/Misc/HISTORY
#! | 12737 lines | 9094 code | 3643 blank | 0 comment | 0 complexity | 9c1bc4d2e0906898e8397430f132aece MD5 | raw file
Possible License(s): 0BSD, BSD-3-Clause
- 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 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 builtin. 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 builtin 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 D�rwald.
- - 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 builtin 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 builtin 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 writeable 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 builtin 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: HISTORY 73770 2009-07-02 15:37:21Z jesus.cea $), 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() builtin 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 builtin types, set() and frozenset().
- - Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
- over a sequence.
- - Added a sorted() builtin 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 builtin 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 builtin 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 builtin 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 builtin 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, extsep,
- 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 builtin 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 builtin
- module to assure that at least the builtin 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 builtin 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 builtin 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 builtin 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 builtin 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 builtin 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 builtin 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 builtin 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).
- - os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
- separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
- RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
- unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
- - 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 builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
- "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
- constructor, with the same signature as the builtin 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 builtin 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
- builtin 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 builtin 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
- builtin 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 builtin
- 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 Misc/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 Loewis. 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 builtin 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 ind