 (since beta2)?
 | |
| -------------------------------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Name mangling to implement a simple form of class-private variables.
 | |
| A name of the form "__spam" can't easily be used outside the class.
 | |
| (This was added in 1.4beta3, but left out of the 1.4beta3 release
 | |
| message.)
 | |
| 
 | |
| - In urllib.urlopen(): HTTP URLs containing user:passwd@host are now
 | |
| handled correctly when using a proxy server.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - In ntpath.normpath(): don't truncate to 8+3 format.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - In mimetools.choose_boundary(): don't die when getuid() or getpid()
 | |
| aren't defined.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Module urllib: some optimizations to (un)quoting.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - New module MimeWriter for writing MIME documents.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - More changes to formatter module.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The freeze script works once again and is much more robust (using
 | |
| sys.prefix etc.).  It also supports a -o option to specify an
 | |
| output directory.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - New module whichdb recognizes dbm, gdbm and bsddb/dbhash files.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The Doc/Makefile targets have been reorganized somewhat to remove the 
 | |
| insistence on always generating PostScript.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The texinfo to html filter (Doc/texi2html.py) has been improved somewhat.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - "errors.h" has been renamed to "pyerrors.h" to resolve a long-standing 
 | |
| name conflict on the Mac.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Linking a module compiled with a different setting for Py_TRACE_REFS now 
 | |
| generates a linker error rather than a core dump.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The cgi module has a new convenience function print_exception(), which 
 | |
| formats a python exception using HTML.  It also fixes a bug in the 
 | |
| compatibility code and adds a dubious feature which makes it possible to 
 | |
| have two query strings, one in the URL and one in the POST data.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - A subtle change in the unpickling of class instances makes it possible 
 | |
| to unpickle in restricted execution mode, where the __dict__ attribute is 
 | |
| not available (but setattr() is).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Documentation for os.path.splitext() (== posixpath.splitext()) has been 
 | |
| cleared up.  It splits at the *last* dot.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - posixfile locking is now also correctly supported on AIX.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The tempfile module once again honors an initial setting of tmpdir.  It 
 | |
| now works on Windows, too.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The traceback module has some new functions to extract, format and print 
 | |
| the active stack.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Some translation functions in the urllib module have been made a little 
 | |
| less sluggish.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The addtag_* methods for Canvas widgets in Tkinter as well as in the 
 | |
| separate Canvas class have been fixed so they actually do something 
 | |
| meaningful.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - A tiny _test() function has been added to Tkinter.py.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - A generic Makefile for dynamically loaded modules is provided in the Misc 
 | |
| subdirectory (Misc/gMakefile).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - A new version of python-mode.el for Emacs is provided.  See
 | |
| http://www.python.org/ftp/emacs/pmdetails.html for details.  The
 | |
| separate file pyimenu.el is no longer needed, imenu support is folded
 | |
| into python-mode.el.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The configure script can finally correctly find the readline library in a 
 | |
| non-standard location.  The LDFLAGS variable is passed on the Makefiles 
 | |
| from the configure script.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Shared libraries are now installed as programs (i.e. with executable 
 | |
| permission).  This is required on HP-UX and won't hurt on other systems.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The objc.c module is no longer part of the distribution.  Objective-C 
 | |
| support may become available as contributed software on the ftp site.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The sybase module is no longer part of the distribution.  A much
 | |
| improved sybase module is available as contributed software from the
 | |
| ftp site.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - _tkinter is now compatible with Tcl 7.5 / Tk 4.1 patch1 on Windows and 
 | |
| Mac (don't use unpatched Tcl/Tk!).  The default line in the Setup.in file 
 | |
| now links with Tcl 7.5 / Tk 4.1 rather than 7.4/4.0.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - In Setup, you can now write "*shared*" instead of "*noconfig*", and you 
 | |
| can use *.so and *.sl as shared libraries.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Some more fidgeting for AIX shared libraries.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The mpz module is now compatible with GMP 2.x.  (Not tested by me.)
 | |
| (Note -- a complete replacement by Niels Mo"ller, called gpmodule, is
 | |
| available from the contrib directory on the ftp site.)
 | |
| 
 | |
| - A warning is written to sys.stderr when a __del__ method raises an 
 | |
| exception (formerly, such exceptions were completely ignored).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The configure script now defines HAVE_OLD_CPP if the C preprocessor is 
 | |
| incapable of ANSI style token concatenation and stringification.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - All source files (except a few platform specific modules) are once again 
 | |
| compatible with K&R C compilers as well as ANSI compilers.  In particular,
 | |
| ANSI-isms have been removed or made conditional in complexobject.c, 
 | |
| getargs.c and operator.c.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The abstract object API has three new functions, PyObject_DelItem, 
 | |
| PySequence_DelItem, and PySequence_DelSlice.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The operator module has new functions delitem and delslice, and the 
 | |
| functions "or" and "and" are renamed to "or_" and "and_" (since "or" and 
 | |
| "and" are reserved words).  ("__or__" and "__and__" are unchanged.)
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The environment module is no longer supported; putenv() is now a function 
 | |
| in posixmodule (also under NT).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Error in filter(<function>, "") has been fixed.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Unrecognized keyword arguments raise TypeError, not KeyError.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Better portability, fewer bugs and memory leaks, fewer compiler warnings, 
 | |
| some more documentation.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug in float power boundary case (0.0 to the negative integer power) 
 | |
| fixed.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The test of negative number to the float power has been moved from the 
 | |
| built-in pow() functin to floatobject.c (so complex numbers can yield the 
 | |
| correct result).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The bug introduced in beta2 where shared libraries loaded (using 
 | |
| dlopen()) from the current directory would fail, has been fixed.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Modules imported as shared libraries now also have a __file__ attribute, 
 | |
| giving the filename from which they were loaded.  The only modules without 
 | |
| a __file__ attribute now are built-in modules.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - On the Mac, dynamically loaded modules can end in either ".slb" or 
 | |
| ".<platform>.slb" where <platform> is either "CFM68K" or "ppc".  The ".slb" 
 | |
| extension should only be used for "fat" binaries.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - C API addition: marshal.c now supports 
 | |
| PyMarshal_WriteObjectToString(object).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - C API addition: getargs.c now supports
 | |
| PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords(args, kwdict, format, kwnames, ...)
 | |
| to parse keyword arguments.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The PC versioning scheme (sys.winver) has changed once again.  the 
 | |
| version number is now "<digit>.<digit>.<digit>.<apiversion>", where the 
 | |
| first three <digit>s are the Python version (e.g. "1.4.0" for Python 1.4, 
 | |
| "1.4.1" for Python 1.4.1 -- the beta level is not included) and 
 | |
| <apiversion> is the four-digit PYTHON_API_VERSION (currently 1005).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - h2py.py accepts whitespace before the # in CPP directives
 | |
| 
 | |
| - On Solaris 2.5, it should now be possible to use either Posix threads or 
 | |
| Solaris threads (XXX: how do you select which is used???).  (Note: the 
 | |
| Python pthreads interface doesn't fully support semaphores yet -- anyone 
 | |
| care to fix this?)
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Thread support should now work on AIX, using either DCE threads or 
 | |
| pthreads.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - New file Demo/sockets/unicast.py
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Working Mac port, with CFM68K support, with Tk 4.1 support (though not 
 | |
| both) (XXX)
 | |
| 
 | |
| - New project setup for PC port, now compatible with PythonWin, with 
 | |
| _tkinter and NumPy support (XXX)
 | |
| 
 | |
| - New module site.py (XXX)
 | |
| 
 | |
| - New module xdrlib.py and optional support module _xdrmodule.c (XXX)
 | |
| 
 | |
| - parser module adapted to new grammar, complete w/ Doc & Demo (XXX)
 | |
| 
 | |
| - regen script fixed (XXX)
 | |
| 
 | |
| - new machdep subdirectories Lib/{aix3,aix4,next3_3,freebsd2,linux2} (XXX)
 | |
| 
 | |
| - testall now also tests math module (XXX)
 | |
| 
 | |
| - string.atoi c.s. now raise an exception for an empty input string.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - At last, it is no longer necessary to define HAVE_CONFIG_H in order to 
 | |
| have config.h included at various places.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Unrecognized keyword arguments now raise TypeError rather than KeyError.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The makesetup script recognizes files with extension .so or .sl as
 | |
| (shared) libraries.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - 'access' is no longer a reserved word, and all code related to its 
 | |
| implementation is gone (or at least #ifdef'ed out).  This should make 
 | |
| Python a little speedier too!
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Performance enhancements suggested by Sjoerd Mullender.  This includes 
 | |
| the introduction of two new optional function pointers in type object, 
 | |
| getattro and setattro, which are like getattr and setattr but take a 
 | |
| string object instead of a C string pointer.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - New operations in string module: lstrip(s) and rstrip(s) strip whitespace 
 | |
| only on the left or only on the right, A new optional third argument to 
 | |
| split() specifies the maximum number of separators honored (so 
 | |
| splitfields(s, sep, n) returns a list of at most n+1 elements).  (Since 
 | |
| 1.3, splitfields(s, None) is totally equivalent to split(s).)
 | |
| string.capwords() has an optional second argument specifying the 
 | |
| separator (which is passed to split()).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - regsub.split() has the same addition as string.split().  regsub.splitx(s, 
 | |
| sep, maxsep) implements the functionality that was regsub.split(s, 1) in 
 | |
| 1.4beta2 (return a list containing the delimiters as well as the words).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Final touch for AIX loading, rewritten Misc/AIX-NOTES.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - In Modules/_tkinter.c, when using Tk 4.1 or higher, use className
 | |
| argument to _tkinter.create() to set Tcl's argv0 variable, so X
 | |
| resources use the right resource class again.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Add #undef fabs to Modules/mathmodule.c for macintosh.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Added some macro renames for AIX in Modules/operator.c.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Removed spurious 'E' from Doc/liberrno.tex.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Got rid of some cruft in Misc/ (dlMakefile, pyimenu.el); added new
 | |
| Misc/gMakefile and new version of Misc/python-mode.el.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Fixed typo in Lib/ntpath.py (islink has "return false" which gives a
 | |
| NameError).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Added missing "from types import *" to Lib/tkinter/Canvas.py.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Added hint about using default args for __init__ to pickle docs.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Corrected typo in Inclide/abstract.h: PySequence_Lenth ->
 | |
| PySequence_Length.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Some improvements to Doc/texi2html.py.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - In Python/import.c, Cast unsigned char * in struct _frozen to char *
 | |
| in calls to rds_object().
 | |
| 
 | |
| - In doc/ref4.tex, added note about scope of lambda bodies.
 | |
| 
 | |
| What's new in 1.4beta2 (since beta1)?
 | |
| -------------------------------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Portability bug in the md5.h header solved.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The PC build procedure now really works, and sets sys.platform to a
 | |
| meaningful value (a few things were botched in beta 1).  Lib/dos_8x3
 | |
| is now a standard part of the distribution (alas).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - More improvements to the installation procedure.  Typing "make install" 
 | |
| now inserts the version number in the pathnames of almost everything 
 | |
| installed, and creates the machine dependent modules (FCNTL.py etc.) if not 
 | |
| supplied by the distribution.  (XXX There's still a problem with the latter 
 | |
| because the "regen" script requires that Python is installed.  Some manual 
 | |
| intervention may still be required.) (This has been fixed in 1.4beta3.)
 | |
| 
 | |
| - New modules: errno, operator (XXX).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Changes for use with Numerical Python: built-in function slice() and
 | |
| Ellipses object, and corresponding syntax:
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	x[lo:hi:stride]		==	x[slice(lo, hi, stride)]
 | |
| 	x[a, ..., z]		==	x[(a, Ellipses, z)]
 | |
| 
 | |
| - New documentation for errno and cgi modules.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The directory containing the script passed to the interpreter is
 | |
| inserted in from of sys.path; "." is no longer a default path
 | |
| component.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Optional third string argument to string.translate() specifies
 | |
| characters to delete.  New function string.maketrans() creates a
 | |
| translation table for translate() or for regex.compile().
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Module posix (and hence module os under Unix) now supports putenv().
 | |
| Moreover, module os is enhanced so that if putenv() is supported,
 | |
| assignments to os.environ entries make the appropriate putenv() call.
 | |
| (XXX the putenv() implementation can leak a small amount of memory per
 | |
| call.)
 | |
| 
 | |
| - pdb.py can now be invoked from the command line to debug a script:
 | |
| python pdb.py <script> <arg> ...
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Much improved parseaddr() in rfc822.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - In cgi.py, you can now pass an alternative value for environ to
 | |
| nearly all functions.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - You can now assign to instance variables whose name begins and ends
 | |
| with '__'.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - New version of Fred Drake's parser module and associates (token,
 | |
| symbol, AST).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - New PYTHON_API_VERSION value and .pyc file magic number (again!).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The "complex" internal structure type is now called "Py_complex" to
 | |
| avoid name conflicts.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Numerous small bugs fixed.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Slight pickle speedups.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Some slight speedups suggested by Sjoerd (more coming in 1.4 final).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - NeXT portability mods by Bill Bumgarner integrated.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Modules regexmodule.c, bsddbmodule.c and xxmodule.c have been
 | |
| converted to new naming style.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| What's new in 1.4beta1 (since 1.3)?
 | |
| -----------------------------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Added sys.platform and sys.exec_platform for Bill Janssen.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Installation has been completely overhauled.  "make install" now installs 
 | |
| everything, not just the python binary.  Installation uses the install-sh 
 | |
| script (borrowed from X11) to install each file.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - New functions in the posix module: mkfifo, plock, remove (== unlink),
 | |
| and ftruncate.  More functions are also available under NT.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - New function in the fcntl module: flock.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Shared library support for FreeBSD.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The --with-readline option can now be used without a DIRECTORY argument, 
 | |
| for systems where libreadline.* is in one of the standard places.  It is 
 | |
| also possible for it to be a shared library.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The extension tkinter has been renamed to _tkinter, to avoid confusion 
 | |
| with Tkinter.py oncase insensitive file systems.  It now supports Tk 4.1 as 
 | |
| well as 4.0.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Author's change of address from CWI in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, to 
 | |
| CNRI in Reston, VA, USA.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The math.hypot() function is now always available (if it isn't found in 
 | |
| the C math library, Python provides its own implementation).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The latex documentation is now compatible with latex2e, thanks to David 
 | |
| Ascher.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The expression x**y is now equivalent to pow(x, y).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The indexing expression x[a, b, c] is now equivalent to x[(a, b, c)].
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Complex numbers are now supported.  Imaginary constants are written with 
 | |
| a 'j' or 'J' prefix, general complex numbers can be formed by adding a real 
 | |
| part to an imaginary part, like 3+4j.  Complex numbers are always stored in 
 | |
| floating point form, so this is equivalent to 3.0+4.0j.  It is also 
 | |
| possible to create complex numbers with the new built-in function 
 | |
| complex(re, [im]).  For the footprint-conscious, complex number support can 
 | |
| be disabled by defining the symbol WITHOUT_COMPLEX.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - New built-in function list() is the long-awaited counterpart of tuple().
 | |
| 
 | |
| - There's a new "cmath" module which provides the same functions as the 
 | |
| "math" library but with complex arguments and results.  (There are very 
 | |
| good reasons why math.sqrt(-1) still raises an exception -- you have to use 
 | |
| cmath.sqrt(-1) to get 1j for an answer.)
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The Python.h header file (which is really the same as allobjects.h except 
 | |
| it disables support for old style names) now includes several more files, 
 | |
| so you have to have fewer #include statements in the average extension.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The NDEBUG symbol is no longer used.  Code that used to be dependent on 
 | |
| the presence of NDEBUG is now present on the absence of DEBUG.  TRACE_REFS 
 | |
| and REF_DEBUG have been renamed to Py_TRACE_REFS and Py_REF_DEBUG, 
 | |
| respectively.  At long last, the source actually compiles and links without 
 | |
| errors when this symbol is defined.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Several symbols that didn't follow the new naming scheme have been 
 | |
| renamed (usually by adding to rename2.h) to use a Py or _Py prefix.  There 
 | |
| are no external symbols left without a Py or _Py prefix, not even those 
 | |
| defined by sources that were incorporated from elsewhere (regexpr.c, 
 | |
| md5c.c).  (Macros are a different story...)
 | |
| 
 | |
| - There are now typedefs for the structures defined in config.c and 
 | |
| frozen.c.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - New PYTHON_API_VERSION value and .pyc file magic number.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - New module Bastion.  (XXX)
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Improved performance of StringIO module.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - UserList module now supports + and * operators.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The binhex and binascii modules now actually work.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The cgi module has been almost totally rewritten and documented.
 | |
| It now supports file upload and a new data type to handle forms more 
 | |
| flexibly.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The formatter module (for use with htmllib) has been overhauled (again).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The ftplib module now supports passive mode and has doc strings.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - In (ideally) all places where binary files are read or written, the file 
 | |
| is now correctly opened in binary mode ('rb' or 'wb') so the code will work 
 | |
| on Mac or PC.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Dummy versions of os.path.expandvars() and expanduser() are now provided 
 | |
| on non-Unix platforms.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Module urllib now has two new functions url2pathname and pathname2url 
 | |
| which turn local filenames into "file:..." URLs using the same rules as 
 | |
| Netscape (why be different).  it also supports urlretrieve() with a 
 | |
| pathname parameter, and honors the proxy environment variables (http_proxy 
 | |
| etc.).  The URL parsing has been improved somewhat, too.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Micro improvements to urlparse.  Added urlparse.urldefrag() which 
 | |
| removes a trailing ``#fragment'' if any.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The mailbox module now supports MH style message delimiters as well.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The mhlib module contains some new functionality: setcontext() to set the 
 | |
| current folder and parsesequence() to parse a sequence as commonly passed 
 | |
| to MH commands (e.g. 1-10 or last:5).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - New module mimify for conversion to and from MIME format of email 
 | |
| messages.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Module ni now automatically installs itself when first imported -- this 
 | |
| is against the normal rule that modules should define classes and functions 
 | |
| but not invoke them, but appears more useful in the case that two 
 | |
| different, independent modules want to use ni's features.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Some small performance enhancements in module pickle.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Small interface change to the profile.run*() family of functions -- more 
 | |
| sensible handling of return values.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The officially registered Mac creator for Python files is 'Pyth'.  This 
 | |
| replaces 'PYTH' which was used before but never registered.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Added regsub.capwords().  (XXX)
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Added string.capwords(), string.capitalize() and string.translate().  
 | |
| (XXX)
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Fixed an interface bug in the rexec module: it was impossible to pass a 
 | |
| hooks instance to the RExec class.  rexec now also supports the dynamic 
 | |
| loading of modules from shared libraries.  Some other interfaces have been 
 | |
| added too.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Module rfc822 now caches the headers in a dictionary for more efficient 
 | |
| lookup.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The sgmllib module now understands a limited number of SGML "shorthands" 
 | |
| like <A/.../ for <A>...</A>.  (It's not clear that this was a good idea...)
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The tempfile module actually tries a number of different places to find a 
 | |
| usable temporary directory.  (This was prompted by certain Linux 
 | |
| installations that appear to be missing a /usr/tmp directory.) [A bug in 
 | |
| the implementation that would ignore a pre-existing tmpdir global has been 
 | |
| fixed in beta3.]
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Much improved and enhanved FileDialog module for Tkinter.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Many small changes to Tkinter, to bring it more in line with Tk 4.0 (as 
 | |
| well as Tk 4.1).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - New socket interfaces include ntohs(), ntohl(), htons(), htonl(), and 
 | |
| s.dup().  Sockets now work correctly on Windows.  On Windows, the built-in 
 | |
| extension is called _socket and a wrapper module win/socket.py provides 
 | |
| "makefile()" and "dup()" functionality.  On Windows, the select module 
 | |
| works only with socket objects.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bugs in bsddb module fixed (e.g. missing default argument values).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The curses extension now includes <ncurses.h> when available.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The gdbm module now supports opening databases in "fast" mode by 
 | |
| specifying 'f' as the second character or the mode string.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - new variables sys.prefix and sys.exec_prefix pass corresponding 
 | |
| configuration options / Makefile variables to the Python programmer.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The ``new'' module now supports creating new user-defined classes as well 
 | |
| as instances thereof.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The soundex module now sports get_soundex() to get the soundex value for an 
 | |
| arbitrary string (formerly it would only do soundex-based string 
 | |
| comparison) as well as doc strings.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - New object type "cobject" to safely wrap void pointers for passing them 
 | |
| between various extension modules.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - More efficient computation of float**smallint.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The mysterious bug whereby "x.x" (two occurrences of the same 
 | |
| one-character name) typed from the commandline would sometimes fail 
 | |
| mysteriously.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The initialization of the readline function can now be invoked by a C 
 | |
| extension through PyOS_ReadlineInit().
 | |
| 
 | |
| - There's now an externally visible pointer PyImport_FrozenModules which 
 | |
| can be changed by an embedding application.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The argument parsing functions now support a new format character 'D' to 
 | |
| specify complex numbers.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Various memory leaks plugged and bugs fixed.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Improved support for posix threads (now that real implementations are 
 | |
| beginning to apepar).  Still no fully functioning semaphores.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Some various and sundry improvements and new entries in the Tools 
 | |
| directory.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| =====================================
 | |
| ==> Release 1.3 (13 October 1995) <==
 | |
| =====================================
 | |
| 
 | |
| Major change
 | |
| ============
 | |
| 
 | |
| Two words: Keyword Arguments.  See the first section of Chapter 12 of
 | |
| the Tutorial.
 | |
| 
 | |
| (The rest of this file is textually the same as the remaining sections
 | |
| of that chapter.)
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| Changes to the WWW and Internet tools
 | |
| =====================================
 | |
| 
 | |
| The "htmllib" module has been rewritten in an incompatible fashion.
 | |
| The new version is considerably more complete (HTML 2.0 except forms,
 | |
| but including all ISO-8859-1 entity definitions), and easy to use.
 | |
| Small changes to "sgmllib" have also been made, to better match the
 | |
| tokenization of HTML as recognized by other web tools.
 | |
| 
 | |
| A new module "formatter" has been added, for use with the new
 | |
| "htmllib" module.
 | |
| 
 | |
| The "urllib"and "httplib" modules have been changed somewhat to allow
 | |
| overriding unknown URL types and to support authentication.  They now
 | |
| use "mimetools.Message" instead of "rfc822.Message" to parse headers.
 | |
| The "endrequest()" method has been removed from the HTTP class since
 | |
| it breaks the interaction with some servers.
 | |
| 
 | |
| The "rfc822.Message" class has been changed to allow a flag to be
 | |
| passed in that says that the file is unseekable.
 | |
| 
 | |
| The "ftplib" module has been fixed to be (hopefully) more robust on
 | |
| Linux.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Several new operations that are optionally supported by servers have
 | |
| been added to "nntplib": "xover", "xgtitle", "xpath" and "date".
 | |
| 
 | |
| Other Language Changes
 | |
| ======================
 | |
| 
 | |
| The "raise" statement now takes an optional argument which specifies
 | |
| the traceback to be used when printing the exception's stack trace.
 | |
| This must be a traceback object, such as found in "sys.exc_traceback".
 | |
| When omitted or given as "None", the old behavior (to generate a stack
 | |
| trace entry for the current stack frame) is used.
 | |
| 
 | |
| The tokenizer is now more tolerant of alien whitespace.  Control-L in
 | |
| the leading whitespace of a line resets the column number to zero,
 | |
| while Control-R just before the end of the line is ignored.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Changes to Built-in Operations
 | |
| ==============================
 | |
| 
 | |
| For file objects, "f.read(0)" and "f.readline(0)" now return an empty
 | |
| string rather than reading an unlimited number of bytes.  For the
 | |
| latter, omit the argument altogether or pass a negative value.
 | |
| 
 | |
| A new system variable, "sys.platform", has been added.  It specifies
 | |
| the current platform, e.g. "sunos5" or "linux1".
 | |
| 
 | |
| The built-in functions "input()" and "raw_input()" now use the GNU
 | |
| readline library when it has been configured (formerly, only
 | |
| interactive input to the interpreter itself was read using GNU
 | |
| readline).  The GNU readline library provides elaborate line editing
 | |
| and history.  The Python debugger ("pdb") is the first beneficiary of
 | |
| this change.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Two new built-in functions, "globals()" and "locals()", provide access
 | |
| to dictionaries containming current global and local variables,
 | |
| respectively.  (These augment rather than replace "vars()", which
 | |
| returns the current local variables when called without an argument,
 | |
| and a module's global variables when called with an argument of type
 | |
| module.)
 | |
| 
 | |
| The built-in function "compile()" now takes a third possible value for
 | |
| the kind of code to be compiled: specifying "'single'" generates code
 | |
| for a single interactive statement, which prints the output of
 | |
| expression statements that evaluate to something else than "None".
 | |
| 
 | |
| Library Changes
 | |
| ===============
 | |
| 
 | |
| There are new module "ni" and "ihooks" that support importing modules
 | |
| with hierarchical names such as "A.B.C".  This is enabled by writing
 | |
| "import ni; ni.ni()" at the very top of the main program.  These
 | |
| modules are amply documented in the Python source.
 | |
| 
 | |
| The module "rexec" has been rewritten (incompatibly) to define a class
 | |
| and to use "ihooks".
 | |
| 
 | |
| The "string.split()" and "string.splitfields()" functions are now the
 | |
| same function (the presence or absence of the second argument
 | |
| determines which operation is invoked); similar for "string.join()"
 | |
| and "string.joinfields()".
 | |
| 
 | |
| The "Tkinter" module and its helper "Dialog" have been revamped to use
 | |
| keyword arguments.  Tk 4.0 is now the standard.  A new module
 | |
| "FileDialog" has been added which implements standard file selection
 | |
| dialogs.
 | |
| 
 | |
| The optional built-in modules "dbm" and "gdbm" are more coordinated
 | |
| --- their "open()" functions now take the same values for their "flag"
 | |
| argument, and the "flag" and "mode" argument have default values (to
 | |
| open the database for reading only, and to create the database with
 | |
| mode "0666" minuse the umask, respectively).  The memory leaks have
 | |
| finally been fixed.
 | |
| 
 | |
| A new dbm-like module, "bsddb", has been added, which uses the BSD DB
 | |
| package's hash method.
 | |
| 
 | |
| A portable (though slow) dbm-clone, implemented in Python, has been
 | |
| added for systems where none of the above is provided.  It is aptly
 | |
| dubbed "dumbdbm".
 | |
| 
 | |
| The module "anydbm" provides a unified interface to "bsddb", "gdbm",
 | |
| "dbm", and "dumbdbm", choosing the first one available.
 | |
| 
 | |
| A new extension module, "binascii", provides a variety of operations
 | |
| for conversion of text-encoded binary data.
 | |
| 
 | |
| There are three new or rewritten companion modules implemented in
 | |
| Python that can encode and decode the most common such formats: "uu"
 | |
| (uuencode), "base64" and "binhex".
 | |
| 
 | |
| A module to handle the MIME encoding quoted-printable has also been
 | |
| added: "quopri".
 | |
| 
 | |
| The parser module (which provides an interface to the Python parser's
 | |
| abstract syntax trees) has been rewritten (incompatibly) by Fred
 | |
| Drake.  It now lets you change the parse tree and compile the result!
 | |
| 
 | |
| The \code{syslog} module has been upgraded and documented.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Other Changes
 | |
| =============
 | |
| 
 | |
| The dynamic module loader recognizes the fact that different filenames
 | |
| point to the same shared library and loads the library only once, so
 | |
| you can have a single shared library that defines multiple modules.
 | |
| (SunOS / SVR4 style shared libraries only.)
 | |
| 
 | |
| Jim Fulton's ``abstract object interface'' has been incorporated into
 | |
| the run-time API.  For more detailes, read the files
 | |
| "Include/abstract.h" and "Objects/abstract.c".
 | |
| 
 | |
| The Macintosh version is much more robust now.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Numerous things I have forgotten or that are so obscure no-one will
 | |
| notice them anyway :-)
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| ===================================
 | |
| ==> Release 1.2 (13 April 1995) <==
 | |
| ===================================
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Changes to Misc/python-mode.el:
 | |
|   - Wrapping and indentation within triple quote strings should work
 | |
|     properly now.
 | |
|   - `Standard' bug reporting mechanism (use C-c C-b)
 | |
|   - py-mark-block was moved to C-c C-m
 | |
|   - C-c C-v shows you the python-mode version
 | |
|   - a basic python-font-lock-keywords has been added for Emacs 19
 | |
|     font-lock colorizations.
 | |
|   - proper interaction with pending-del and del-sel modes.
 | |
|   - New py-electric-colon (:) command for improved outdenting.  Also
 | |
|     py-indent-line (TAB) should handle outdented lines better.
 | |
|   - New commands py-outdent-left (C-c C-l) and py-indent-right (C-c C-r)
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The Library Reference has been restructured, and many new and
 | |
| existing modules are now documented, in particular the debugger and
 | |
| the profiler, as well as the persistency and the WWW/Internet support
 | |
| modules.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - All known bugs have been fixed.  For example the pow(2,2,3L) bug on
 | |
| Linux has been fixed.  Also the re-entrancy problems with __del__ have
 | |
| been fixed.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - All known memory leaks have been fixed.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Phase 2 of the Great Renaming has been executed.  The header files
 | |
| now use the new names (PyObject instead of object, etc.).  The linker
 | |
| also sees the new names.  Most source files still use the old names,
 | |
| by virtue of the rename2.h header file.  If you include Python.h, you
 | |
| only see the new names.  Dynamically linked modules have to be
 | |
| recompiled.  (Phase 3, fixing the rest of the sources, will be
 | |
| executed gradually with the release later versions.)
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The hooks for implementing "safe-python" (better called "restricted
 | |
| execution") are in place.  Specifically, the import statement is
 | |
| implemented by calling the built-in function __import__, and the
 | |
| built-in names used in a particular scope are taken from the
 | |
| dictionary __builtins__ in that scope's global dictionary.  See also
 | |
| the new (unsupported, undocumented) module rexec.py.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The import statement now supports the syntax "import a.b.c" and
 | |
| "from a.b.c import name".  No officially supported implementation
 | |
| exists, but one can be prototyped by replacing the built-in __import__
 | |
| function.  A proposal by Ken Manheimer is provided as newimp.py.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - All machinery used by the import statement (or the built-in
 | |
| __import__ function) is now exposed through the new built-in module
 | |
| "imp" (see the library reference manual).  All dynamic loading
 | |
| machinery is moved to the new file importdl.c.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Persistent storage is supported through the use of the modules
 | |
| "pickle" and "shelve" (implemented in Python).  There's also a "copy"
 | |
| module implementing deepcopy and normal (shallow) copy operations.
 | |
| See the library reference manual.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Documentation strings for many objects types are accessible through
 | |
| the __doc__ attribute.  Modules, classes and functions support special
 | |
| syntax to initialize the __doc__ attribute: if the first statement
 | |
| consists of just a string literal, that string literal becomes the
 | |
| value of the __doc__ attribute.  The default __doc__ attribute is
 | |
| None.  Documentation strings are also supported for built-in
 | |
| functions, types and modules; however this feature hasn't been widely
 | |
| used yet.  See the 'new' module for an example.  (Basically, the type
 | |
| object's tp_doc field contains the doc string for the type, and the
 | |
| 4th member of the methodlist structure contains the doc string for the
 | |
| method.)
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The __coerce__ and __cmp__ methods for user-defined classes once
 | |
| again work as expected.  As an example, there's a new standard class
 | |
| Complex in the library.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The functions posix.popen() and posix.fdopen() now have an optional
 | |
| third argument to specify the buffer size, and default their second
 | |
| (mode) argument to 'r' -- in analogy to the built-in open() function.
 | |
| The same applies to posixfile.open() and the socket method makefile().
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The thread.exit_thread() function now raises SystemExit so that
 | |
| 'finally' clauses are honored and a memory leak is plugged.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Improved X11 and Motif support, by Sjoerd Mullender.  This extension
 | |
| is being maintained and distributed separately.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Improved support for the Apple Macintosh, in part by Jack Jansen,
 | |
| e.g. interfaces to (a few) resource mananger functions, get/set file
 | |
| type and creator, gestalt, sound manager, speech manager, MacTCP, comm
 | |
| toolbox, and the think C console library.  This is being maintained
 | |
| and distributed separately.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Improved version for Windows NT, by Mark Hammond.  This is being
 | |
| maintained and distributed separately.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Used autoconf 2.0 to generate the configure script.  Adapted
 | |
| configure.in to use the new features in autoconf 2.0.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - It now builds on the NeXT without intervention, even on the 3.3
 | |
| Sparc pre-release.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Characters passed to isspace() and friends are masked to nonnegative
 | |
| values.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Correctly compute pow(-3.0, 3).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Fix portability problems with getopt (configure now checks for a
 | |
| non-GNU getopt).
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Don't add frozenmain.o to libPython.a.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Exceptions can now be classes.  ALl built-in exceptions are still
 | |
| string objects, but this will change in the future.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The socket module exports a long list of socket related symbols.
 | |
| (More built-in modules will export their symbolic constants instead of
 | |
| relying on a separately generated Python module.)
 | |
| 
 | |
| - When a module object is deleted, it clears out its own dictionary.
 | |
| This fixes a circularity in the references between functions and
 | |
| their global dictionary.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Changed the error handling by [new]getargs() e.g. for "O&".
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Dynamic loading of modules using shared libraries is supported for
 | |
| several new platforms.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Support "O&", "[...]" and "{...}" in mkvalue().
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Extension to findmethod(): findmethodinchain() (where a chain is a
 | |
| linked list of methodlist arrays).  The calling interface for
 | |
| findmethod() has changed: it now gets a pointer to the (static!)
 | |
| methodlist structure rather than just to the function name -- this
 | |
| saves copying flags etc. into the (short-lived) method object.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - The callable() function is now public.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Object types can define a few new operations by setting function
 | |
| pointers in the type object structure: tp_call defines how an object
 | |
| is called, and tp_str defines how an object's str() is computed.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| ===================================
 | |
| ==> Release 1.1.1 (10 Nov 1994) <==
 | |
| ===================================
 | |
| 
 | |
| This is a pure bugfix release again.  See the ChangeLog file for details.
 | |
| 
 | |
| One exception: a few new features were added to tkinter.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| =================================
 | |
| ==> Release 1.1 (11 Oct 1994) <==
 | |
| =================================
 | |
| 
 | |
| This release adds several new features, improved configuration and
 | |
| portability, and fixes more bugs than I can list here (including some
 | |
| memory leaks).
 | |
| 
 | |
| The source compiles and runs out of the box on more platforms than
 | |
| ever -- including Windows NT.  Makefiles or projects for a variety of
 | |
| non-UNIX platforms are provided.
 | |
| 
 | |
| APOLOGY: some new features are badly documented or not at all.  I had
 | |
| the choice -- postpone the new release indefinitely, or release it
 | |
| now, with working code but some undocumented areas.  The problem with
 | |
| postponing the release is that people continue to suffer from existing
 | |
| bugs, and send me patches based on the previous release -- which I
 | |
| can't apply directly because my own source has changed.  Also, some
 | |
| new modules (like signal) have been ready for release for quite some
 | |
| time, and people are anxiously waiting for them.  In the case of
 | |
| signal, the interface is simple enough to figure out without
 | |
| documentation (if you're anxious enough :-).  In this case it was not
 | |
| simple to release the module on its own, since it relies on many small
 | |
| patches elsewhere in the source.
 | |
| 
 | |
| For most new Python modules, the source code contains comments that
 | |
| explain how to use them.  Documentation for the Tk interface, written
 | |
| by Matt Conway, is available as tkinter-doc.tar.gz from the Python
 | |
| home and mirror ftp sites (see Misc/FAQ for ftp addresses).  For the
 | |
| new operator overloading facilities, have a look at Demo/classes:
 | |
| Complex.py and Rat.py show how to implement a numeric type without and
 | |
| with __coerce__ method.  Also have a look at the end of the Tutorial
 | |
| document (Doc/tut.tex).  If you're still confused: use the newsgroup
 | |
| or mailing list.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| New language features:
 | |
| 
 | |
|     - More flexible operator overloading for user-defined classes
 | |
|     (INCOMPATIBLE WITH PREVIOUS VERSIONS!)  See end of tutorial.
 | |
| 
 | |
|     - Classes can define methods named __getattr__, __setattr__ and
 | |
|     __delattr__ to trap attribute accesses.  See end of tutorial.
 | |
| 
 | |
|     - Classes can define method __call__ so instances can be called
 | |
|     directly.  See end of tutorial.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| New support facilities:
 | |
| 
 | |
|     - The Makefiles (for the base interpreter as well as for extensions)
 | |
|     now support creating dynamically loadable modules if the platform
 | |
|     supports shared libraries.
 | |
| 
 | |
|     - Passing the interpreter a .pyc file as script argument will execute
 | |
|     the code in that file.  (On the Mac such files can be double-clicked!)
 | |
| 
 | |
|     - New Freeze script, to create independently distributable "binaries"
 | |
|     of Python programs -- look in Demo/freeze
 | |
| 
 | |
|     - Improved h2py script (in Demo/scripts) follows #includes and
 | |
|     supports macros with one argument
 | |
| 
 | |
|     - New module compileall generates .pyc files for all modules in a
 | |
|     directory (tree) without also executing them
 | |
| 
 | |
|     - Threads should work on more platforms
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| New built-in modules:
 | |
| 
 | |
|     - tkinter (support for Tcl's Tk widget set) is now part of the base
 | |
|     distribution
 | |
| 
 | |
|     - signal allows catching or ignoring UNIX signals (unfortunately still
 | |
|     undocumented -- any taker?)
 | |
| 
 | |
|     - termios provides portable access to POSIX tty settings
 | |
| 
 | |
|     - curses provides an interface to the System V curses library
 | |
| 
 | |
|     - syslog provides an interface to the (BSD?) syslog daemon
 | |
| 
 | |
|     - 'new' provides interfaces to create new built-in object types
 | |
|     (e.g. modules and functions)
 | |
| 
 | |
|     - sybase provides an interface to SYBASE database
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| New/obsolete built-in methods:
 | |
| 
 | |
|     - callable(x) tests whether x can be called
 | |
| 
 | |
|     - sockets now have a setblocking() method
 | |
| 
 | |
|     - sockets no longer have an allowbroadcast() method
 | |
| 
 | |
|     - socket methods send() and sendto() return byte count
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| New standard library modules:
 | |
| 
 | |
|     - types.py defines standard names for built-in types, e.g. StringType
 | |
| 
 | |
|     - urlparse.py parses URLs according to the latest Internet draft
 | |
| 
 | |
|     - uu.py does uuencode/uudecode (not the fastest in the world, but
 | |
|     quicker than installing uuencode on a non-UNIX machine :-)
 | |
| 
 | |
|     - New, faster and more powerful profile module.py
 | |
| 
 | |
|     - mhlib.py provides interface to MH folders and messages
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| New facilities for extension writers (unfortunately still
 | |
| undocumented):
 | |
| 
 | |
|     - newgetargs() supports optional arguments and improved error messages
 | |
| 
 | |
|     - O!, O& O? formats for getargs allow more versatile type checking of
 | |
|     non-standard types
 | |
| 
 | |
|     - can register pending asynchronous callback, to be called the next
 | |
|     time the Python VM begins a new instruction (Py_AddPendingCall)
 | |
| 
 | |
|     - can register cleanup routines to be called when Python exits
 | |
|     (Py_AtExit)
 | |
| 
 | |
|     - makesetup script understands C++ files in Setup file (use file.C
 | |
|     or file.cc)
 | |
| 
 | |
|     - Make variable OPT is passed on to sub-Makefiles
 | |
| 
 | |
|     - An init<module>() routine may signal an error by not entering
 | |
|     the module in the module table and raising an exception instead
 | |
| 
 | |
|     - For long module names, instead of foobarbletchmodule.c you can
 | |
|     use foobarbletch.c
 | |
| 
 | |
|     - getintvalue() and getfloatvalue() try to convert any object
 | |
|     instead of requiring an "intobject" or "floatobject"
 | |
| 
 | |
|     - All the [new]getargs() formats that retrieve an integer value
 | |
|     will now also work if a float is passed
 | |
| 
 | |
|     - C function listtuple() converts list to tuple, fast
 | |
| 
 | |
|     - You should now call sigcheck() instead of intrcheck();
 | |
|     sigcheck() also sets an exception when it returns nonzero
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| ====================================
 | |
| ==> Release 1.0.3 (14 July 1994) <==
 | |
| ====================================
 | |
| 
 | |
| This release consists entirely of bug fixes to the C sources; see the
 | |
| head of ../ChangeLog for a complete list.  Most important bugs fixed:
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Sometimes the format operator (string%expr) would drop the last
 | |
| character of the format string
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Tokenizer looped when last line did not end in \n
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Bug when triple-quoted string ended in quote plus newline
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Typo in socketmodule (listen) (== instead of =)
 | |
| 
 | |
| - typing vars() at the >>> prompt would cause recursive output
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| ==================================
 | |
| ==> Release 1.0.2 (4 May 1994) <==
 | |
| ==================================
 | |
| 
 | |
| Overview of the most visible changes.  Bug fixes are not listed.  See
 | |
| also ChangeLog.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Tokens
 | |
| ------
 | |
| 
 | |
| * String literals follow Standard C rules: they may be continued on
 | |
| the next line using a backslash; adjacent literals are concatenated
 | |
| at compile time.
 | |
| 
 | |
| * A new kind of string literals, surrounded by triple quotes (""" or
 | |
| '''), can be continued on the next line without a backslash.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Syntax
 | |
| ------
 | |
| 
 | |
| * Function arguments may have a default value, e.g. def f(a, b=1);
 | |
| defaults are evaluated at function definition time.  This also applies
 | |
| to lambda.
 | |
| 
 | |
| * The try-except statement has an optional else clause, which is
 | |
| executed when no exception occurs in the try clause.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Interpreter
 | |
| -----------
 | |
| 
 | |
| * The result of a statement-level expression is no longer printed,
 | |
| except_ for expressions entered interactively.  Consequently, the -k
 | |
| command line option is gone.
 | |
| 
 | |
| * The result of the last printed interactive expression is assigned to
 | |
| the variable '_'.
 | |
| 
 | |
| * Access to implicit global variables has been speeded up by removing
 | |
| an always-failing dictionary lookup in the dictionary of local
 | |
| variables (mod suggested by Steve Makewski and Tim Peters).
 | |
| 
 | |
| * There is a new command line option, -u, to force stdout and stderr
 | |
| to be unbuffered.
 | |
| 
 | |
| * Incorporated Steve Majewski's mods to import.c for dynamic loading
 | |
| under AIX.
 | |
| 
 | |
| * Fewer chances of dumping core when trying to reload or re-import
 | |
| static built-in, dynamically loaded built-in, or frozen modules.
 | |
| 
 | |
| * Loops over sequences now don't ask for the sequence's length when
 | |
| they start, but try to access items 0, 1, 2, and so on until they hit
 | |
| an IndexError.  This makes it possible to create classes that generate
 | |
| infinite or indefinite sequences a la Steve Majewski.  This affects
 | |
| for loops, the (not) in operator, and the built-in functions filter(),
 | |
| map(), max(), min(), reduce().
 | |
| 
 | |
| Changed Built-in operations
 | |
| ---------------------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| * The '%' operator on strings (printf-style formatting) supports a new
 | |
| feature (adapted from a patch by Donald Beaudry) to allow
 | |
| '%(<key>)<format>' % {...} to take values from a dictionary by name
 | |
| instead of from a tuple by position (see also the new function
 | |
| vars()).
 | |
| 
 | |
| * The '%s' formatting operator is changed to accept any type and
 | |
| convert it to a string using str().
 | |
| 
 | |
| * Dictionaries with more than 20,000 entries can now be created
 | |
| (thanks to Steve Kirsch).
 | |
| 
 | |
| New Built-in Functions
 | |
| ----------------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| * vars() returns a dictionary containing the local variables; vars(m)
 | |
| returns a dictionary containing the variables of module m.  Note:
 | |
| dir(x) is now equivalent to vars(x).keys().
 | |
| 
 | |
| Changed Built-in Functions
 | |
| --------------------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| * open() has an optional third argument to specify the buffer size: 0
 | |
| for unbuffered, 1 for line buffered, >1 for explicit buffer size, <0
 | |
| for default.
 | |
| 
 | |
| * open()'s second argument is now optional; it defaults to "r".
 | |
| 
 | |
| * apply() now checks that its second argument is indeed a tuple.
 | |
| 
 | |
| New Built-in Modules
 | |
| --------------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| Changed Built-in Modules
 | |
| ------------------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| The thread module no longer supports exit_prog().
 | |
| 
 | |
| New Python Modules
 | |
| ------------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| * Module addpack contains a standard interface to modify sys.path to
 | |
| find optional packages (groups of related modules).
 | |
| 
 | |
| * Module urllib contains a number of functions to access
 | |
| World-Wide-Web files specified by their URL.
 | |
| 
 | |
| * Module httplib implements the client side of the HTTP protocol used
 | |
| by World-Wide-Web servers.
 | |
| 
 | |
| * Module gopherlib implements the client side of the Gopher protocol.
 | |
| 
 | |
| * Module mailbox (by Jack Jansen) contains a parser for UNIX and MMDF
 | |
| style mailbox files.
 | |
| 
 | |
| * Module random contains various random distributions, e.g. gauss().
 | |
| 
 | |
| * Module lockfile locks and unlocks open files using fcntl (inspired
 | |
| by a similar module by Andy Bensky).
 | |
| 
 | |
| * Module ntpath (by Jaap Vermeulen) implements path operations for
 | |
| Windows/NT.
 | |
| 
 | |
| * Module test_thread (in Lib/test) contains a small test set for the
 | |
| thread module.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Changed Python Modules
 | |
| ----------------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| * The string module's expandvars() function is now documented and is
 | |
| implemented in Python (using regular expressions) instead of forking
 | |
| off a shell process.
 | |
| 
 | |
| * Module rfc822 now supports accessing the header fields using the
 | |
| mapping/dictionary interface, e.g. h['subject'].
 | |
| 
 | |
| * Module pdb now makes it possible to set a break on a function
 | |
| (syntax: break <expression>, where <expression> yields a function
 | |
| object).
 | |
| 
 | |
| Changed Demos
 | |
| -------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| * The Demo/scripts/freeze.py script is working again (thanks to Jaap
 | |
| Vermeulen).
 | |
| 
 | |
| New Demos
 | |
| ---------
 | |
| 
 | |
| * Demo/threads/Generator.py is a proposed interface for restartable
 | |
| functions a la Tim Peters.
 | |
| 
 | |
| * Demo/scripts/newslist.py, by Quentin Stafford-Fraser, generates a
 | |
| directory full of HTML pages which between them contain links to all
 | |
| the newsgroups available on your server.
 | |
| 
 | |
| * Demo/dns contains a DNS (Domain Name Server) client.
 | |
| 
 | |
| * Demo/lutz contains miscellaneous demos by Mark Lutz (e.g. psh.py, a
 | |
| nice enhanced Python shell!!!).
 | |
| 
 | |
| * Demo/turing contains a Turing machine by Amrit Prem.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Documentation
 | |
| -------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| * Documented new language features mentioned above (but not all new
 | |
| modules).
 | |
| 
 | |
| * Added a chapter to the Tutorial describing recent additions to
 | |
| Python.
 | |
| 
 | |
| * Clarified some sentences in the reference manual,
 | |
| e.g. break/continue, local/global scope, slice assignment.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Source Structure
 | |
| ----------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| * Moved Include/tokenizer.h to Parser/tokenizer.h.
 | |
| 
 | |
| * Added Python/getopt.c for systems that don't have it.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Emacs mode
 | |
| ----------
 | |
| 
 | |
| * Indentation of continuated lines is done more intelligently;
 | |
| consequently the variable py-continuation-offset is gone.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| ========================================
 | |
| ==> Release 1.0.1 (15 February 1994) <==
 | |
| ========================================
 | |
| 
 | |
| * Many portability fixes should make it painless to build Python on
 | |
| several new platforms, e.g. NeXT, SEQUENT, WATCOM, DOS, and Windows.
 | |
| 
 | |
| * Fixed test for <stdarg.h> -- this broke on some platforms.
 | |
| 
 | |
| * Fixed test for shared library dynalic loading -- this broke on SunOS
 | |
| 4.x using the GNU loader.
 | |
| 
 | |
| * Changed order and number of SVR4 networking libraries (it is now
 | |
| -lsocket -linet -lnsl, if these libraries exist).
 | |
| 
 | |
| * Installing the build intermediate stages with "make libainstall" now
 | |
| also installs config.c.in, Setup and makesetup, which are used by the
 | |
| new Extensions mechanism.
 | |
| 
 | |
| * Improved README file contains more hints and new troubleshooting
 | |
| section.
 | |
| 
 | |
| * The built-in module strop now defines fast versions of three more
 | |
| functions of the standard string module: atoi(), atol() and atof().
 | |
| The strop versions of atoi() and atol() support an optional second
 | |
| argument to specify the base (default 10).  NOTE: you don't have to
 | |
| explicitly import strop to use the faster versions -- the string
 | |
| module contains code to let versions from stop override the default
 | |
| versions.
 | |
| 
 | |
| * There is now a working Lib/dospath.py for those who use Python under
 | |
| DOS (or Windows).  Thanks, Jaap!
 | |
| 
 | |
| * There is now a working Modules/dosmodule.c for DOS (or Windows)
 | |
| system calls.
 | |
| 
 | |
| * Lib.os.py has been reorganized (making it ready for more operating
 | |
| systems).
 | |
| 
 | |
| * Lib/ospath.py is now obsolete (use os.path instead).
 | |
| 
 | |
| * Many fixes to the tutorial to make it match Python 1.0.  Thanks,
 | |
| Tim!
 | |
| 
 | |
| * Fixed Doc/Makefile, Doc/README and various scripts there.
 | |
| 
 | |
| * Added missing description of fdopen to Doc/libposix.tex.
 | |
| 
 | |
| * Made cleanup() global, for the benefit of embedded applications.
 | |
| 
 | |
| * Added parsing of addresses and dates to Lib/rfc822.py.
 | |
| 
 | |
| * Small fixes to Lib/aifc.py, Lib/sunau.py, Lib/tzparse.py to make
 | |
| them usable at all.
 | |
| 
 | |
| * New module Lib/wave.py reads RIFF (*.wav) audio files.
 | |
| 
 | |
| * Module Lib/filewin.py moved to Lib/stdwin/filewin.py where it
 | |
| belongs.
 | |
| 
 | |
| * New options and comments for Modules/makesetup (used by new
 | |
| Extension mechanism).
 | |
| 
 | |
| * Misc/HYPE contains text of announcement of 1.0.0 in comp.lang.misc
 | |
| and elsewhere.
 | |
| 
 | |
| * Fixed coredump in filter(None, 'abcdefg').
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| =======================================
 | |
| ==> Release 1.0.0 (26 January 1994) <==
 | |
| =======================================
 | |
| 
 | |
| As is traditional, so many things have changed that I can't pretend to
 | |
| be complete in these release notes, but I'll try anyway :-)
 | |
| 
 | |
| Note that the very last section is labeled "remaining bugs".
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| Source organization and build process
 | |
| -------------------------------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| * The sources have finally been split: instead of a single src
 | |
| subdirectory there are now separate directories Include, Parser,
 | |
| Grammar, Objects, Python and Modules.  Other directories also start
 | |
| with a capital letter: Misc, Doc, Lib, Demo.
 | |
| 
 | |
| * A few extensions (notably Amoeba and X support) have been moved to a
 | |
| separate subtree Extensions, which is no longer in the core
 | |
| distribution, but separately ftp'able as extensions.tar.Z.  (The
 | |
| distribution contains a placeholder Ext-dummy with a description of
 | |
| the Extensions subtree as well as the most recent versions of the
 | |
| scripts used there.)
 | |
| 
 | |
| * A few large specialized demos (SGI video and www) have been
 | |
| moved to a separate subdirectory Demo2, which is no longer in the core
 | |
| distribution, but separately ftp'able as demo2.tar.Z.
 | |
| 
 | |
| * Parts of the standard library have been moved to subdirectories:
 | |
| there are now standard subdirectories stdwin, test, sgi and sun4.
 | |
| 
 | |
| * The configuration process has radically changed: I now use GNU
 | |
| autoconf.  This makes it much easier to build on new Unix flavors, as
 | |
| well as fully supporting VPATH (if your Make has it).  The scripts
 | |
| Configure.py and Addmodule.sh are no longer needed.  Many source files
 | |
| have been adapted in order to work with the symbols that the configure
 | |
| script generated by autoconf defines (or not); the resulting source is
 | |
| much more portable to different C compilers and operating systems,
 | |
| even non Unix systems (a Mac port was done in an afternoon).  See the
 | |
| toplevel README file for a description of the new build process.
 | |
| 
 | |
| * GNU readline (a slightly newer version) is now a subdirectory of the
 | |
| Python toplevel.  It is still not automatically configured (being
 | |
| totally autoconf-unaware :-).  One problem has been solved: typing
 | |
| Control-C to a readline prompt will now work.  The distribution no
 | |
| longer contains a "super-level" directory (above the python toplevel
 | |
| directory), and dl, dl-dld and GNU dld are no longer part of the
 | |
| Python distribution (you can still ftp them from
 | |
| ftp.cwi.nl:/pub/dynload).
 | |
| 
 | |
| * The DOS functions have been taken out of posixmodule.c and moved
 | |
| into a separate file dosmodule.c.
 | |
| 
 | |
| * There's now a separate file version.c which contains nothing but
 | |
| the version number.
 | |
| 
 | |
| * The actual main program is now contained in config.c (unless NO_MAIN
 | |
| is defined); pythonmain.c now contains a function realmain() which is
 | |
| called from config.c's main().
 | |
| 
 | |
| * All files needed to use the built-in module md5 are now contained in
 | |
| the distribution.  The module has been cleaned up considerably.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| Documentation
 | |
| -------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| * The library manual has been split into many more small latex files,
 | |
| so it is easier to edit Doc/lib.tex file to create a custom library
 | |
| manual, describing only those modules supported on your system.  (This
 | |
| is not automated though.)
 | |
| 
 | |
| * A fourth manual has been added, titled "Extending and Embedding the
 | |
| Python Interpreter" (Doc/ext.tex), which collects information about
 | |
| the interpreter which was previously spread over several files in the
 | |
| misc subdirectory.
 | |
| 
 | |
| * The entire documentation is now also available on-line for those who
 | |
| have a WWW browser (e.g. NCSA Mosaic).  Point your browser to the URL
 | |
| "http://www.cwi.nl/~guido/Python.html".
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| Syntax
 | |
| ------
 | |
| 
 | |
| * Strings may now be enclosed in double quotes as well as in single
 | |
| quotes.  There is no difference in interpretation.  The repr() of
 | |
| string objects will use double quotes if the string contains a single
 | |
| quote and no double quotes.  Thanks to Amrit Prem for these changes!
 | |
| 
 | |
| * There is a new keyword 'exec'.  This replaces the exec() built-in
 | |
| function.  If a function contains an exec statement, local variable
 | |
| optimization is not performed for that particular function, thus
 | |
| making assignment to local variables in exec statements less
 | |
| confusing.  (As a consequence, os.exec and python.exec have been
 | |
| renamed to execv.)
 | |
| 
 | |
| * There is a new keyword 'lambda'.  An expression of the form
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	lambda <parameters> : <expression>
 | |
| 
 | |
| yields an anonymous function.  This is really only syntactic sugar;
 | |
| you can just as well define a local function using
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	def some_temporary_name(<parameters>): return <expression>
 | |
| 
 | |
| Lambda expressions are particularly useful in combination with map(),
 | |
| filter() and reduce(), described below.  Thanks to Amrit Prem for
 | |
| submitting this code (as well as map(), filter(), reduce() and
 | |
| xrange())!
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| Built-in functions
 | |
| ------------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| * The built-in module containing the built-in functions is called
 | |
| __builtin__ instead of builtin.
 | |
| 
 | |
| * New built-in functions map(), filter() and reduce() perform standard
 | |
| functional programming operations (though not lazily):
 | |
| 
 | |
| - map(f, seq) returns a new sequence whose items are the items from
 | |
| seq with f() applied to them.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - filter(f, seq) returns a subsequence of seq consisting of those
 | |
| items for which f() is true.
 | |
| 
 | |
| - reduce(f, seq, initial) returns a value computed as follows:
 | |
| 	acc = initial
 | |
| 	for item in seq: acc = f(acc, item)
 | |
| 	return acc
 | |
| 
 | |
| * New function xrange() creates a "range object".  Its arguments are
 | |
| the same as those of range(), and when used in a for loop a range
 | |
| objects also behaves identical.  The advantage of xrange() over
 | |
| range() is that its representation (if the range contains many
 | |
| elements) is much more compact than that of range().  The disadvantage
 | |
| is that the result cannot be used to initialize a list object or for
 | |
| the "Python idiom" [RED, GREEN, BLUE] = range(3).  On some modern
 | |
| architectures, benchmarks have shown that "for i in range(...): ..."
 | |
| actually executes *faster* than "for i in xrange(...): ...", but on
 | |
| memory starved machines like PCs running DOS range(100000) may be just
 | |
| too big to be represented at all...
 | |
| 
 | |
| * Built-in function exec() has been replaced by the exec statement --
 | |
| see above.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| The interpreter
 | |
| ---------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| * Syntax errors are now not printed to stderr by the parser, but
 | |
| rather the offending line and other relevant information are packed up
 | |
| in the SyntaxError exception argument.  When the main loop catches a
 | |
| SyntaxError exception it will print the error in the same format as
 | |
| previously, but at the proper position in the stack traceback.
 | |
| 
 | |
| * You can now set a maximum to the number of traceback entries
 | |
| printed by assigning to sys.tracebacklimit.  The default is 1000.
 | |
| 
 | |
| * The version number in .pyc files has changed yet again.
 | |
| 
 | |
| * It is now possible to have a .pyc file without a corresponding .py
 | |
| file.  (Warning: this may break existing installations if you have an
 | |
| old .pyc file lingering around somewhere on your module search path
 | |
| without a corresponding .py file, when there is a .py file for a
 | |
| module of the same name further down the path -- the new interpreter
 | |
| will find the first .pyc file and complain about it, while the old
 | |
| interpreter would ignore it and use the .py file further down.)
 | |
| 
 | |
| * The list sys.builtin_module_names is now sorted and also contains
 | |
| the names of a few hardwired built-in modules (sys, __main__ and
 | |
| __builtin__).
 | |
| 
 | |
| * A module can now find its own name by accessing the global variable
 | |
| __name__.  Assigning to this variable essentially renames the module
 | |
| (it should also be stored under a different key in sys.modules).
 | |
| A neat hack follows from this: a module that wants to execute a main
 | |
| program when called as a script no longer needs to compare
 | |
| sys.argv[0]; it can simply do "if __name__ == '__main__': main()".
 | |
| 
 | |
| * When an object is printed by the print statement, its implementation
 | |
| of str() is used.  This means that classes can define __str__(self) to
 | |
| direct how their instances are printed.  This is different from
 | |
| __repr__(self), which should define an unambigous string
 | |
| representation of the instance.  (If __str__() is not defined, it
 | |
| defaults to __repr__().)
 | |
| 
 | |
| * Functions and code objects can now be compared meaningfully.
 | |
| 
 | |
| * On systems supporting SunOS or SVR4 style shared libraries, dynamic
 | |
| loading of modules using shared libraries is automatically configured.
 | |
| Thanks to Bill Jansen and Denis Severson for contributing this change!
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| Built-in objects
 | |
| ----------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| * File objects have acquired a new method writelines() which is the
 | |
| reverse of readlines().  (It does not actually write lines, just a
 | |
| list of strings, but the symmetry makes the choice of name OK.)
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| Built-in modules
 | |
| ----------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| * Socket objects no longer support the avail() method.  Use the select
 | |
| module instead, or use this function to replace it:
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	def avail(f):
 | |
| 		import select
 | |
| 		return f in select.select([f], [], [], 0)[0]
 | |
| 
 | |
| * Initialization of stdwin is done differently.  It actually modifies
 | |
| sys.argv (taking out the options the X version of stdwin recognizes)
 | |
| the first time it is imported.
 | |
| 
 | |
| * A new built-in module parser provides a rudimentary interface to the
 | |
| python parser.  Corresponding standard library modules token and symbol
 | |
| defines the numeric values of tokens and non-terminal symbols.
 | |
| 
 | |
| * The posix module has aquired new functions setuid(), setgid(),
 | |
| execve(), and exec() has been renamed to execv().
 | |
| 
 | |
| * The array module is extended with 8-byte object swaps, the 'i'
 | |
| format character, and a reverse() method.  The read() and write()
 | |
| methods are renamed to fromfile() and tofile().
 | |
| 
 | |
| * The rotor module has freed of portability bugs.  This introduces a
 | |
| backward compatibility problem: strings encoded with the old rotor
 | |
| module can't be decoded by the new version.
 | |
| 
 | |
| * For select.select(), a timeout (4th) argument of None means the same
 | |
| as leaving the timeout argument out.
 | |
| 
 | |
| * Module strop (and hence standard library module string) has aquired
 | |
| a new function: rindex().  Thanks to Amrit Prem!
 | |
| 
 | |
| * Module regex defines a new function symcomp() which uses an extended
 | |
| regular expression syntax: parenthesized subexpressions may be labeled
 | |
| using the form "\(<labelname>...\)", and the group() method can return
 | |
| sub-expressions by name.  Thanks to Tracy Tims for these changes!
 | |
| 
 | |
| * Multiple threads are now supported on Solaris 2.  Thanks to Sjoerd
 | |
| Mullender!
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| Standard library modules
 | |
| ------------------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| * The library is now split in several subdirectories: all stuff using
 | |
| stdwin is in Lib/stdwin, all SGI specific (or SGI Indigo or GL) stuff
 | |
| is in Lib/sgi, all Sun Sparc specific stuff is in Lib/sun4, and all
 | |
| test modules are in Lib/test.  The default module search path will
 | |
| include all relevant subdirectories by default.
 | |
| 
 | |
| * Module os now knows about trying to import dos.  It defines
 | |
| functions execl(), execle(), execlp() and execvp().
 | |
| 
 | |
| * New module dospath (should be attacked by a DOS hacker though).
 | |
| 
 | |
| * All modules defining classes now define __init__() constructors
 | |
| instead of init() methods.  THIS IS AN INCOMPATIBLE CHANGE!
 | |
| 
 | |
| * Some minor changes and bugfixes module ftplib (mostly Steve
 | |
| Majewski's suggestions); the debug() method is renamed to
 | |
| set_debuglevel().
 | |
| 
 | |
| * Some new test modules (not run automatically by testall though):
 | |
| test_audioop, test_md5, test_rgbimg, test_select.
 | |
| 
 | |
| * Module string now defines rindex() and rfind() in analogy of index()
 | |
| and find().  It also defines atof() and atol() (and corresponding
 | |
| exceptions) in analogy to atoi().
 | |
| 
 | |
| * Added help() functions to modules profile and pdb.
 | |
| 
 | |
| * The wdb debugger (now in Lib/stdwin) now shows class or instance
 | |
| variables on a double click.  Thanks to Sjoerd Mullender!
 | |
| 
 | |
| * The (undocumented) module lambda has gone -- you couldn't import it
 | |
| any more, and it was basically more a demo than a library module...
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| Multimedia extensions
 | |
| ---------------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| * The optional built-in modules audioop and imageop are now standard
 | |
| parts of the interpreter.  Thanks to Sjoerd Mullender and Jack Jansen
 | |
| for contributing this code!
 | |
| 
 | |
| * There's a new operation in audioop: minmax().
 | |
| 
 | |
| * There's a new built-in module called rgbimg which supports portable
 | |
| efficient reading of SGI RCG image files.  Thanks also to Paul
 | |
| Haeberli for the original code!  (Who will contribute a GIF reader?)
 | |
| 
 | |
| * The module aifc is gone -- you should now always use aifc, which has
 | |
| received a facelift.
 | |
| 
 | |
| * There's a new module sunau., for reading Sun (and NeXT) audio files.
 | |
| 
 | |
| * There's a new module audiodev which provides a uniform interface to
 | |
| (SGI Indigo and Sun Sparc) audio hardware.
 | |
| 
 | |
| * There's a new module sndhdr which recognizes various sound files by
 | |
| looking in their header and checking for various magic words.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| Optimizations
 | |
| -------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| * Most optimizations below can be configured by compile-time flags.
 | |
| Thanks to Sjoerd Mullender for submitting these optimizations!
 | |
| 
 | |
| * Small integers (default -1..99) are shared -- i.e. if two different
 | |
| functions compute the same value it is possible (but not
 | |
| guaranteed!!!) that they return the same *object*.  Python programs
 | |
| can detect this but should *never* rely on it.
 | |
| 
 | |
| * Empty tuples (which all compare equal) are shared in the same
 | |
| manner.
 | |
| 
 | |
| * Tuples of size up to 20 (default) are put in separate free lists
 | |
| when deallocated.
 | |
| 
 | |
| * There is a compile-time option to cache a string's hash function,
 | |
| but this appeared to have a negligeable effect, and as it costs 4
 | |
| bytes per string it is disabled by default.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| Embedding Python
 | |
| ----------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| * The initialization interface has been simplified somewhat.  You now
 | |
| only call "initall()" to initialize the interpreter.
 | |
| 
 | |
| * The previously announced renaming of externally visible identifiers
 | |
| has not been carried out.  It will happen in a later release.  Sorry.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| Miscellaneous bugs that have been fixed
 | |
| ---------------------------------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| * All known portability bugs.
 | |
| 
 | |
| * Version 0.9.9 dumped core in <listobject>.sort() which has been
 | |
| fixed.  Thanks to Jaap Vermeulen for fixing this and posting the fix
 | |
| on the mailing list while I was away!
 | |
| 
 | |
| * Core dump on a format string ending in '%', e.g. in the expression
 | |
| '%' % None.
 | |
| 
 | |
| * The array module yielded a bogus result for concatenation (a+b would
 | |
| yield a+a).
 | |
| 
 | |
| * Some serious memory leaks in strop.split() and strop.splitfields().
 | |
| 
 | |
| * Several problems with the nis module.
 | |
| 
 | |
| * Subtle problem when copying a class method from another class
 | |
| through assignment (the method could not be called).
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| Remaining bugs
 | |
| --------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| * One problem with 64-bit machines remains -- since .pyc files are
 | |
| portable and use only 4 bytes to represent an integer object, 64-bit
 | |
| integer literals are silently truncated when written into a .pyc file.
 | |
| Work-around: use eval('123456789101112').
 | |
| 
 | |
| * The freeze script doesn't work any more.  A new and more portable
 | |
| one can probably be cooked up using tricks from Extensions/mkext.py.
 | |
| 
 | |
| * The dos support hasn't been tested yet.  (Really Soon Now we should
 | |
| have a PC with a working C compiler!)
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| ===================================
 | |
| ==> Release 0.9.9 (29 Jul 1993) <==
 | |
| ===================================
 | |
| 
 | |
| I *believe* these are the main user-visible changes in this release,
 | |
| but there may be others.  SGI users may scan the {src,lib}/ChangeLog
 | |
| files for improvements of some SGI specific modules, e.g. aifc and
 | |
| cl.  Developers of extension modules should also read src/ChangeLog.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| Naming of C symbols used by the Python interpreter
 | |
| --------------------------------------------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| * This is the last release using the current naming conventions.  New
 | |
| naming conventions are explained in the file misc/NAMING.
 | |
| Summarizing, all externally visible symbols get (at least) a "Py"
 | |
| prefix, and most functions are renamed to the standard form
 | |
| PyModule_FunctionName.
 | |
| 
 | |
| * Writers of extensions are urged to start using the new naming
 | |
| conventions.  The next release will use the new naming conventions
 | |
| throughout (it will also have a different source directory
 | |
| structure).
 | |
| 
 | |
| * As a result of the preliminary work for the great renaming, many
 | |
| functions that were accidentally global have been made static.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| BETA X11 support
 | |
| ----------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| * There are now modules interfacing to the X11 Toolkit Intrinsics, the
 | |
| Athena widgets, and the Motif 1.1 widget set.  These are not yet
 | |
| documented except through the examples and README file in the demo/x11
 | |
| directory.  It is expected that this interface will be replaced by a
 | |
| more powerful and correct one in the future, which may or may not be
 | |
| backward compatible.  In other words, this part of the code is at most
 | |
| BETA level software!  (Note: the rest of Python is rock solid as ever!)
 | |
| 
 | |
| * I understand that the above may be a bit of a disappointment,
 | |
| however my current schedule does not allow me to change this situation
 | |
| before putting the release out of the door.  By releasing it
 | |
| undocumented and buggy, at least some of the (working!) demo programs,
 | |
| like itr (my Internet Talk Radio browser) become available to a larger
 | |
| audience.
 | |
| 
 | |
| * There are also modules interfacing to SGI's "Glx" widget (a GL
 | |
| window wrapped in a widget) and to NCSA's "HTML" widget (which can
 | |
| format HyperText Markup Language, the document format used by the
 | |
| World Wide Web).
 | |
| 
 | |
| * I've experienced some problems when building the X11 support.  In
 | |
| particular, the Xm and Xaw widget sets don't go together, and it
 | |
| appears that using X11R5 is better than using X11R4.  Also the threads
 | |
| module and its link time options may spoil things.  My own strategy is
 | |
| to build two Python binaries: one for use with X11 and one without
 | |
| it, which can contain a richer set of built-in modules.  Don't even
 | |
| *think* of loading the X11 modules dynamically...
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| Environmental changes
 | |
| ---------------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| * Compiled files (*.pyc files) created by this Python version are
 | |
| incompatible with those created by the previous version.  Both
 | |
| versions detect this and silently create a correct version, but it
 | |
| means that it is not a good idea to use the same library directory for
 | |
| an old and a new interpreter, since they will start to "fight" over
 | |
| the *.pyc files...
 | |
| 
 | |
| * When a stack trace is printed, the exception is printed last instead
 | |
| of first.  This means that if the beginning of the stack trace
 | |
| scrolled out of your window you can still see what exception caused
 | |
| it.
 | |
| 
 | |
| * Sometimes interrupting a Python operation does not work because it
 | |
| hangs in a blocking system call.  You can now kill the interpreter by
 | |
| interrupting it three times.  The second time you interrupt it, a
 | |
| message will be printed telling you that the third interrupt will kill
 | |
| the interpreter.  The "sys.exitfunc" feature still makes limited
 | |
| clean-up possible in this case.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| Changes to the command line interface
 | |
| -------------------------------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| * The python usage message is now much more informative.
 | |
| 
 | |
| * New option -i enters interactive mode after executing a script --
 | |
| useful for debugging.
 | |
| 
 | |
| * New option -k raises an exception when an expression statement
 | |
| yields a value other than None.
 | |
| 
 | |
| * For each option there is now also a corresponding environment
 | |
| variable.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| Using Python as an embedded language
 | |
| ------------------------------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| * The distribution now contains (some) documentation on the use of
 | |
| Python as an "embedded language" in other applications, as well as a
 | |
| simple example.  See the file misc/EMBEDDING and the directory embed/.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| Speed improvements
 | |
| ------------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| * Function local variables are now generally stored in an array and
 | |
| accessed using an integer indexing operation, instead of through a
 | |
| dictionary lookup.  (This compensates the somewhat slower dictionary
 | |
| lookup caused by the generalization of the dictionary module.)
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| Changes to the syntax
 | |
| ---------------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| * Continuation lines can now *sometimes* be written without a
 | |
| backslash: if the continuation is contained within nesting (), [] or
 | |
| {} brackets the \ may be omitted.  There's a much improved
 | |
| python-mode.el in the misc directory which knows about this as well.
 | |
| 
 | |
| * You can no longer use an empty set of parentheses to define a class
 | |
| without base classes.  That is, you no longer write this:
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	class Foo(): # syntax error
 | |
| 		...
 | |
| 
 | |
| You must write this instead:
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	class Foo:
 | |
| 		...
 | |
| 
 | |
| This was already the preferred syntax in release 0.9.8 but many
 | |
| people seemed not to have picked it up.  There's a Python script that
 | |
| fixes old code: demo/scripts/classfix.py.
 | |
| 
 | |
| * There's a new reserved word: "access".  The syntax and semantics are
 | |
| still subject of research and debate (as well as undocumented), but
 | |
| the parser knows about the keyword so you must not use it as a
 | |
| variable, function, or attribute name.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| Changes to the semantics of the language proper
 | |
| -----------------------------------------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| * The following compatibility hack is removed: if a function was
 | |
| defined with two or more arguments, and called with a single argument
 | |
| that was a tuple with just as many arguments, the items of this tuple
 | |
| would be used as the arguments.  This is no longer supported.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| Changes to the semantics of classes and instances
 | |
| -------------------------------------------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| * Class variables are now also accessible as instance variables for
 | |
| reading (assignment creates an instance variable which overrides the
 | |
| class variable of the same name though).
 | |
| 
 | |
| * If a class attribute is a user-defined function, a new kind of
 | |
| object is returned: an "unbound method".  This contains a pointer to
 | |
| the class and can only be called with a first argument which is a
 | |
| member of that class (or a derived class).
 | |
| 
 | |
| * If a class defines a method __init__(self, arg1, ...) then this
 | |
| method is called when a class instance is created by the classname()
 | |
| construct.  Arguments passed to classname() are passed to the
 | |
| __init__() method.  The __init__() methods of base classes are not
 | |
| automatically called; the derived __init__() method must call these if
 | |
| necessary (this was done so the derived __init__() method can choose
 | |
| the call order and arguments for the base __init__() methods).
 | |
| 
 | |
| * If a class defines a method __del__(self) then this method is called
 | |
| when an instance of the class is about to be destroyed.  This makes it
 | |
| possible to implement clean-up of external resources attached to the
 | |
| instance.  As with __init__(), the __del__() methods of base classes
 | |
| are not automatically called.  If __del__ manages to store a reference
 | |
| to the object somewhere, its destruction is postponed; when the object
 | |
| is again about to be destroyed its __del__() method will be called
 | |
| again.
 | |
| 
 | |
| * Classes may define a method __hash__(self) to allow their instances
 | |
| to be used as dictionary keys.  This must return a 32-bit integer.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| Minor improvements
 | |
| ------------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| * Function and class objects now know their name (the name given in
 | |
| the 'def' or 'class' statement that created them).
 | |
| 
 | |
| * Class instances now know their class name.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| Additions to built-in operations
 | |
| --------------------------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| * The % operator with a string left argument implements formatting
 | |
| similar to sprintf() in C.  The right argument is either a single
 | |
| value or a tuple of values.  All features of Standard C sprintf() are
 | |
| supported except %p.
 | |
| 
 | |
| * Dictionaries now support almost any key type, instead of just
 | |
| strings.  (The key type must be an immutable type or must be a class
 | |
| instance where the class defines a method __hash__(), in order to
 | |
| avoid losing track of keys whose value may change.)
 | |
| 
 | |
| * Built-in methods are now compared properly: when comparing x.meth1
 | |
| and y.meth2, if x is equal to y and the methods are defined by the
 | |
| same function, x.meth1 compares equal to y.meth2.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| Additions to built-in functions
 | |
| -------------------------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| * str(x) returns a string version of its argument.  If the argument is
 | |
| a string it is returned unchanged, otherwise it returns `x`.
 | |
| 
 | |
| * repr(x) returns the same as `x`.  (Some users found it easier to
 | |
| have this as a function.)
 | |
| 
 | |
| * round(x) returns the floating point number x rounded to an whole
 | |
| number, represented as a floating point number.  round(x, n) returns x
 | |
| rounded to n digits.
 | |
| 
 | |
| * hasattr(x, name) returns true when x has an attribute with the given
 | |
| name.
 | |
| 
 | |
| * hash(x) returns a hash code (32-bit integer) of an arbitrary
 | |
| immutable object's value.
 | |
| 
 | |
| * id(x) returns a unique identifier (32-bit integer) of an arbitrary
 | |
| object.
 | |
| 
 | |
| * compile() compiles a string to a Python code object.
 | |
| 
 | |
| * exec() and eval() now support execution of code objects.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| Changes to the documented part of the library (standard modules)
 | |
| ----------------------------------------------------------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| * os.path.normpath() (a.k.a. posixpath.normpath()) has been fixed so
 | |
| the border case '/foo/..' returns '/' instead of ''.
 | |
| 
 | |
| * A new function string.find() is added with similar semantics to
 | |
| string.index(); however when it does not find the given substring it
 | |
| returns -1 instead of raising string.index_error.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| Changes to built-in modules
 | |
| ---------------------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| * New optional module 'array' implements operations on sequences of
 | |
| integers or floating point numbers of a particular size.  This is
 | |
| useful to manipulate large numerical arrays or to read and write
 | |
| binary files consisting of numerical data.
 | |
| 
 | |
| * Regular expression objects created by module regex now support a new
 | |
| method named group(), which returns one or more \(...\) groups by number.
 | |
| The number of groups is increased from 10 to 100.
 | |
| 
 | |
| * Function compile() in module regex now supports an optional mapping
 | |
| argument; a variable casefold is added to the module which can be used
 | |
| as a standard uppercase to lowercase mapping.
 | |
| 
 | |
| * Module time now supports many routines that are defined in the
 | |
| Standard C time interface (<time.h>): gmtime(), localtime(),
 | |
| asctime(), ctime(), mktime(), as well as these variables (taken from
 | |
| System V): timezone, altzone, daylight and tzname.  (The corresponding
 | |
| functions in the undocumented module calendar have been removed; the
 | |
| undocumented and unfinished module tzparse is now obsolete and will
 | |
| disappear in a future release.)
 | |
| 
 | |
| * Module strop (the fast built-in version of standard module string)
 | |
| now uses C's definition of whitespace instead of fixing it to space,
 | |
| tab and newline; in practice this usually means that vertical tab,
 | |
| form feed and return are now also considered whitespace.  It exports
 | |
| the string of characters that are considered whitespace as well as the
 | |
| characters that are considered lowercase or uppercase.
 | |
| 
 | |
| * Module sys now defines the variable builtin_module_names, a list of
 | |
| names of modules built into the current interpreter (including not
 | |
| yet imported, but excluding two special modules that always have to be
 | |
| defined -- sys and builtin).
 | |
| 
 | |
| * Objects created by module sunaudiodev now also support flush() and
 | |
| close() methods.
 | |
| 
 | |
| * Socket objects created by module socket now support an optional
 | |
| flags argument for their methods sendto() and recvfrom().
 | |
| 
 | |
| * Module marshal now supports dumping to and loading from strings,
 | |
| through the functions dumps() and loads().
 | |
| 
 | |
| * Module stdwin now supports some new functionality.  You may have to
 | |
| ftp the latest version: ftp.cwi.nl:/pub/stdwin/stdwinforviews.tar.Z.)
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| Bugs fixed
 | |
| ----------
 | |
| 
 | |
| * Fixed comparison of negative long integers.
 | |
| 
 | |
| * The tokenizer no longer botches input lines longer than BUFSIZ.
 | |
| 
 | |
| * Fixed several severe memory leaks in module select.
 | |
| 
 | |
| * Fixed memory leaks in modules socket and sv.
 | |
| 
 | |
| * Fixed memory leak in divmod() for long integers.
 | |
| 
 | |
| * Problems with definition of floatsleep() on Suns fixed.
 | |
| 
 | |
| * Many portability bugs fixed (and undoubtedly new ones added :-).
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| Changes to the build procedure
 | |
| ------------------------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| * The Makefile supports some new targets: "make default" and "make
 | |
| all".  Both are by normally equivalent to "make python".
 | |
| 
 | |
| * The Makefile no longer uses $> since it's not supported by all
 | |
| versions of Make.
 | |
| 
 | |
| * The header files now all contain #ifdef constructs designed to make
 | |
| it safe to include the same header file twice, as well as support for
 | |
| inclusion from C++ programs (automatic extern "C" { ... } added).
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| Freezing Python scripts
 | |
| -----------------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| * There is now some support for "freezing" a Python script as a
 | |
| stand-alone executable binary file.  See the script
 | |
| demo/scripts/freeze.py.  It will require some site-specific tailoring
 | |
| of the script to get this working, but is quite worthwhile if you write
 | |
| Python code for other who may not have built and installed Python.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| MS-DOS
 | |
| ------
 | |
| 
 | |
| * A new MS-DOS port has been done, using MSC 6.0 (I believe).  Thanks,
 | |
| Marcel van der Peijl!  This requires fewer compatibility hacks in
 | |
| posixmodule.c.  The executable is not yet available but will be soon
 | |
| (check the mailing list).
 | |
| 
 | |
| * The default PYTHONPATH has changed.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| Changes for developers of extension modules
 | |
| -------------------------------------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| * Read src/ChangeLog for full details.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| SGI specific changes
 | |
| --------------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| * Read src/ChangeLog for full details.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| ==================================
 | |
| ==> Release 0.9.8 (9 Jan 1993) <==
 | |
| ==================================
 | |
| 
 | |
| I claim no completeness here, but I've tried my best to scan the log
 | |
| files throughout my source tree for interesting bits of news.  A more
 | |
| complete account of the changes is to be found in the various
 | |
| ChangeLog files. See also "News for release 0.9.7beta" below if you're
 | |
| still using release 0.9.6, and the file HISTORY if you have an even
 | |
| older release.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	--Guido
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| Changes to the language proper
 | |
| ------------------------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| There's only one big change: the conformance checking for function
 | |
| argument lists (of user-defined functions only) is stricter.  Earlier,
 | |
| you could get away with the following:
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	(a) define a function of one argument and call it with any
 | |
| 	    number of arguments; if the actual argument count wasn't
 | |
| 	    one, the function would receive a tuple containing the
 | |
| 	    arguments (an empty tuple if there were none).
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	(b) define a function of two arguments, and call it with more
 | |
| 	    than two arguments; if there were more than two arguments,
 | |
| 	    the second argument would be passed as a tuple containing
 | |
| 	    the second and further actual arguments.
 | |
| 
 | |
| (Note that an argument (formal or actual) that is a tuple is counted as
 | |
| one; these rules don't apply inside such tuples, only at the top level
 | |
| of the argument list.)
 | |
| 
 | |
| Case (a) was needed to accommodate variable-length argument lists;
 | |
| there is now an explicit "varargs" feature (precede the last argument
 | |
| with a '*').  Case (b) was needed for compatibility with old class
 | |
| definitions: up to release 0.9.4 a method with more than one argument
 | |
| had to be declared as "def meth(self, (arg1, arg2, ...)): ...".
 | |
| Version 0.9.6 provide better ways to handle both casees, bot provided
 | |
| backward compatibility; version 0.9.8 retracts the compatibility hacks
 | |
| since they also cause confusing behavior if a function is called with
 | |
| the wrong number of arguments.
 | |
| 
 | |
| There's a script that helps converting classes that still rely on (b),
 | |
| provided their methods' first argument is called "self":
 | |
| demo/scripts/methfix.py.
 | |
| 
 | |
| If this change breaks lots of code you have developed locally, try
 | |
| #defining COMPAT_HACKS in ceval.c.
 | |
| 
 | |
| (There's a third compatibility hack, which is the reverse of (a): if a
 | |
| function is defined with two or more arguments, and called with a
 | |
| single argument that is a tuple with just as many arguments, the items
 | |
| of this tuple will be used as the arguments.  Although this can (and
 | |
| should!) be done using the built-in function apply() instead, it isn't
 | |
| withdrawn yet.)
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| One minor change: comparing instance methods works like expected, so
 | |
| that if x is an instance of a user-defined class and has a method m,
 | |
| then (x.m==x.m) yields 1.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| The following was already present in 0.9.7beta, but not explicitly
 | |
| mentioned in the NEWS file: user-defined classes can now define types
 | |
| that behave in almost allrespects like numbers.  See
 | |
| demo/classes/Rat.py for a simple example.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| Changes to the build process
 | |
| ----------------------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| The Configure.py script and the Makefile has been made somewhat more
 | |
| bullet-proof, after reports of (minor) trouble on certain platforms.
 | |
| 
 | |
| There is now a script to patch Makefile and config.c to add a new
 | |
| optional built-in module: Addmodule.sh.  Read the script before using!
 | |
| 
 | |
| Useing Addmodule.sh, all optional modules can now be configured at
 | |
| compile time using Configure.py, so there are no modules left that
 | |
| require dynamic loading.
 | |
| 
 | |
| The Makefile has been fixed to make it easier to use with the VPATH
 | |
| feature of some Make versions (e.g. SunOS).
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| Changes affecting portability
 | |
| -----------------------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| Several minor portability problems have been solved, e.g. "malloc.h"
 | |
| has been renamed to "mymalloc.h", "strdup.c" is no longer used, and
 | |
| the system now tolerates malloc(0) returning 0.
 | |
| 
 | |
| For dynamic loading on the SGI, Jack Jansen's dl 1.6 is now
 | |
| distributed with Python.  This solves several minor problems, in
 | |
| particular scripts invoked using #! can now use dynamic loading.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| Changes to the interpreter interface
 | |
| ------------------------------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| On popular demand, there's finally a "profile" feature for interactive
 | |
| use of the interpreter.  If the environment variable $PYTHONSTARTUP is
 | |
| set to the name of an existing file, Python statements in this file
 | |
| are executed when the interpreter is started in interactive mode.
 | |
| 
 | |
| There is a new clean-up mechanism, complementing try...finally: if you
 | |
| assign a function object to sys.exitfunc, it will be called when
 | |
| Python exits or receives a SIGTERM or SIGHUP signal.
 | |
| 
 | |
| The interpreter is now generally assumed to live in
 | |
| /usr/local/bin/python (as opposed to /usr/local/python).  The script
 | |
| demo/scripts/fixps.py will update old scripts in place (you can easily
 | |
| modify it to do other similar changes).
 | |
| 
 | |
| Most I/O that uses sys.stdin/stdout/stderr will now use any object
 | |
| assigned to those names as long as the object supports readline() or
 | |
| write() methods.
 | |
| 
 | |
| The parser stack has been increased to 500 to accommodate more
 | |
| complicated expressions (7 levels used to be the practical maximum,
 | |
| it's now about 38).
 | |
| 
 | |
| The limit on the size of the *run-time* stack has completely been
 | |
| removed -- this means that tuple or list displays can contain any
 | |
| number of elements (formerly more than 50 would crash the
 | |
| interpreter). 
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| Changes to existing built-in functions and methods
 | |
| --------------------------------------------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| The built-in functions int(), long(), float(), oct() and hex() now
 | |
| also apply to class instalces that define corresponding methods
 | |
| (__int__ etc.).
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| New built-in functions
 | |
| ----------------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| The new functions str() and repr() convert any object to a string.
 | |
| The function repr(x) is in all respects equivalent to `x` -- some
 | |
| people prefer a function for this.  The function str(x) does the same
 | |
| except if x is already a string -- then it returns x unchanged
 | |
| (repr(x) adds quotes and escapes "funny" characters as octal escapes).
 | |
| 
 | |
| The new function cmp(x, y) returns -1 if x<y, 0 if x==y, 1 if x>y.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| Changes to general built-in modules
 | |
| -----------------------------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| The time module's functions are more general: time() returns a
 | |
| floating point number and sleep() accepts one.  Their accuracies
 | |
| depends on the precision of the system clock.  Millisleep is no longer
 | |
| needed (although it still exists for now), but millitimer is still
 | |
| needed since on some systems wall clock time is only available with
 | |
| seconds precision, while a source of more precise time exists that
 | |
| isn't synchronized with the wall clock.  (On UNIX systems that support
 | |
| the BSD gettimeofday() function, time.time() is as time.millitimer().)
 | |
| 
 | |
| The string representation of a file object now includes an address:
 | |
| '<file 'filename', mode 'r' at #######>' where ###### is a hex number
 | |
| (the object's address) to make it unique.
 | |
| 
 | |
| New functions added to posix: nice(), setpgrp(), and if your system
 | |
| supports them: setsid(), setpgid(), tcgetpgrp(), tcsetpgrp().
 | |
| 
 | |
| Improvements to the socket module: socket objects have new methods
 | |
| getpeername() and getsockname(), and the {get,set}sockopt methods can
 | |
| now get/set any kind of option using strings built with the new struct
 | |
| module.  And there's a new function fromfd() which creates a socket
 | |
| object given a file descriptor (useful for servers started by inetd,
 | |
| which have a socket connected to stdin and stdout).
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| Changes to SGI-specific built-in modules
 | |
| ----------------------------------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| The FORMS library interface (fl) now requires FORMS 2.1a.  Some new
 | |
| functions have been added and some bugs have been fixed.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Additions to al (audio library interface): added getname(),
 | |
| getdefault() and getminmax().
 | |
| 
 | |
| The gl modules doesn't call "foreground()" when initialized (this
 | |
| caused some problems) like it dit in 0.9.7beta (but not before).
 | |
| There's a new gl function 'gversion() which returns a version string.
 | |
| 
 | |
| The interface to sv (Indigo video interface) has totally changed.
 | |
| (Sorry, still no documentation, but see the examples in
 | |
| demo/sgi/{sv,video}.)
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| Changes to standard library modules
 | |
| -----------------------------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| Most functions in module string are now much faster: they're actually
 | |
| implemented in C.  The module containing the C versions is called
 | |
| "strop" but you should still import "string" since strop doesn't
 | |
| provide all the interfaces defined in string (and strop may be renamed
 | |
| to string when it is complete in a future release).
 | |
| 
 | |
| string.index() now accepts an optional third argument giving an index
 | |
| where to start searching in the first argument, so you can find second
 | |
| and further occurrences (this is similar to the regular expression
 | |
| functions in regex).
 | |
| 
 | |
| The definition of what string.splitfields(anything, '') should return
 | |
| is changed for the last time: it returns a singleton list containing
 | |
| its whole first argument unchanged.  This is compatible with
 | |
| regsub.split() which also ignores empty delimiter matches.
 | |
| 
 | |
| posixpath, macpath: added dirname() and normpath() (and basename() to
 | |
| macpath).
 | |
| 
 | |
| The mainloop module (for use with stdwin) can now demultiplex input
 | |
| from other sources, as long as they can be polled with select().
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| New built-in modules
 | |
| --------------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| Module struct defines functions to pack/unpack values to/from strings
 | |
| representing binary values in native byte order.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Module strop implements C versions of many functions from string (see
 | |
| above).
 | |
| 
 | |
| Optional module fcntl defines interfaces to fcntl() and ioctl() --
 | |
| UNIX only.  (Not yet properly documented -- see however src/fcntl.doc.)
 | |
| 
 | |
| Optional module mpz defines an interface to an altaernative long
 | |
| integer implementation, the GNU MPZ library.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Optional module md5 uses the GNU MPZ library to calculate MD5
 | |
| signatures of strings.
 | |
| 
 | |
| There are also optional new modules specific to SGI machines: imageop
 | |
| defines some simple operations to images represented as strings; sv
 | |
| interfaces to the Indigo video board; cl interfaces to the (yet
 | |
| unreleased) compression library.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| New standard library modules
 | |
| ----------------------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| (Unfortunately the following modules are not all documented; read the
 | |
| sources to find out more about them!)
 | |
| 
 | |
| autotest: run testall without showing any output unless it differs
 | |
| from the expected output
 | |
| 
 | |
| bisect: use bisection to insert or find an item in a sorted list
 | |
| 
 | |
| colorsys: defines conversions between various color systems (e.g. RGB
 | |
| <-> YUV)
 | |
| 
 | |
| nntplib: a client interface to NNTP servers
 | |
| 
 | |
| pipes: utility to construct pipeline from templates, e.g. for
 | |
| conversion from one file format to another using several utilities.
 | |
| 
 | |
| regsub: contains three functions that are more or less compatible with
 | |
| awk functions of the same name: sub() and gsub() do string
 | |
| substitution, split() splits a string using a regular expression to
 | |
| define how separators are define.
 | |
| 
 | |
| test_types: test operations on the built-in types of Python
 | |
| 
 | |
| toaiff: convert various audio file formats to AIFF format
 | |
| 
 | |
| tzparse: parse the TZ environment parameter (this may be less general
 | |
| than it could be, let me know if you fix it).
 | |
| 
 | |
| (Note that the obsolete module "path" no longer exists.)
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| New SGI-specific library modules
 | |
| --------------------------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| CL: constants for use with the built-in compression library interface (cl)
 | |
| 
 | |
| Queue: a multi-producer, multi-consumer queue class implemented for
 | |
| use with the built-in thread module
 | |
| 
 | |
| SOCKET: constants for use with built-in module socket, e.g. to set/get
 | |
| socket options.  This is SGI-specific because the constants to be
 | |
| passed are system-dependent.  You can generate a version for your own
 | |
| system by running the script demo/scripts/h2py.py with
 | |
| /usr/include/sys/socket.h as input.
 | |
| 
 | |
| cddb: interface to the database used by the CD player
 | |
| 
 | |
| torgb: convert various image file types to rgb format (requires pbmplus)
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| New demos
 | |
| ---------
 | |
| 
 | |
| There's an experimental interface to define Sun RPC clients and
 | |
| servers in demo/rpc.
 | |
| 
 | |
| There's a collection of interfaces to WWW, WAIS and Gopher (both
 | |
| Python classes and program providing a user interface) in demo/www.
 | |
| This includes a program texi2html.py which converts texinfo files to
 | |
| HTML files (the format used hy WWW).
 | |
| 
 | |
| The ibrowse demo has moved from demo/stdwin/ibrowse to demo/ibrowse.
 | |
| 
 | |
| For SGI systems, there's a whole collection of programs and classes
 | |
| that make use of the Indigo video board in demo/sgi/{sv,video}.  This
 | |
| represents a significant amount of work that we're giving away!
 | |
| 
 | |
| There are demos "rsa" and "md5test" that exercise the mpz and md5
 | |
| modules, respectively.  The rsa demo is a complete implementation of
 | |
| the RSA public-key cryptosystem!
 | |
| 
 | |
| A bunch of games and examples submitted by Stoffel Erasmus have been
 | |
| included in demo/stoffel.
 | |
| 
 | |
| There are miscellaneous new files in some existing demo
 | |
| subdirectories: classes/bitvec.py, scripts/{fixps,methfix}.py,
 | |
| sgi/al/cmpaf.py, sockets/{mcast,gopher}.py.
 | |
| 
 | |
| There are also many minor changes to existing files, but I'm too lazy
 | |
| to run a diff and note the differences -- you can do this yourself if
 | |
| you save the old distribution's demos.  One highlight: the
 | |
| stdwin/python.py demo is much improved!
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| Changes to the documentation
 | |
| ----------------------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| The LaTeX source for the library uses different macros to enable it to
 | |
| be converted to texinfo, and from there to INFO or HTML format so it
 | |
| can be browsed as a hypertext.  The net result is that you can now
 | |
| read the Python library documentation in Emacs info mode!
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| Changes to the source code that affect C extension writers
 | |
| ----------------------------------------------------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| The function strdup() no longer exists (it was used only in one places
 | |
| and is somewhat of a portability problem since some systems have the
 | |
| same function in their C library.
 | |
| 
 | |
| The functions NEW() and RENEW() allocate one spare byte to guard
 | |
| against a NULL return from malloc(0) being taken for an error, but
 | |
| this should not be relied upon.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| =========================
 | |
| ==> Release 0.9.7beta <==
 | |
| =========================
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| Changes to the language proper
 | |
| ------------------------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| User-defined classes can now implement operations invoked through
 | |
| special syntax, such as x[i] or `x` by defining methods named
 | |
| __getitem__(self, i) or __repr__(self), etc.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| Changes to the build process
 | |
| ----------------------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| Instead of extensive manual editing of the Makefile to select
 | |
| compile-time options, you can now run a Configure.py script.
 | |
| The Makefile as distributed builds a minimal interpreter sufficient to
 | |
| run Configure.py.  See also misc/BUILD
 | |
| 
 | |
| The Makefile now includes more "utility" targets, e.g. install and
 | |
| tags/TAGS
 | |
| 
 | |
| Using the provided strtod.c and strtol.c are now separate options, as
 | |
| on the Sun the provided strtod.c dumps core :-(
 | |
| 
 | |
| The regex module is now an option chosen by the Makefile, since some
 | |
| (old) C compilers choke on regexpr.c
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| Changes affecting portability
 | |
| -----------------------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| You need STDWIN version 0.9.7 (released 30 June 1992) for the stdwin
 | |
| interface
 | |
| 
 | |
| Dynamic loading is now supported for Sun (and other non-COFF systems)
 | |
| throug dld-3.2.3, as well as for SGI (a new version of Jack Jansen's
 | |
| DL is out, 1.4)
 | |
| 
 | |
| The system-dependent code for the use of the select() system call is
 | |
| moved to one file: myselect.h
 | |
| 
 | |
| Thanks to Jaap Vermeulen, the code should now port cleanly to the
 | |
| SEQUENT
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| Changes to the interpreter interface
 | |
| ------------------------------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| The interpretation of $PYTHONPATH in the environment is different: it
 | |
| is inserted in front of the default path instead of overriding it
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| Changes to existing built-in functions and methods
 | |
| --------------------------------------------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| List objects now support an optional argument to their sort() method,
 | |
| which is a comparison function similar to qsort(3) in C
 | |
| 
 | |
| File objects now have a method fileno(), used by the new select module
 | |
| (see below)
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| New built-in function
 | |
| ---------------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| coerce(x, y): take two numbers and return a tuple containing them
 | |
| both converted to a common type
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| Changes to built-in modules
 | |
| ---------------------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| sys: fixed core dumps in settrace() and setprofile()
 | |
| 
 | |
| socket: added socket methods setsockopt() and getsockopt(); and
 | |
| fileno(), used by the new select module (see below)
 | |
| 
 | |
| stdwin: added fileno() == connectionnumber(), in support of new module
 | |
| select (see below)
 | |
| 
 | |
| posix: added get{eg,eu,g,u}id(); waitpid() is now a separate function.
 | |
| 
 | |
| gl: added qgetfd()
 | |
| 
 | |
| fl: added several new functions, fixed several obscure bugs, adapted
 | |
| to FORMS 2.1
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| Changes to standard modules
 | |
| ---------------------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| posixpath: changed implementation of ismount()
 | |
| 
 | |
| string: atoi() no longer mistakes leading zero for octal number
 | |
| 
 | |
| ...
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| New built-in modules
 | |
| --------------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| Modules marked "dynamic only" are not configured at compile time but
 | |
| can be loaded dynamically.  You need to turn on the DL or DLD option in
 | |
| the Makefile for support dynamic loading of modules (this requires
 | |
| external code).
 | |
| 
 | |
| select: interfaces to the BSD select() system call
 | |
| 
 | |
| dbm: interfaces to the (new) dbm library (dynamic only)
 | |
| 
 | |
| nis: interfaces to some NIS functions (aka yellow pages)
 | |
| 
 | |
| thread: limited form of multiple threads (sgi only)
 | |
| 
 | |
| audioop: operations useful for audio programs, e.g. u-LAW and ADPCM
 | |
| coding (dynamic only)
 | |
| 
 | |
| cd: interface to Indigo SCSI CDROM player audio library (sgi only)
 | |
| 
 | |
| jpeg: read files in JPEG format (dynamic only, sgi only; needs
 | |
| external code)
 | |
| 
 | |
| imgfile: read SGI image files (dynamic only, sgi only)
 | |
| 
 | |
| sunaudiodev: interface to sun's /dev/audio (dynamic only, sun only)
 | |
| 
 | |
| sv: interface to Indigo video library (sgi only)
 | |
| 
 | |
| pc: a minimal set of MS-DOS interfaces (MS-DOS only)
 | |
| 
 | |
| rotor: encryption, by Lance Ellinghouse (dynamic only)
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| New standard modules
 | |
| --------------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| Not all these modules are documented.  Read the source:
 | |
| lib/<modulename>.py.  Sometimes a file lib/<modulename>.doc contains
 | |
| additional documentation.
 | |
| 
 | |
| imghdr: recognizes image file headers
 | |
| 
 | |
| sndhdr: recognizes sound file headers
 | |
| 
 | |
| profile: print run-time statistics of Python code
 | |
| 
 | |
| readcd, cdplayer: companion modules for built-in module cd (sgi only)
 | |
| 
 | |
| emacs: interface to Emacs using py-connect.el (see below).
 | |
| 
 | |
| SOCKET: symbolic constant definitions for socket options
 | |
| 
 | |
| SUNAUDIODEV: symbolic constant definitions for sunaudiodef (sun only)
 | |
| 
 | |
| SV: symbolic constat definitions for sv (sgi only)
 | |
| 
 | |
| CD: symbolic constat definitions for cd (sgi only)
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| New demos
 | |
| ---------
 | |
| 
 | |
| scripts/pp.py: execute Python as a filter with a Perl-like command
 | |
| line interface
 | |
| 
 | |
| classes/: examples using the new class features
 | |
| 
 | |
| threads/: examples using the new thread module
 | |
| 
 | |
| sgi/cd/: examples using the new cd module
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| Changes to the documentation
 | |
| ----------------------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| The last-minute syntax changes of release 0.9.6 are now reflected
 | |
| everywhere in the manuals
 | |
| 
 | |
| The reference manual has a new section (3.2) on implementing new kinds
 | |
| of numbers, sequences or mappings with user classes
 | |
| 
 | |
| Classes are now treated extensively in the tutorial (chapter 9)
 | |
| 
 | |
| Slightly restructured the system-dependent chapters of the library
 | |
| manual
 | |
| 
 | |
| The file misc/EXTENDING incorporates documentation for mkvalue() and
 | |
| a new section on error handling
 | |
| 
 | |
| The files misc/CLASSES and misc/ERRORS are no longer necessary
 | |
| 
 | |
| The doc/Makefile now creates PostScript files automatically
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| Miscellaneous changes
 | |
| ---------------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| Incorporated Tim Peters' changes to python-mode.el, it's now version
 | |
| 1.06
 | |
| 
 | |
| A python/Emacs bridge (provided by Terrence M. Brannon) lets a Python
 | |
| program running in an Emacs buffer execute Emacs lisp code.  The
 | |
| necessary Python code is in lib/emacs.py.  The Emacs code is
 | |
| misc/py-connect.el (it needs some external Emacs lisp code)
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| Changes to the source code that affect C extension writers
 | |
| ----------------------------------------------------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| New service function mkvalue() to construct a Python object from C
 | |
| values according to a "format" string a la getargs()
 | |
| 
 | |
| Most functions from pythonmain.c moved to new pythonrun.c which is
 | |
| in libpython.a.  This should make embedded versions of Python easier
 | |
| 
 | |
| ceval.h is split in eval.h (which needs compile.h and only declares
 | |
| eval_code) and ceval.h (which doesn't need compile.hand declares the
 | |
| rest)
 | |
| 
 | |
| ceval.h defines macros BGN_SAVE / END_SAVE for use with threads (to
 | |
| improve the parallellism of multi-threaded programs by letting other
 | |
| Python code run when a blocking system call or something similar is
 | |
| made)
 | |
| 
 | |
| In structmember.[ch], new member types BYTE, CHAR and unsigned
 | |
| variants have been added
 | |
| 
 | |
| New file xxmodule.c is a template for new extension modules.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| ==================================
 | |
| ==> Release 0.9.6 (6 Apr 1992) <==
 | |
| ==================================
 | |
| 
 | |
| Misc news in 0.9.6:
 | |
| - Restructured the misc subdirectory
 | |
| - Reference manual completed, library manual much extended (with indexes!)
 | |
| - the GNU Readline library is now distributed standard with Python
 | |
| - the script "../demo/scripts/classfix.py" fixes Python modules using old
 | |
|   class syntax
 | |
| - Emacs python-mode.el (was python.el) vastly improved (thanks, Tim!)
 | |
| - Because of the GNU copyleft business I am not using the GNU regular
 | |
|   expression implementation but a free re-implementation by Tatu Ylonen
 | |
|   that recently appeared in comp.sources.misc (Bravo, Tatu!)
 | |
| 
 | |
| New features in 0.9.6:
 | |
| - stricter try stmt syntax: cannot mix except and finally clauses on 1 try
 | |
| - New module 'os' supplants modules 'mac' and 'posix' for most cases;
 | |
|   module 'path' is replaced by 'os.path'
 | |
| - os.path.split() return value differs from that of old path.split()
 | |
| - sys.exc_type, sys.exc_value, sys.exc_traceback are set to the exception
 | |
|   currently being handled
 | |
| - sys.last_type, sys.last_value, sys.last_traceback remember last unhandled
 | |
|   exception
 | |
| - New function string.expandtabs() expands tabs in a string
 | |
| - Added times() interface to posix (user & sys time of process & children)
 | |
| - Added uname() interface to posix (returns OS type, hostname, etc.)
 | |
| - New built-in function execfile() is like exec() but from a file
 | |
| - Functions exec() and eval() are less picky about whitespace/newlines
 | |
| - New built-in functions getattr() and setattr() access arbitrary attributes
 | |
| - More generic argument handling in built-in functions (see "./EXTENDING")
 | |
| - Dynamic loading of modules written in C or C++ (see "./DYNLOAD")
 | |
| - Division and modulo for long and plain integers with negative operands
 | |
|   have changed; a/b is now floor(float(a)/float(b)) and a%b is defined
 | |
|   as a-(a/b)*b.  So now the outcome of divmod(a,b) is the same as
 | |
|   (a/b, a%b) for integers.  For floats, % is also changed, but of course
 | |
|   / is unchanged, and divmod(x,y) does not yield (x/y, x%y)...
 | |
| - A function with explicit variable-length argument list can be declared
 | |
|   like this: def f(*args): ...; or even like this: def f(a, b, *rest): ...
 | |
| - Code tracing and profiling features have been added, and two source
 | |
|   code debuggers are provided in the library (pdb.py, tty-oriented,
 | |
|   and wdb, window-oriented); you can now step through Python programs!
 | |
|   See sys.settrace() and sys.setprofile(), and "../lib/pdb.doc"
 | |
| - '==' is now the only equality operator; "../demo/scripts/eqfix.py" is
 | |
|   a script that fixes old Python modules
 | |
| - Plain integer right shift now uses sign extension
 | |
| - Long integer shift/mask operations now simulate 2's complement
 | |
|   to give more useful results for negative operands
 | |
| - Changed/added range checks for long/plain integer shifts
 | |
| - Options found after "-c command" are now passed to the command in sys.argv
 | |
|   (note subtle incompatiblity with "python -c command -- -options"!)
 | |
| - Module stdwin is better protected against touching objects after they've
 | |
|   been closed; menus can now also be closed explicitly
 | |
| - Stdwin now uses its own exception (stdwin.error)
 | |
| 
 | |
| New features in 0.9.5 (released as Macintosh application only, 2 Jan 1992):
 | |
| - dictionary objects can now be compared properly; e.g., {}=={} is true
 | |
| - new exception SystemExit causes termination if not caught;
 | |
|   it is raised by sys.exit() so that 'finally' clauses can clean up,
 | |
|   and it may even be caught.  It does work interactively!
 | |
| - new module "regex" implements GNU Emacs style regular expressions;
 | |
|   module "regexp" is rewritten in Python for backward compatibility
 | |
| - formal parameter lists may contain trailing commas
 | |
| 
 | |
| Bugs fixed in 0.9.6:
 | |
| - assigning to or deleting a list item with a negative index dumped core
 | |
| - divmod(-10L,5L) returned (-3L, 5L) instead of (-2L, 0L)
 | |
| 
 | |
| Bugs fixed in 0.9.5:
 | |
| - masking operations involving negative long integers gave wrong results
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| ===================================
 | |
| ==> Release 0.9.4 (24 Dec 1991) <==
 | |
| ===================================
 | |
| 
 | |
| - new function argument handling (see below)
 | |
| - built-in apply(func, args) means func(args[0], args[1], ...)
 | |
| - new, more refined exceptions
 | |
| - new exception string values (NameError = 'NameError' etc.)
 | |
| - better checking for math exceptions
 | |
| - for sequences (string/tuple/list), x[-i] is now equivalent to x[len(x)-i]
 | |
| - fixed list assignment bug: "a[1:1] = a" now works correctly
 | |
| - new class syntax, without extraneous parentheses
 | |
| - new 'global' statement to assign global variables from within a function
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| New class syntax
 | |
| ----------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| You can now declare a base class as follows:
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	class B:			# Was: class B():
 | |
| 		def some_method(self): ...
 | |
| 		...
 | |
| 
 | |
| and a derived class thusly:
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	class D(B):			# Was: class D() = B():
 | |
| 		def another_method(self, arg): ...
 | |
| 
 | |
| Multiple inheritance looks like this:
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	class M(B, D):			# Was: class M() = B(), D():
 | |
| 		def this_or_that_method(self, arg): ...
 | |
| 
 | |
| The old syntax is still accepted by Python 0.9.4, but will disappear
 | |
| in Python 1.0 (to be posted to comp.sources).
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| New 'global' statement
 | |
| ----------------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| Every now and then you have a global variable in a module that you
 | |
| want to change from within a function in that module -- say, a count
 | |
| of calls to a function, or an option flag, etc.  Until now this was
 | |
| not directly possible.  While several kludges are known that
 | |
| circumvent the problem, and often the need for a global variable can
 | |
| be avoided by rewriting the module as a class, this does not always
 | |
| lead to clearer code.
 | |
| 
 | |
| The 'global' statement solves this dilemma.  Its occurrence in a
 | |
| function body means that, for the duration of that function, the
 | |
| names listed there refer to global variables.  For instance:
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	total = 0.0
 | |
| 	count = 0
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	def add_to_total(amount):
 | |
| 		global total, count
 | |
| 		total = total + amount
 | |
| 		count = count + 1
 | |
| 
 | |
| 'global' must be repeated in each function where it is needed.  The
 | |
| names listed in a 'global' statement must not be used in the function
 | |
| before the statement is reached.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Remember that you don't need to use 'global' if you only want to *use*
 | |
| a global variable in a function; nor do you need ot for assignments to
 | |
| parts of global variables (e.g., list or dictionary items or
 | |
| attributes of class instances).  This has not changed; in fact
 | |
| assignment to part of a global variable was the standard workaround.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| New exceptions
 | |
| --------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| Several new exceptions have been defined, to distinguish more clearly
 | |
| between different types of errors.
 | |
| 
 | |
| name			meaning					was
 | |
| 
 | |
| AttributeError		reference to non-existing attribute	NameError
 | |
| IOError			unexpected I/O error			RuntimeError
 | |
| ImportError		import of non-existing module or name	NameError
 | |
| IndexError		invalid string, tuple or list index	RuntimeError
 | |
| KeyError		key not in dictionary			RuntimeError
 | |
| OverflowError		numeric overflow			RuntimeError
 | |
| SyntaxError		invalid syntax				RuntimeError
 | |
| ValueError		invalid argument value			RuntimeError
 | |
| ZeroDivisionError	division by zero			RuntimeError
 | |
| 
 | |
| The string value of each exception is now its name -- this makes it
 | |
| easier to experimentally find out which operations raise which
 | |
| exceptions; e.g.:
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	>>> KeyboardInterrupt
 | |
| 	'KeyboardInterrupt'
 | |
| 	>>>
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| New argument passing semantics
 | |
| ------------------------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| Off-line discussions with Steve Majewski and Daniel LaLiberte have
 | |
| convinced me that Python's parameter mechanism could be changed in a
 | |
| way that made both of them happy (I hope), kept me happy, fixed a
 | |
| number of outstanding problems, and, given some backward compatibility
 | |
| provisions, would only break a very small amount of existing code --
 | |
| probably all mine anyway.  In fact I suspect that most Python users
 | |
| will hardly notice the difference.  And yet it has cost me at least
 | |
| one sleepless night to decide to make the change...
 | |
| 
 | |
| Philosophically, the change is quite radical (to me, anyway): a
 | |
| function is no longer called with either zero or one argument, which
 | |
| is a tuple if there appear to be more arguments.  Every function now
 | |
| has an argument list containing 0, 1 or more arguments.  This list is
 | |
| always implemented as a tuple, and it is a (run-time) error if a
 | |
| function is called with a different number of arguments than expected.
 | |
| 
 | |
| What's the difference? you may ask.  The answer is, very little unless
 | |
| you want to write variadic functions -- functions that may be called
 | |
| with a variable number of arguments.  Formerly, you could write a
 | |
| function that accepted one or more arguments with little trouble, but
 | |
| writing a function that could be called with either 0 or 1 argument
 | |
| (or more) was next to impossible.  This is now a piece of cake: you
 | |
| can simply declare an argument that receives the entire argument
 | |
| tuple, and check its length -- it will be of size 0 if there are no
 | |
| arguments.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Another anomaly of the old system was the way multi-argument methods
 | |
| (in classes) had to be declared, e.g.:
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	class Point():
 | |
| 		def init(self, (x, y, color)): ...
 | |
| 		def setcolor(self, color): ...
 | |
| 		dev moveto(self, (x, y)): ...
 | |
| 		def draw(self): ...
 | |
| 
 | |
| Using the new scheme there is no need to enclose the method arguments
 | |
| in an extra set of parentheses, so the above class could become:
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	class Point:
 | |
| 		def init(self, x, y, color): ...
 | |
| 		def setcolor(self, color): ...
 | |
| 		dev moveto(self, x, y): ...
 | |
| 		def draw(self): ...
 | |
| 
 | |
| That is, the equivalence rule between methods and functions has
 | |
| changed so that now p.moveto(x,y) is equivalent to Point.moveto(p,x,y)
 | |
| while formerly it was equivalent to Point.moveto(p,(x,y)).
 | |
| 
 | |
| A special backward compatibility rule makes that the old version also
 | |
| still works: whenever a function with exactly two arguments (at the top
 | |
| level) is called with more than two arguments, the second and further
 | |
| arguments are packed into a tuple and passed as the second argument.
 | |
| This rule is invoked independently of whether the function is actually a
 | |
| method, so there is a slight chance that some erroneous calls of
 | |
| functions expecting two arguments with more than that number of
 | |
| arguments go undetected at first -- when the function tries to use the
 | |
| second argument it may find it is a tuple instead of what was expected.
 | |
| Note that this rule will be removed from future versions of the
 | |
| language; it is a backward compatibility provision *only*.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Two other rules and a new built-in function handle conversion between
 | |
| tuples and argument lists:
 | |
| 
 | |
| Rule (a): when a function with more than one argument is called with a
 | |
| single argument that is a tuple of the right size, the tuple's items
 | |
| are used as arguments.
 | |
| 
 | |
| Rule (b): when a function with exactly one argument receives no
 | |
| arguments or more than one, that one argument will receive a tuple
 | |
| containing the arguments (the tuple will be empty if there were no
 | |
| arguments).
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| A new built-in function, apply(), was added to support functions that
 | |
| need to call other functions with a constructed argument list.  The call
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	apply(function, tuple)
 | |
| 
 | |
| is equivalent to
 | |
| 
 | |
| 	function(tuple[0], tuple[1], ..., tuple[len(tuple)-1])
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| While no new argument syntax was added in this phase, it would now be
 | |
| quite sensible to add explicit syntax to Python for default argument
 | |
| values (as in C++ or Modula-3), or a "rest" argument to receive the
 | |
| remaining arguments of a variable-length argument list.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| ========================================================
 | |
| ==> Release 0.9.3 (never made available outside CWI) <==
 | |
| ========================================================
 | |
| 
 | |
| - string sys.version shows current version (also printed on interactive entry)
 | |
| - more detailed exceptions, e.g., IOError, ZeroDivisionError, etc.
 | |
| - 'global' statement to declare module-global variables assigned in functions.
 | |
| - new class declaration syntax: class C(Base1, Base2, ...): suite
 | |
|   (the old syntax is still accepted -- be sure to convert your classes now!)
 | |
| - C shifting and masking operators: << >> ~ & ^ | (for ints and longs).
 | |
| - C comparison operators: == != (the old = and <> remain valid).
 | |
| - floating point numbers may now start with a period (e.g., .14).
 | |
| - definition of integer division tightened (always truncates towards zero).
 | |
| - new builtins hex(x), oct(x) return hex/octal string from (long) integer.
 | |
| - new list method l.count(x) returns the number of occurrences of x in l.
 | |
| - new SGI module: al (Indigo and 4D/35 audio library).
 | |
| - the FORMS interface (modules fl and FL) now uses FORMS 2.0
 | |
| - module gl: added lrect{read,write}, rectzoom and pixmode;
 | |
|   added (non-GL) functions (un)packrect.
 | |
| - new socket method: s.allowbroadcast(flag).
 | |
| - many objects support __dict__, __methods__ or __members__.
 | |
| - dir() lists anything that has __dict__.
 | |
| - class attributes are no longer read-only.
 | |
| - classes support __bases__, instances support __class__ (and __dict__).
 | |
| - divmod() now also works for floats.
 | |
| - fixed obscure bug in eval('1            ').
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| ===================================
 | |
| ==> Release 0.9.2 (Autumn 1991) <==
 | |
| ===================================
 | |
| 
 | |
| Highlights
 | |
| ----------
 | |
| 
 | |
| - tutorial now (almost) complete; library reference reorganized
 | |
| - new syntax: continue statement; semicolons; dictionary constructors;
 | |
|   restrictions on blank lines in source files removed
 | |
| - dramatically improved module load time through precompiled modules
 | |
| - arbitrary precision integers: compute 2 to the power 1000 and more...
 | |
| - arithmetic operators now accept mixed type operands, e.g., 3.14/4
 | |
| - more operations on list: remove, index, reverse; repetition
 | |
| - improved/new file operations: readlines, seek, tell, flush, ...
 | |
| - process management added to the posix module: fork/exec/wait/kill etc.
 | |
| - BSD socket operations (with example servers and clients!)
 | |
| - many new STDWIN features (color, fonts, polygons, ...)
 | |
| - new SGI modules: font manager and FORMS library interface
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| Extended list of changes in 0.9.2
 | |
| ---------------------------------
 | |
| 
 | |
| Here is a summary of the most important user-visible changes in 0.9.2,
 | |
| in somewhat arbitrary order.  Changes in later versions are listed in
 | |
| the "highlights" section above.
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| 1. Changes to the interpreter proper
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Simple statements can now be separated by semicolons.
 | |
|   If you write "if t: s1; s2", both s1 and s2 are executed
 | |
|   conditionally.
 | |
| - The 'continue' statement was added, with semantics as in C.
 | |
| - Dictionary displays are now allowed on input: {key: value, ...}.
 | |
| - Blank lines and lines bearing only a comment no longer need to
 | |
|   be indented properly.  (A completely empty line still ends a multi-
 | |
|   line statement interactively.)
 | |
| - Mixed arithmetic is supported, 1 compares equal to 1.0, etc.
 | |
| - Option "-c command" to execute statements from the command line
 | |
| - Compiled versions of modules are cached in ".pyc" files, giving a
 | |
|   dramatic improvement of start-up time
 | |
| - Other, smaller speed improvements, e.g., extracting characters from
 | |
|   strings, looking up single-character keys, and looking up global
 | |
|   variables
 | |
| - Interrupting a print operation raises KeyboardInterrupt instead of
 | |
|   only cancelling the print operation
 | |
| - Fixed various portability problems (it now passes gcc with only
 | |
|   warnings -- more Standard C compatibility will be provided in later
 | |
|   versions)
 | |
| - Source is prepared for porting to MS-DOS
 | |
| - Numeric constants are now checked for overflow (this requires
 | |
|   standard-conforming strtol() and strtod() functions; a correct
 | |
|   strtol() implementation is provided, but the strtod() provided
 | |
|   relies on atof() for everything, including error checking
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| 2. Changes to the built-in types, functions and modules
 | |
| 
 | |
| - New module socket: interface to BSD socket primitives
 | |
| - New modules pwd and grp: access the UNIX password and group databases
 | |
| - (SGI only:) New module "fm" interfaces to the SGI IRIX Font Manager
 | |
| - (SGI only:) New module "fl" interfaces to Mark Overmars' FORMS library
 | |
| - New numeric type: long integer, for unlimited precision
 | |
| 	- integer constants suffixed with 'L' or 'l' are long integers
 | |
| 	- new built-in function long(x) converts int or float to long
 | |
| 	- int() and float() now also convert from long integers
 | |
| - New built-in function:
 | |
| 	- pow(x, y) returns x to the power y
 | |
| - New operation and methods for lists:
 | |
| 	- l*n returns a new list consisting of n concatenated copies of l
 | |
| 	- l.remove(x) removes the first occurrence of the value x from l
 | |
| 	- l.index(x) returns the index of the first occurrence of x in l
 | |
| 	- l.reverse() reverses l in place
 | |
| - New operation for tuples:
 | |
| 	- t*n returns a tuple consisting of n concatenated copies of t
 | |
| - Improved file handling:
 | |
| 	- f.readline() no longer restricts the line length, is faster,
 | |
| 	  and isn't confused by null bytes; same for raw_input()
 | |
| 	- f.read() without arguments reads the entire (rest of the) file
 | |
| 	- mixing of print and sys.stdout.write() has different effect
 | |
| - New methods for files:
 | |
| 	- f.readlines() returns a list containing the lines of the file,
 | |
| 	  as read with f.readline()
 | |
| 	- f.flush(), f.tell(), f.seek() call their stdio counterparts
 | |
| 	- f.isatty() tests for "tty-ness"
 | |
| - New posix functions:
 | |
| 	- _exit(), exec(), fork(), getpid(), getppid(), kill(), wait()
 | |
| 	- popen() returns a file object connected to a pipe
 | |
| 	- utime() replaces utimes() (the latter is not a POSIX name)
 | |
| - New stdwin features, including:
 | |
| 	- font handling
 | |
| 	- color drawing
 | |
| 	- scroll bars made optional
 | |
| 	- polygons
 | |
| 	- filled and xor shapes
 | |
| 	- text editing objects now have a 'settext' method
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| 3. Changes to the standard library
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Name change: the functions path.cat and macpath.cat are now called
 | |
|   path.join and macpath.join
 | |
| - Added new modules: formatter, mutex, persist, sched, mainloop
 | |
| - Added some modules and functionality to the "widget set" (which is
 | |
|   still under development, so please bear with me):
 | |
| 	DirList, FormSplit, TextEdit, WindowSched
 | |
| - Fixed module testall to work non-interactively
 | |
| - Module string:
 | |
| 	- added functions join() and joinfields()
 | |
| 	- fixed center() to work correct and make it "transitive"
 | |
| - Obsolete modules were removed: util, minmax
 | |
| - Some modules were moved to the demo directory
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| 4. Changes to the demonstration programs
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Added new useful scipts: byteyears, eptags, fact, from, lfact,
 | |
|   objgraph, pdeps, pi, primes, ptags, which
 | |
| - Added a bunch of socket demos
 | |
| - Doubled the speed of ptags
 | |
| - Added new stdwin demos: microedit, miniedit
 | |
| - Added a windowing interface to the Python interpreter: python (most
 | |
|   useful on the Mac)
 | |
| - Added a browser for Emacs info files: demo/stdwin/ibrowse
 | |
|   (yes, I plan to put all STDWIN and Python documentation in texinfo
 | |
|   form in the future)
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| 5. Other changes to the distribution
 | |
| 
 | |
| - An Emacs Lisp file "python.el" is provided to facilitate editing
 | |
|   Python programs in GNU Emacs (slightly improved since posted to
 | |
|   gnu.emacs.sources)
 | |
| - Some info on writing an extension in C is provided
 | |
| - Some info on building Python on non-UNIX platforms is provided
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| =====================================
 | |
| ==> Release 0.9.1 (February 1991) <==
 | |
| =====================================
 | |
| 
 | |
| - Micro changes only
 | |
| - Added file "patchlevel.h"
 | |
| 
 | |
| 
 | |
| =====================================
 | |
| ==> Release 0.9.0 (February 1991) <==
 | |
| =====================================
 | |
| 
 | |
| Original posting to alt.sources.
 | 
