5637 lines
226 KiB
Plaintext
5637 lines
226 KiB
Plaintext
+++++++++++
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Python News
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+++++++++++
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(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
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What's New in Python 2.5 alpha 1?
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=================================
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*Release date: XX-XXX-2006*
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Core and builtins
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-----------------
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- patch #1109424: int, long, float, complex, and unicode now check for the
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proper magic slot for type conversions when subclassed. Previously the
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magic slot was ignored during conversion. Semantics now match the way
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subclasses of str always behaved. int/long/float, conversion of an instance
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to the base class has been moved the prroper nb_* magic slot and out of
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PyNumber_*().
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Thanks Walter Dörwald.
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- Descriptors defined in C with a PyGetSetDef structure, where the setter is
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NULL, now raise an AttributeError when attempting to set or delete the
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attribute. Previously a TypeError was raised, but this was inconsistent
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with the equivalent pure-Python implementation.
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- It is now safe to call PyGILState_Release() before
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PyEval_InitThreads() (note that if there is reason to believe there
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are multiple threads around you still must call PyEval_InitThreads()
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before using the Python API; this fix is for extension modules that
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have no way of knowing if Python is multi-threaded yet).
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- Typing Ctrl-C whilst raw_input() was waiting in a build with threads
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disabled caused a crash.
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- Bug #1165306: instancemethod_new allowed the creation of a method
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with im_class == im_self == NULL, which caused a crash when called.
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- Move exception finalisation later in the shutdown process - this
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fixes the crash seen in bug #1165761
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- Added two new builtins, any() and all().
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- Defining a class with empty parentheses is now allowed
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(e.g., ``class C(): pass`` is no longer a syntax error).
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Patch #1176012 added support to the 'parser' module and 'compiler' package
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(thanks to logistix for that added support).
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- Patch #1115086: Support PY_LONGLONG in structmember.
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- Bug #1155938: new style classes did not check that __init__() was
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returning None.
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- Patch #802188: Report characters after line continuation character
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('\') with a specific error message.
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- Bug #723201: Raise a TypeError for passing bad objects to 'L' format.
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- Bug #1124295: the __name__ attribute of file objects was
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inadvertently made inaccessible in restricted mode.
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- Bug #1074011: closing sys.std{out,err} now causes a flush() and
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an ferror() call.
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- min() and max() now support key= arguments with the same meaning as in
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list.sort().
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- The peephole optimizer now performs simple constant folding in expressions:
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(2+3) --> (5).
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- set and frozenset objects can now be marshalled. SF #1098985.
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- Bug #1077106: Poor argument checking could cause memory corruption
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in calls to os.read().
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- The parser did not complain about future statements in illegal
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positions. It once again reports a syntax error if a future
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statement occurs after anything other than a doc string.
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Extension Modules
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-----------------
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- Patch #1103951: Expose O_SHLOCK and O_EXLOCK in the posix module if
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available on the platform.
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- Bug #1166660: The readline module could segfault if hook functions
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were set in a different thread than that which called readline.
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- collections.deque objects now support a remove() method.
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- operator.itemgetter() and operator.attrgetter() now support retrieving
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multiple fields. This provides direct support for sorting on multiple
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keys (primary, secondary, etc).
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- os.access now supports Unicode path names on non-Win32 systems.
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- Patches #925152, #1118602: Avoid reading after the end of the buffer
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in pyexpat.GetInputContext.
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- Patches #749830, #1144555: allow UNIX mmap size to default to current
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file size.
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- Added functional.partial(). See PEP309.
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- Patch #1093585: raise a ValueError for negative history items in readline.
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{remove_history,replace_history}
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- The spwd module has been added, allowing access to the shadow password
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database.
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- stat_float_times is now True.
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- array.array objects are now picklable.
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- the cPickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
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args tuple returned by __reduce__().
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- itertools.islice() now accepts None for the start and step arguments.
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This allows islice() to work more readily with slices:
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islice(s.start, s.stop, s.step)
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- datetime.datetime() now has a strptime class method which can be used to
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create datetime object using a string and format.
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Library
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-------
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- Patch #1120353: The xmlrpclib module provides better, more transparent,
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support for datetime.{datetime,date,time} objects. With use_datetime set
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to True, applications shouldn't have to fiddle with the DateTime wrapper
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class at all.
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- distutils.commands.upload was added to support uploading distribution
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files to PyPI.
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- distutils.commands.register now encodes the data as UTF-8 before posting
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them to PyPI.
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- decimal operator and comparison methods now return NotImplemented
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instead of raising a TypeError when interacting with other types. This
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allows other classes to implement __radd__ style methods and have them
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work as expected.
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- Bug #1163325: Decimal infinities failed to hash. Attempting to
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hash a NaN raised an InvalidOperation instead of a TypeError.
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- Patch #918101: Add tarfile open mode r|* for auto-detection of the
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stream compression; add, for symmetry reasons, r:* as a synonym of r.
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- Patch #1043890: Add extractall method to tarfile.
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- Patch #1075887: Don't require MSVC in distutils if there is nothing
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to build.
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- Patch #1103407: Properly deal with tarfile iterators when untarring
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symbolic links on Windows.
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- Patch #645894: Use getrusage for computing the time consumption in
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profile.py if available.
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- Patch #1046831: Use get_python_version where appropriate in sysconfig.py.
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- Patch #1117454: Remove code to special-case cookies without values
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in LWPCookieJar.
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- Patch #1117339: Add cookielib special name tests.
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- Patch #1112812: Make bsddb/__init__.py more friendly for modulefinder.
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- Patch #1110248: SYNC_FLUSH the zlib buffer for GZipFile.flush.
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- Patch #1107973: Allow to iterate over the lines of a tarfile.ExFileObject.
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- Patch #1104111: Alter setup.py --help and --help-commands.
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- Patch #1121234: Properly cleanup _exit and tkerror commands.
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- Patch #1049151: xdrlib now unpacks booleans as True or False.
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- Fixed bug in a NameError bug in cookielib. Patch #1116583.
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- Applied a security fix to SimpleXMLRPCserver (PSF-2005-001). This
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disables recursive traversal through instance attributes, which can
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be exploited in various ways.
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- Bug #1110478: Revert os.environ.update to do putenv again.
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- Bug #1103844: fix distutils.install.dump_dirs() with negated options.
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- os.{SEEK_SET, SEEK_CUR, SEEK_END} have been added for convenience.
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- Enhancements to the csv module:
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+ Dialects are now validated by the underlying C code, better
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reflecting it's capabilities, and improving it's compliance with
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PEP 305.
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+ Dialect parameter parsing has been re-implemented to improve error
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reporting.
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+ quotechar=None and quoting=QUOTE_NONE now work the way PEP 305
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dictates.
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+ the parser now removes the escapechar prefix from escaped characters.
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+ when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the writer now tests for numeric
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types, rather than any object than can be represented as a numeric.
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+ when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the reader now casts unquoted fields
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to floats.
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+ reader now allows \r characters to be quoted (previously it only allowed
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\n to be quoted).
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+ writer doublequote handling improved.
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+ Dialect classes passed to the module are no longer instantiated by
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the module before being parsed (the former validation scheme required
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this, but the mechanism was unreliable).
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+ The dialect registry now contains instances of the internal
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C-coded dialect type, rather than references to python objects.
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+ the internal c-coded dialect type is now immutable.
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+ register_dialect now accepts the same keyword dialect specifications
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as the reader and writer, allowing the user to register dialects
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without first creating a dialect class.
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+ a configurable limit to the size of parsed fields has been added -
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previously, an unmatched quote character could result in the entire
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file being read into the field buffer before an error was reported.
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+ A new module method csv.field_size_limit() has been added that sets
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the parser field size limit (returning the former limit). The initial
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limit is 128kB.
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+ A line_num attribute has been added to the reader object, which tracks
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the number of lines read from the source iterator. This is not
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the same as the number of records returned, as records can span
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multiple lines.
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+ reader and writer objects were not being registered with the cyclic-GC.
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This has been fixed.
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- _DummyThread objects in the threading module now delete self.__block that is
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inherited from _Thread since it uses up a lock allocated by 'thread'. The
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lock primitives tend to be limited in number and thus should not be wasted on
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a _DummyThread object. Fixes bug #1089632.
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- The imghdr module now detects Exif files.
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- StringIO.truncate() now correctly adjusts the size attribute.
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(Bug #951915).
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- locale.py now uses an updated locale alias table (built using
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Tools/i18n/makelocalealias.py, a tool to parse the X11 locale
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alias file); the encoding lookup was enhanced to use Python's
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encoding alias table
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- moved deprecated modules to Lib/lib-old: whrandom, tzparse, statcache.
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- the pickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
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args tuple returned by __reduce__().
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- optparse now optionally imports gettext. This allows its use in setup.py.
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- the pickle module no longer uses the deprecated bin parameter.
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- the shelve module no longer uses the deprecated binary parameter.
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- the pstats module no longer uses the deprecated ignore() method.
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- the filecmp module no longer uses the deprecated use_statcache argument.
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- unittest.TestCase.run() and unittest.TestSuite.run() can now be successfully
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extended or overridden by subclasses. Formerly, the subclassed method would
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be ignored by the rest of the module. (Bug #1078905).
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- heapq.nsmallest() and heapq.nlargest() now support key= arguments with
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the same meaning as in list.sort().
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- Bug #1076985: ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` now calls ``read()`` only
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once when a size argument is given. This prevents a buffer overflow in the
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tokenizer with very long source lines.
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- Bug #1083110: ``zlib.decompress.flush()`` would segfault if called immediately
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after creating the object, without any intervening ``.decompress()`` calls.
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- The reconvert.quote function can now emit triple-quoted strings. The
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reconvert module now has some simple documentation.
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- ``UserString.MutableString`` now supports negative indices in
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``__setitem__`` and ``__delitem__``
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- Bug #1149508: ``textwrap`` now handles hyphenated numbers (eg. "2004-03-05")
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correctly.
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- Partial fixes for SF bugs #1163244 and #1175396: If a chunk read by
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``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` has a trailing "\r", read one more
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character even if the user has passed a size parameter to get a proper
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line ending. Remove the special handling of a "\r\n" that has been split
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between two lines.
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Build
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-----
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- EXTRA_CFLAGS has been introduced as an environment variable to hold compiler
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flags that change binary compatibility. Changes were also made to
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distutils.sysconfig to also use the environment variable when used during
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compilation of the interpreter and of C extensions through distutils.
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- SF patch 1171735: Darwin 8's headers are anal about POSIX compliance,
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and linking has changed (prebinding is now deprecated, and libcc_dynamic
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no longer exists). This configure patch makes things right.
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- Bug #1158607: Build with --disable-unicode again.
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- spwdmodule.c is built only if either HAVE_GETSPNAM or HAVE_HAVE_GETSPENT is
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defined. Discovered as a result of not being able to build on OS X.
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- setup.py now uses the directories specified in LDFLAGS using the -L option
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and in CPPFLAGS using the -I option for adding library and include
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directories, respectively, for compiling extension modules against. This has
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led to the core being compiled using the values in CPPFLAGS. It also removes
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the need for the special-casing of both DarwinPorts and Fink for darwin since
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the proper directories can be specified in LDFLAGS (``-L/sw/lib`` for Fink,
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``-L/opt/local/lib`` for DarwinPorts) and CPPFLAGS (``-I/sw/include`` for
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Fink, ``-I/opt/local/include`` for DarwinPorts).
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- Test in configure.in that checks for tzset no longer dependent on tm->tm_zone
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to exist in the struct (not required by either ISO C nor the UNIX 2 spec).
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Tests for sanity in tzname when HAVE_TZNAME defined were also defined.
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Closes bug #1096244. Thanks Gregory Bond.
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C API
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-----
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- Removed PyRange_New().
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Tests
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-----
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- In test_os, st_?time is now truncated before comparing it with ST_?TIME.
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Documentation
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-------------
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- Remove all latent references for "Macintosh" that referred to semantics for
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Mac OS 9 and change to reflect the state for OS X.
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Closes patch #1095802. Thanks Jack Jansen.
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Mac
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---
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Tools/Demos
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-----------
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- Patch #1177597: Correct Complex.__init__.
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What's New in Python 2.4 final?
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===============================
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*Release date: 30-NOV-2004*
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Core and builtins
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-----------------
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- Bug 875692: Improve signal handling, especially when using threads, by
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forcing an early re-execution of PyEval_EvalFrame() "periodic" code when
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things_to_do is not cleared by Py_MakePendingCalls().
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What's New in Python 2.4 (release candidate 1)
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==============================================
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*Release date: 18-NOV-2004*
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Core and builtins
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-----------------
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- Bug 1061968: Fixes in 2.4a3 to address thread bug 1010677 reintroduced
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the years-old thread shutdown race bug 225673. Numeric history lesson
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aside, all bugs in all three reports are fixed now.
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Library
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-------
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- Bug 1052242: If exceptions are raised by an atexit handler function an
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attempt is made to execute the remaining handlers. The last exception
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raised is re-raised.
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- ``doctest``'s new support for adding ``pdb.set_trace()`` calls to
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doctests was broken in a dramatic but shallow way. Fixed.
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- Bug 1065388: ``calendar``'s ``day_name``, ``day_abbr``, ``month_name``,
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and ``month_abbr`` attributes emulate sequences of locale-correct
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spellings of month and day names. Because the locale can change at
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any time, the correct spelling is recomputed whenever one of these is
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indexed. In the worst case, the index may be a slice object, so these
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recomputed every day or month name each time they were indexed. This is
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much slower than necessary in the usual case, when the index is just an
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integer. In that case, only the single spelling needed is recomputed
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now; and, when the index is a slice object, only the spellings needed
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by the slice are recomputed now.
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- Patch 1061679: Added ``__all__`` to pickletools.py.
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Build
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-----
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- Bug 1034277 / Patch 1035255: Remove compilation of core against CoreServices
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and CoreFoundation on OS X. Involved removing PyMac_GetAppletScriptFile()
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which has no known users. Thanks Bob Ippolito.
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C API
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-----
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- The PyRange_New() function is deprecated.
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What's New in Python 2.4 beta 2?
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================================
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*Release date: 03-NOV-2004*
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License
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-------
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The Python Software Foundation changed the license under which Python
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is released, to remove Python version numbers. There were no other
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changes to the license. So, for example, wherever the license for
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Python 2.3 said "Python 2.3", the new license says "Python". The
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intent is to make it possible to refer to the PSF license in a more
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durable way. For example, some people say they're confused by that
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the Open Source Initiative's entry for the Python Software Foundation
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License::
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http://www.opensource.org/licenses/PythonSoftFoundation.php
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says "Python 2.1.1" all over it, wondering whether it applies only
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to Python 2.1.1.
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The official name of the new license is the Python Software Foundation
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License Version 2.
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Core and builtins
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-----------------
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- Bug #1055820 Cyclic garbage collection was not protecting against that
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calling a live weakref to a piece of cyclic trash could resurrect an
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insane mutation of the trash if any Python code ran during gc (via
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running a dead object's __del__ method, running another callback on a
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weakref to a dead object, or via any Python code run in any other thread
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that managed to obtain the GIL while a __del__ or callback was running
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in the thread doing gc). The most likely symptom was "impossible"
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``AttributeEror`` exceptions, appearing seemingly at random, on weakly
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referenced objects. The cure was to clear all weakrefs to unreachable
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objects before allowing any callbacks to run.
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- Bug #1054139 _PyString_Resize() now invalidates its cached hash value.
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Extension Modules
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-----------------
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- Bug #1048870: the compiler now generates distinct code objects for
|
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functions with identical bodies. This was producing confusing
|
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traceback messages which pointed to the function where the code
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object was first defined rather than the function being executed.
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Library
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-------
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- Patch #1056967 changes the semantics of Template.safe_substitute() so that
|
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no ValueError is raised on an 'invalid' match group. Now the delimiter is
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returned.
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- Bug #1052503 pdb.runcall() was not passing along keyword arguments.
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- Bug #902037: XML.sax.saxutils.prepare_input_source() now combines relative
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paths with a base path before checking os.path.isfile().
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- The whichdb module can now be run from the command line.
|
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- Bug #1045381: time.strptime() can now infer the date using %U or %W (week of
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the year) when the day of the week and year are also specified.
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- Bug #1048816: fix bug in Ctrl-K at start of line in curses.textpad.Textbox
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- Bug #1017553: fix bug in tarfile.filemode()
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- Patch #737473: fix bug that old source code is shown in tracebacks even if
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the source code is updated and reloaded.
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Build
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-----
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- Patch #1044395: --enable-shared is allowed in FreeBSD also.
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What's New in Python 2.4 beta 1?
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================================
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*Release date: 15-OCT-2004*
|
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Core and builtins
|
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-----------------
|
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- Patch #975056: Restartable signals were not correctly disabled on
|
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BSD systems. Consistently use PyOS_setsig() instead of signal().
|
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|
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- The internal portable implementation of thread-local storage (TLS), used
|
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by the ``PyGILState_Ensure()``/``PyGILState_Release()`` API, was not
|
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thread-correct. This could lead to a variety of problems, up to and
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including segfaults. See bug 1041645 for an example.
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|
|
|
- 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 compatability 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 $Id$), 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
|
|
-------
|
|
|
|
- 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.
|
|
|
|
----
|
|
|
|
**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**
|