+++++++++++

Python News

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(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)

What's New in Python 2.3.3 (final)?

===================================

*Release date: 19-Dec-2003*

Core and builtins

-----------------

- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains

deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.

Library

-------

- A couple of bugs were squished in trace.py

What's New in Python 2.3.3c1?

=============================

*Release date: 05-Dec-2003*

Core and builtins

-----------------

- 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 could result (in a release build;

in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).

This has been repaired.

- 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.

- Patch #820195: object.__contains__() now returns True or False instead

of 1 or 0.

Extension modules

-----------------

- Bug #852314: Fix return type of tkFileDialog.askdirectory on Unix.

- Bug #834676: Fix crashes when normalizing Hangul syllables.

- Bug #703198: Ignore "b" and "t" in os.popen on Unix.

- Patch #803998: Deal with errors in SSL_write correctly.

- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.

- Patch #813445: Add missing socket.IPPROTO_IPV6.

- Bug #807314: Properly raise an exception if non-existent Tcl

variable is accessed.

- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X

- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI

Library

-------

- Bug #849662: UserDict.DictMixin had performance issues when

an instance was tested for equality with None.

- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6

compiler because of incomplete registry entries.

- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules

in packages.

- Bug #792101: Add missing file operations for httplib.SSLFile.

- Bug #811082: test_tempfile fails if space in install directory.

- Bug #780461: platform.mac_ver() raised MacOSError exception under OS X.

- Bug #812202: random.randrange() returned only even numbers

for range lengths above 2**53.

- Bug #823328: urllib2's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.

What's New in Python 2.3.2 (final)?

===================================

*Release date: 03-Oct-2003*

Core and builtins

-----------------

- A workaround for an OpenBSD compiler bug that meant python failed to

detect floating point overflow in some cases.

Tools/Demos

-----------

- Tools/scripts/md5sum.py opens files in binary mode by default. Opening

in text mode is almost certainly not what you want.

Extension modules

-----------------

- The documentation for bsddb now warns strongly about using the legacy

API in multi-threaded applications.

What's New in Python 2.3.2c1?

=============================

*Release date: 30-Sep-2003*

Build

-----

- A bug in the autoconf machinery meant that os.fsync was never available.

- A bug in autoconf meant a bunch of symbols were undefined on HP/UX.

Mac

---

- The Framework build now identifies itself as 2.3.2.

What's New in Python 2.3.1?

===========================

*Release date: 23-Sep-2003*

Core and builtins

-----------------

- Patch #805613: Fix usage of the PTH library.

- 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.

- Fixed a leak in class objects defining a comparison but not a hash

function.

- Bug #789402, fixed memory leak when opening a file object.

- Fixed a leak when new code objects are instantiated.

- Bug #800796: slice(1).__hash__() now raises a TypeError, unhashable type.

- Bug #603724: Pass an explicit buffer to setvbuf in PyFile_SetBufSize().

- Bug #795506: The % formatting operator did not support '%F' as

had been documented.

- Bug #775985: Only set stdout.encoding if a codec is available.

Extension modules

-----------------

- The _bsddb module now supports Berkeley DB 4.2.

- Bug #698282: Add __file__ to dynamic modules in multiple interpreters.

- Patch #798145: Return correct information from nl_langinfo(RADIXCHAR).

- Bug #797447: Correct confusing error message for unsupported locales.

- Patch #798534: fixed memory leak in os.popen().

- Bug #793826: re-ordered the reference counting code in

itertools.izip() to prevent re-entrancy anomalies. Also,

if given zero arguments, it now returns an empty iterator

rather than raising a type error.

- Bug #770485: cStringIO did not support the f.closed attribute.

- Patch #781722: Gracefully reject AF_INET6 in socket.inet_pton

if IPv6 is disabled.

- Bug #783312: Release host name memory in socket calls.

Library

-------

- Bug #709491: Reset __starttext_tag in sgmllib.

- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and

mapping protocols.

- Bug #711632: Reset all state members in HTMLParser.reset.

- Bug #792649: logging.ConfigStreamHandler had an uninitialized variable

- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword

arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.

- Bug #453515: filecmp.dircmp() can now make case insensitive

filename comparisons.

- Bug #798254: doctest.py can now handle unbound methods.

- Bug #797650: textwrap.py now avoids an infinite loop when one of the

indent arguments is set longer than the total width.

- Bug #796149: time.strptime() now handles having parentheses in the

format string properly.

- 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.

- Bug #801342: random.sample() now accepts a Set as a possible argument.

Previously, it insisted that the population argument be indexable.

- Bug #778964: random.seed() now uses fractional seconds so that

rapid successive, seeding calls will produce different sequences.

- Bug #777664: Add Tkconstants.HIDDEN.

- Bug #781065: test_normalization is updated to the current

URL of the Unicode 3.2 normalization file.

- Bug #782369: fix memory leak in array module.

- Caching in _strptime.py has been re-introduced. This leads to a large

performance boost at the cost of not being thread-safe from locale

changes while executing time.strptime() .

- Bug #783952: time.strptime() now properly handles issue of

time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] while time.daylight is set to be

true.

IDLE

----

- Bug #788378: Handle locale.error.

- Bug #774680: IDLE now does not fail to save the file anymore

if the Tk buffer is not a Unicode string, yet eol_convention is.

- Bug #782510: The idna codec would fail to support names with a

trailing full-stop.

Tools/Demos

-----------

- Patch #713645: Fix typo in checkextensions_win32.

- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no

-d option was given.

- texcheck.py now checks for double word errors and erroneous spacing markup.

Build

-----

- patch #762934: improve detection of broken implementations of tzset().

- Patch #798202: detect redhat9 Tcl/Tk in configure script.

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.

- The _ssl extension module was built using openssl-0.9.7b.

- The Windows installer includes documentation in HTMLHelp format

instead of single HTML pages.

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).

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.