What's new in this release?

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

Below is a list of all relevant changes since release 1.4. The

sections are now in a more useful order: the most recent changes are

listed first.

A note on attributions: while I have sprinkled some names throughout

here, I'm grateful to many more people who remain unnamed. You may

find your name in the ACKS file. If you believe you deserve more

credit, let me know and I'll add you to the list!

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

From 1.5.1 to 1.5.2a1

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

General

-------

- When searching for the library, a landmark that is a compiled module

(string.pyc or string.pyo) is also accepted.

- When following symbolic links to the python executable, use a loop

so that a symlink to a symlink can work.

- Added a hack so that when you type 'quit' or 'exit' at the

interpreter, you get a friendly explanation of how to press Ctrl-D (or

Ctrl-Z) to exit.

- New and improved Misc/python-mode.el (Python mode for Emacs).

- Revert a new feature in Unix dynamic loading: for one or two

revisions, modules were loaded using the RTLD_GLOBAL flag. It turned

out to be a bad idea.

Miscellaneous fixed bugs

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

- All patches on the patch page have been integrated. (But much more

has been done!)

- Several memory leaks plugged (e.g. the one for classes with a

__getattr__ method).

- Removed the only use of calloc(). This triggered an obscure bug on

multiprocessor Sparc Solaris 2.6.

- Fix a peculiar bug that would allow "import sys.time" to succeed

(believing the built-in time module to be a part of the sys package).

- Fix a bug in the overflow checking when converting a Python long to

a C long (failed to convert -2147483648L, and some other cases).

Documentation

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

- Doc strings have been added to many extension modules: __builtin__,

errno, select, signal, socket, sys, thread, time. Also to methods of

list objects (try [].append.__doc__). A doc string on a type will now

automatically be propagated to an instance if the instance has methods

that are accessed in the usual way.

- The documentation has been expanded and the formatting improved.

(Remember that the documentation is now unbundled and has its own

release cycle though; see http://www.python.org/doc/.)

- Added Misc/Porting -- a mini-FAQ on porting to a new platform.

Ports and build procedure

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

- The BeOS port is now integrated. Courtesy Chris Herborth.

- Symbol files for FreeBSD 2.x and 3.x have been contributed

(Lib/plat-freebsd[23]/*).

- Support HPUX 10.20 DCE threads.

- Finally fixed the configure script so that (on SGI) if -OPT:Olimit=0

works, it won't also use -Olimit 1500 (which gives a warning for every

file). Also support the SGI_ABI environment variable better.

- The makesetup script now understands absolute pathnames ending in .o

in the module -- it assumes it's a file for which we have no source.

- Other miscellaneous improvements to the configure script and

Makefiles.

- The test suite now uses a different sound sample.

Built-in functions

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

- Better checks for invalid input to int(), long(), string.atoi(),

string.atol(). (Formerly, a sign without digits would be accepted as

a legal ways to spell zero.)

- Changes to map() and filter() to use the length of a sequence only

as a hint -- if an IndexError happens earlier, take that. (Formerly,

this was considered an error.)

- Experimental feature in getattr(): a third argument can specify a

default (instead of raising AttributeError).

- Implement round() slightly different, so that for negative ndigits

no additional errors happen in the last step.

- The open() function now adds the filename to the exception when it

fails.

Built-in exceptions

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

- New standard exceptions EnvironmentError and PosixError.

EnvironmentError is the base class for IOError and PosixError;

PosixError is the same as os.error. All this so that either exception

class can be instantiated with a third argument indicating a filename.

The built-in function open() and most os/posix functions that take a

filename argument now use this.

Built-in types

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

- List objects now have an experimental pop() method; l.pop() returns

and removes the last item; l.pop(i) returns and removes the item at

i. Also, the sort() method is faster again. Sorting is now also

safer: it is impossible for the sorting function to modify the list

while the sort is going on (which could cause core dumps).

- Changes to comparisons: numbers are now smaller than any other type.

This is done to prevent the circularity where [] < 0L < 1 < [] is

true. As a side effect, cmp(None, 0) is now positive instead of

negative. This *shouldn't* affect any working code, but I've found

that the change caused several "sleeping" bugs to become active, so

beware!

- Instance methods may now have other callable objects than just

Python functions as their im_func. Use new.instancemethod() or write

your own C code to create them; new.instancemethod() may be called

with None for the instance to create an unbound method.

- Assignment to __name__, __dict__ or __bases__ of a class object is

now allowed (with stringent type checks); also allow assignment to

__getattr__ etc. The cached values for __getattr__ etc. are

recomputed after such assignments (but not for derived classes :-( ).

- Allow assignment to some attributes of function objects: func_code,

func_defaults and func_doc / __doc__. (With type checks except for

__doc__ / func_doc .)

Python services

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

- New tests (in Lib/test): reperf.py (regular expression benchmark),

sortperf.py (list sorting benchmark), test_MimeWriter.py (test case

for the MimeWriter module).

- Generalized test/regrtest.py so that it is useful for testing other

packages.

- The ihooks.py module now understands package imports.

- In code.py, add a class that subsumes Fredrik Lundh's

PythonInterpreter class. The interact() function now uses this.

- In rlcompleter.py, in completer(), return None instead of raising an

IndexError when there are no more completions left.

- Fixed the marshal module to test for certain common kinds of invalid

input. (It's still not foolproof!)

- In the operator module, add an alias (now the preferred name)

"contains" for "sequenceincludes".

String Services

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

- In the string and strop modules, in the replace() function, treat an

empty pattern as an error (since it's not clear what was meant!).

- Some speedups to re.py, especially the string substitution and split

functions. Also added new function/method findall(), to find all

occurrences of a given substring.

- In cStringIO, add better argument type checking and support the

readonly 'closed' attribute (like regular files).

- In the struct module, unsigned 1-2 byte sized formats no longer

result in long integer values.

Miscellaneous services

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

- In whrandom.py, added new method and function randrange(), same as

choice(range(start, stop, step)) but faster. This addresses the

problem that randint() was accidentally defined as taking an inclusive

range. Also, randint(a, b) is now redefined as randrange(a, b+1),

adding extra range and type checking to its arguments!

- Add some semi-thread-safety to random.gauss() (it used to be able to

crash when invoked from separate threads; now the worst it can do is

give a duplicate result occasionally).

- Some restructuring and generalization done to cmd.py.

- Major upgrade to ConfigParser.py; converted to using 're', added new

exceptions, support underscore in section header and option name. No

longer add 'name' option to every section; instead, add '__name__'.

- In getpass.py, don't use raw_input() to ask for the password -- we

don't want it to show up in the readline history! Also don't catch

interrupts (the try-finally already does all necessary cleanup).

Generic OS Services

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

- New functions in os.py: makedirs(), removedirs(), renames(). New

variable: linesep (the line separator as found in binary files,

i.e. '\n' on Unix, '\r\n' on DOS/Windows, '\r' on Mac. Do *not* use

this with files opened in (default) text mode; the line separator used

will always be '\n'!

- Changes to the 'os.path' submodule of os.py: added getsize(),

getmtime(), getatime() -- these fetch the most popular items from the

stat return tuple.

- In the time module, add strptime(), if it exists. (This parses a

time according to a format -- the inverse of strftime().) Also,

remove the call to mktime() from strftime() -- it messed up the

formatting of some non-local times.

- In the socket module, added a new function gethostbyname_ex().

Also, don't use #ifdef to test for some symbols that are enums on some

platforms (and should exist everywhere).

Optional OS Services

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

- Some fixes to gzip.py. In particular, the readlines() method now

returns the lines *with* trailing newline characters, like readlines()

of regular file objects. Also, it didn't work together with cPickle;

fixed that.

- In whichdb.py, support byte-swapped dbhash (bsddb) files.

- In anydbm.py, look at the type of an existing database to determine

which module to use to open it. (The anydbm.error exception is now a

tuple.)

Unix Services

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

- In the termios module, in tcsetattr(), initialize the structure vy

calling tcgetattr().

- Added some of the "wait status inspection" macros as functions to

the posix module (and thus to the os module): WEXITSTATUS(),

WIFEXITED(), WIFSIGNALED(), WIFSTOPPED(), WSTOPSIG(), WTERMSIG().

- In the syslog module, make the default facility more intuitive

(matching the docs).

Debugger

--------

- In pdb.py, support for setting breaks on files/modules that haven't

been loaded yet.

Internet Protocols and Support

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

- Changes in urllib.py; sped up unquote() and quote(). Fixed an

obscure bug in quote_plus(). Added urlencode(dict) -- convenience

function for sending a POST request with urlopen(). Use the getpass

module to ask for a password. Rewrote the (test) main program so that

when used as a script, it can retrieve one or more URLs to stdout.

Use -t to run the self-test. Made the proxy code work again.

- In cgi.py, treat "HEAD" the same as "GET", so that CGI scripts don't

fail when someone asks for their HEAD. Also, for POST, set the

default content-type to application/x-www-form-urlencoded. Also, in

FieldStorage.__init__(), when method='GET', always get the query

string from environ['QUERY_STRING'] or sys.argv[1] -- ignore an

explicitly passed in fp.

- The smtplib.py module now supports ESMTP and has improved standard

compliance, for picky servers.

- Improved imaplib.py.

- Fixed UDP support in SocketServer.py (it never worked).

- Fixed a small bug in CGIHTTPServer.py.

Internet Data handling

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

- In rfc822.py, add a new class AddressList. Also support a new

overridable method, isheader(). Also add a get() method similar to

dictionaries (and make getheader() an alias for it). Also, be smarter

about seekable (test whether fp.tell() works) and test for presence of

unread() method before trying seeks.

- In sgmllib.py, restore the call to report_unbalanced() that was lost

long ago. Also some other improvements: handle <? processing

instructions >, allow . and - in entity names, and allow \r\n as line

separator.

- Some restructuring and generalization done to multifile.py; support

a 'seekable' flag.

Restricted Execution

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

- Improvements to rexec.py: package support; support a (minimal)

sys.exc_info(). Also made the (test) main program a bit fancier (you

can now use it to run arbitrary Python scripts in restricted mode).

Tkinter

-------

- On Unix, Tkinter can now safely be used from a multi-threaded

application. (Formerly, no threads would make progress while

Tkinter's mainloop() was active, because it didn't release the Python

interpreter lock.) Unfortunately, on Windows, threads other than the

main thread should not call update() or update_idletasks() because

this will deadlock the application.

- An interactive interpreter that uses readline and Tkinter no longer

uses up all available CPU time.

- Even if readline is not used, Tk windows created in an interactive

interpreter now get continuously updated. (This even works in Windows

as long as you don't hit a key.)

- New demos in Demo/tkinter/guido/: brownian.py, redemo.py, switch.py.

- No longer register Tcl_finalize() as a low-level exit handler. It

may call back into Python, and that's a bad idea.

- Allow binding of Tcl commands (given as a string).

- Some minor speedups; replace explicitly coded getint() with int() in

most places.

- In FileDialog.py, remember the directory of the selected file, if

given.

- Change the names of all methods in the Wm class: they are now

wm_title(), etc. The old names (title() etc.) are still defined as

aliases.

- Add a new method of interpreter objects, interpaddr(). This returns

the address of the Tcl interpreter object, as an integer. Not very

useful for the Python programmer, but this can be called by another C

extension that needs to make calls into the Tcl/Tk C API and needs to

get the address of the Tcl interpreter object. A simple cast of the

return value to (Tcl_Interp *) will do the trick.

Windows General

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

- Don't insist on proper case for module source files if the filename

is all uppercase (e.g. FOO.PY now matches foo; but FOO.py still

doesn't). This should address problems with this feature on

oldfashioned filesystems (Novell servers?).

Windows Library

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

- os.environ is now all uppercase, but accesses are case insensitive,

and the putenv() calls made as a side effect of changing os.environ

are case preserving.

- Removed samefile(), sameopenfile(), samestat() from os.path (aka

ntpath.py) -- these cannot be made to work reliably (at least I

wouldn't know how).

- Fixed os.pipe() so that it returns file descriptors acceptable to

os.read() and os.write() (like it does on Unix), rather than Windows

file handles.

- Added a table of WSA error codes to socket.py.

- In the select module, put the (huge) file descriptor arrays on the

heap.

- The getpass module now raises KeyboardInterrupt when it sees ^C.

- In mailbox.py, fix tell/seek when using files opened in text mode.

- In rfc822.py, fix tell/seek when using files opened in text mode.

- In the msvcrt extension module, release the interpreter lock for

calls that may block: _locking(), _getch(), _getche(). Also fix a

bogus error return when open_osfhandle() doesn't have the right

argument list.

Windows Installer

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

- The registry key used is now "1.5" instead of "1.5.x" -- so future

versions of 1.5 and Mark Hammond's win32all installer don't need to be

resynchronized.

Windows Tools

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

- Several improvements to freeze specifically for Windows.

Windows Build Procedure

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

- The VC++ project files and the WISE installer have been moved to the

PCbuild subdirectory, so they are distributed in the same subdirectory

where they must be used. This avoids confusion.

- New project files for Windows 3.1 port by Jim Ahlstrom.

- Got rid of the obsolete subdirectory PC/setup_nt/.

- The projects now use distinct filenames for the .exe, .dll, .lib and

.pyd files built in debug mode (by appending "_d" to the base name,

before the extension). This makes it easier to switch between the two

and get the right versions. There's a pragma in config.h that directs

the linker to include the appropriate .lib file (so python15.lib no

longer needs to be explicit in your project).

- The installer now installs more files (e.g. config.h). The idea is

that you shouldn't need the source distribution if you want build your

own extensions in C or C++.

Tools and Demos

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

- New script nm2def.py by Marc-Andre Lemburg, to construct

PC/python_nt.def automatically (some hand editing still required).

- New tool ndiff.py: Tim Peters' text diffing tool.

- Various and sundry improvements to the freeze script.

- The script texi2html.py (which was part of the Doc tree but is no

longer used there) has been moved to the Tools/scripts subdirectory.

- Some generalizations in the webchecker code. There's now a

primnitive gui for websucker.py: wsgui.py. (In Tools/webchecker/.)

- The ftpmirror.py script now handles symbolic links properly, and

also files with multiple spaces in their names.

- The 1.5.1 tabnanny.py suffers an assert error if fed a script whose

last line is both indented and lacks a newline. This is now fixed.

Python/C API

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

- Added missing prototypes for PyEval_CallFunction() and

PyEval_CallMethod().

- New macro PyList_SET_ITEM().

- New macros to access object members for PyFunction, PyCFunction

objects.

- New APIs PyImport_AppendInittab() an PyImport_ExtendInittab() to

dynamically add one or many entries to the table of built-in modules.

- New macro Py_InitModule3(name, methods, doc) which calls

Py_InitModule4() with appropriate arguments. (The -4 variant requires

you to pass an obscure version number constant which is always the same.)

- New APIs PySys_WriteStdout() and PySys_WriteStderr() to write to

sys.stdout or sys.stderr using a printf-like interface. (Used in

_tkinter.c, for example.)

- New APIs for conversion between Python longs and C 'long long' if

your compiler supports it.

- PySequence_In() is now called PySequence_Contains().

(PySequence_In() is still supported for b/w compatibility; it is

declared obsolete because its argument order is confusing.)

- PyDict_GetItem() and PyDict_GetItemString() are changed so that they

*never* raise an exception -- (even if the hash() fails, simply clear

the error). This was necessary because there is lots of code out

there that already assumes this.

- Changes to PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_List() to use the

length of a sequence only as a hint -- if an IndexError happens

earlier, take that. (Formerly, this was considered an error.)

- Reformatted abstract.c to give it a more familiar "look" and fixed

many error checking bugs.

- Add NULL pointer checks to all calls of a C function through a type

object and extensions (e.g. nb_add).

- The code that initializes sys.path now calls Py_GetPythonHome()

instead of getenv("PYTHONHOME"). This, together with the new API

Py_SetPythonHome(), makes it easier for embedding applications to

change the notion of Python's "home" directory (where the libraries

etc. are sought).

- Fixed a very old bug in the parsing of "O?" format specifiers.

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

From 1.5 to 1.5.1

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

General

-------

- The documentation is now unbundled. It has also been extensively

modified (mostly to implement a new and more uniform formatting

style). We figure that most people will prefer to download one of the

preformatted documentation sets (HTML, PostScript or PDF) and that

only a minority have a need for the LaTeX or FrameMaker sources. Of

course, the unbundled documentation sources still released -- just not

in the same archive file, and perhaps not on the same date.

- All bugs noted on the errors page (and many unnoted) are fixed. All

new bugs take their places.

- No longer a core dump when attempting to print (or repr(), or str())

a list or dictionary that contains an instance of itself; instead, the

recursive entry is printed as [...] or {...}. See Py_ReprEnter() and

Py_ReprLeave() below. Comparisons of such objects still go beserk,

since this requires a different kind of fix; fortunately, this is a

less common scenario in practice.

Syntax change

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

- The raise statement can now be used without arguments, to re-raise

a previously set exception. This should be used after catching an

exception with an except clause only, either in the except clause or

later in the same function.

Import and module handling

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

- The implementation of import has changed to use a mutex (when

threading is supported). This means that when two threads

simultaneously import the same module, the import statements are

serialized. Recursive imports are not affected.

- Rewrote the finalization code almost completely, to be much more

careful with the order in which modules are destroyed. Destructors

will now generally be able to reference built-in names such as None

without trouble.

- Case-insensitive platforms such as Mac and Windows require the case

of a module's filename to match the case of the module name as

specified in the import statement (see below).

- The code for figuring out the default path now distinguishes between

files, modules, executable files, and directories. When expecting a

module, we also look for the .pyc or .pyo file.

Parser/tokenizer changes

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

- The tokenizer can now warn you when your source code mixes tabs and

spaces for indentation in a manner that depends on how much a tab is

worth in spaces. Use "python -t" or "python -v" to enable this

option. Use "python -tt" to turn the warnings into errors. (See also

tabnanny.py and tabpolice.py below.)

- Return unsigned characters from tok_nextc(), so '\377' isn't

mistaken for an EOF character.

- Fixed two pernicious bugs in the tokenizer that only affected AIX.

One was actually a general bug that was triggered by AIX's smaller I/O

buffer size. The other was a bug in the AIX optimizer's loop

unrolling code; swapping two statements made the problem go away.

Tools, demos and miscellaneous files

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

- There's a new version of Misc/python-mode.el (the Emacs mode for

Python) which is much smarter about guessing the indentation style

used in a particular file. Lots of other cool features too!

- There are two new tools in Tools/scripts: tabnanny.py and

tabpolice.py, implementing two different ways of checking whether a

file uses indentation in a way that is sensitive to the interpretation

of a tab. The preferred module is tabnanny.py (by Tim Peters).

- Some new demo programs:

Demo/tkinter/guido/paint.py -- Dave Mitchell

Demo/sockets/unixserver.py -- Piet van Oostrum

- Much better freeze support. The freeze script can now freeze

hierarchical module names (with a corresponding change to import.c),

and has a few extra options (e.g. to suppress freezing specific

modules). It also does much more on Windows NT.

- Version 1.0 of the faq wizard is included (only very small changes

since version 0.9.0).

- New feature for the ftpmirror script: when removing local files

(i.e., only when -r is used), do a recursive delete.

Configuring and building Python

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

- Get rid of the check for -linet -- recent Sequent Dynix systems don't

need this any more and apparently it screws up their configuration.

- Some changes because gcc on SGI doesn't support '-all'.

- Changed the build rules to use $(LIBRARY) instead of

-L.. -lpython$(VERSION)

since the latter trips up the SunOS 4.1.x linker (sigh).

- Fix the bug where the '# dgux is broken' comment in the Makefile

tripped over Make on some platforms.

- Changes for AIX: install the python.exp file; properly use

$(srcdir); the makexp_aix script now removes C++ entries of the form

Class::method.

- Deleted some Makefile targets only used by the (long obsolete)

gMakefile hacks.

Extension modules

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

- Performance and threading improvements to the socket and bsddb

modules, by Christopher Lindblad of Infoseek.

- Added operator.__not__ and operator.not_.

- In the thread module, when a thread exits due to an unhandled

exception, don't store the exception information in sys.last_*; it

prevents proper calling of destructors of local variables.

- Fixed a number of small bugs in the cPickle module.

- Changed find() and rfind() in the strop module so that

find("x","",2) returns -1, matching the implementation in string.py.

- In the time module, be more careful with the result of ctime(), and

test for HAVE_MKTIME before usinmg mktime().

- Doc strings contributed by Mitch Chapman to the termios, pwd, gdbm

modules.

- Added the LOG_SYSLOG constant to the syslog module, if defined.

Standard library modules

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

- All standard library modules have been converted to an indentation

style using either only tabs or only spaces -- never a mixture -- if

they weren't already consistent according to tabnanny. This means

that the new -t option (see above) won't complain about standard

library modules.

- New standard library modules:

threading -- GvR and the thread-sig

Java style thread objects -- USE THIS!!!

getpass -- Piers Lauder

simple utilities to prompt for a password and to

retrieve the current username

imaplib -- Piers Lauder

interface for the IMAP4 protocol

poplib -- David Ascher, Piers Lauder

interface for the POP3 protocol

smtplib -- Dragon De Monsyne

interface for the SMTP protocol

- Some obsolete modules moved to a separate directory (Lib/lib-old)

which is *not* in the default module search path:

Para

addpack

codehack

fmt

lockfile

newdir

ni

rand

tb

- New version of the PCRE code (Perl Compatible Regular Expressions --

the re module and the supporting pcre extension) by Andrew Kuchling.

Incompatible new feature in re.sub(): the handling of escapes in the

replacement string has changed.

- Interface change in the copy module: a __deepcopy__ method is now

called with the memo dictionary as an argument.

- Feature change in the tokenize module: differentiate between NEWLINE

token (an official newline) and NL token (a newline that the grammar

ignores).

- Several bugfixes to the urllib module. It is now truly thread-safe,

and several bugs and a portability problem have been fixed. New

features, all due to Sjoerd Mullender: When creating a temporary file,

it gives it an appropriate suffix. Support the "data:" URL scheme.

The open() method uses the tempcache.

- New version of the xmllib module (this time with a test suite!) by

Sjoerd Mullender.

- Added debugging code to the telnetlib module, to be able to trace

the actual traffic.

- In the rfc822 module, added support for deleting a header (still no

support for adding headers, though). Also fixed a bug where an

illegal address would cause a crash in getrouteaddr(), fixed a

sign reversal in mktime_tz(), and use the local timezone by default

(the latter two due to Bill van Melle).

- The normpath() function in the dospath and ntpath modules no longer

does case normalization -- for that, use the separate function

normcase() (which always existed); normcase() has been sped up and

fixed (it was the cause of a crash in Mark Hammond's installer in

certain locales).

- New command supported by the ftplib module: rmd(); also fixed some

minor bugs.

- The profile module now uses a different timer function by default --

time.clock() is generally better than os.times(). This makes it work

better on Windows NT, too.

- The tempfile module now recovers when os.getcwd() raises an

exception.

- Fixed some bugs in the random module; gauss() was subtly wrong, and

vonmisesvariate() should return a full circle. Courtesy Mike Miller,

Lambert Meertens (gauss()), and Magnus Kessler (vonmisesvariate()).

- Better default seed in the whrandom module, courtesy Andrew Kuchling.

- Fix slow close() in shelve module.

- The Unix mailbox class in the mailbox module is now more robust when

a line begins with the string "From " but is definitely not the start

of a new message. The pattern used can be changed by overriding a

method or class variable.

- Added a rmtree() function to the copy module.

- Fixed several typos in the pickle module. Also fixed problems when

unpickling in restricted execution environments.

- Added docstrings and fixed a typo in the py_compile and compileall

modules. At Mark Hammond's repeated request, py_compile now append a

newline to the source if it needs one. Both modules support an extra

parameter to specify the purported source filename (to be used in

error messages).

- Some performance tweaks by Jeremy Hylton to the gzip module.

- Fixed a bug in the merge order of dictionaries in the ConfigParser

module. Courtesy Barry Warsaw.

- In the multifile module, support the optional second parameter to

seek() when possible.

- Several fixes to the gopherlib module by Lars Marius Garshol. Also,

urlparse now correctly handles Gopher URLs with query strings.

- Fixed a tiny bug in format_exception() in the traceback module.

Also rewrite tb_lineno() to be compatible with JPython (and not

disturb the current exception!); by Jim Hugunin.

- The httplib module is more robust when servers send a short response

-- courtesy Tim O'Malley.

Tkinter and friends

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

- Various typos and bugs fixed.

- New module Tkdnd implements a drag-and-drop protocol (within one

application only).

- The event_*() widget methods have been restructured slightly -- they

no longer use the default root.

- The interfaces for the bind*() and unbind() widget methods have been

redesigned; the bind*() methods now return the name of the Tcl command

created for the callback, and this can be passed as a optional

argument to unbind() in order to delete the command (normally, such

commands are automatically unbound when the widget is destroyed, but

for some applications this isn't enough).

- Variable objects now have trace methods to interface to Tcl's

variable tracing facilities.

- Image objects now have an optional keyword argument, 'master', to

specify a widget (tree) to which they belong. The image_names() and

image_types() calls are now also widget methods.

- There's a new global call, Tkinter.NoDefaultRoot(), which disables

all use of the default root by the Tkinter library. This is useful to

debug applications that are in the process of being converted from

relying on the default root to explicit specification of the root

widget.

- The 'exit' command is deleted from the Tcl interpreter, since it

provided a loophole by which one could (accidentally) exit the Python

interpreter without invoking any cleanup code.

- Tcl_Finalize() is now registered as a Python low-level exit handle,

so Tcl will be finalized when Python exits.

The Python/C API

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

- New function PyThreadState_GetDict() returns a per-thread dictionary

intended for storing thread-local global variables.

- New functions Py_ReprEnter() and Py_ReprLeave() use the per-thread

dictionary to allow recursive container types to detect recursion in

their repr(), str() and print implementations.

- New function PyObject_Not(x) calculates (not x) according to Python's

standard rules (basically, it negates the outcome PyObject_IsTrue(x).

- New function _PyModule_Clear(), which clears a module's dictionary

carefully without removing the __builtins__ entry. This is implied

when a module object is deallocated (this used to clear the dictionary

completely).

- New function PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(), which extends

PyImport_ExecCodeModule() by adding an extra parameter to pass it the

true file.

- New functions Py_GetPythonHome() and Py_SetPythonHome(), intended to

allow embedded applications to force a different value for PYTHONHOME.

- New global flag Py_FrozenFlag is set when this is a "frozen" Python

binary; it suppresses warnings about not being able to find the

standard library directories.

- New global flag Py_TabcheckFlag is incremented by the -t option and

causes the tokenizer to issue warnings or errors about inconsistent

mixing of tabs and spaces for indentation.

Miscellaneous minor changes and bug fixes

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

- Improved the error message when an attribute of an attribute-less

object is requested -- include the name of the attribute and the type

of the object in the message.

- Sped up int(), long(), float() a bit.

- Fixed a bug in list.sort() that would occasionally dump core.

- Fixed a bug in PyNumber_Power() that caused numeric arrays to fail

when taken tothe real power.

- Fixed a number of bugs in the file reading code, at least one of

which could cause a core dump on NT, and one of which would

occasionally cause file.read() to return less than the full contents

of the file.

- Performance hack by Vladimir Marangozov for stack frame creation.

- Make sure setvbuf() isn't used unless HAVE_SETVBUF is defined.

Windows 95/NT

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

- The .lib files are now part of the distribution; they are collected

in the subdirectory "libs" of the installation directory.

- The extension modules (.pyd files) are now collected in a separate

subdirectory of the installation directory named "DLLs".

- The case of a module's filename must now match the case of the

module name as specified in the import statement. This is an

experimental feature -- if it turns out to break in too many

situations, it will be removed (or disabled by default) in the future.

It can be disabled on a per-case basis by setting the environment

variable PYTHONCASEOK (to any value).

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

From 1.5b2 to 1.5

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

- Newly documentated module: BaseHTTPServer.py, thanks to Greg Stein.

- Added doc strings to string.py, stropmodule.c, structmodule.c,

thanks to Charles Waldman.

- Many nits fixed in the manuals, thanks to Fred Drake and many others

(especially Rob Hooft and Andrew Kuchling). The HTML version now uses

HTML markup instead of inline GIF images for tables; only two images

are left (for obsure bits of math). The index of the HTML version has

also been much improved. Finally, it is once again possible to

generate an Emacs info file from the library manual (but I don't

commit to supporting this in future versions).

- New module: telnetlib.py (a simple telnet client library).

- New tool: Tools/versioncheck/, by Jack Jansen.

- Ported zlibmodule.c and bsddbmodule.c to NT; The project file for MS

DevStudio 5.0 now includes new subprojects to build the zlib and bsddb

extension modules.

- Many small changes again to Tkinter.py -- mostly bugfixes and adding

missing routines. Thanks to Greg McFarlane for reporting a bunch of

problems and proofreading my fixes.

- The re module and its documentation are up to date with the latest

version released to the string-sig (Dec. 22).

- Stop test_grp.py from failing when the /etc/group file is empty

(yes, this happens!).

- Fix bug in integer conversion (mystrtoul.c) that caused

4294967296==0 to be true!

- The VC++ 4.2 project file should be complete again.

- In tempfile.py, use a better template on NT, and add a new optional

argument "suffix" with default "" to specify a specific extension for

the temporary filename (needed sometimes on NT but perhaps also handy

elsewhere).

- Fixed some bugs in the FAQ wizard, and converted it to use re

instead of regex.

- Fixed a mysteriously undetected error in dlmodule.c (it was using a

totally bogus routine name to raise an exception).

- Fixed bug in import.c which wasn't using the new "dos-8x3" name yet.

- Hopefully harmless changes to the build process to support shared

libraries on DG/UX. This adds a target to create

libpython$(VERSION).so; however this target is *only* for DG/UX.

- Fixed a bug in the new format string error checking in getargs.c.

- A simple fix for infinite recursion when printing __builtins__:

reset '_' to None before printing and set it to the printed variable

*after* printing (and only when printing is successful).

- Fixed lib-tk/SimpleDialog.py to keep the dialog visible even if the

parent window is not (Skip Montanaro).

- Fixed the two most annoying problems with ftp URLs in

urllib.urlopen(); an empty file now correctly raises an error, and it

is no longer required to explicitly close the returned "file" object

before opening another ftp URL to the same host and directory.

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

From 1.5b1 to 1.5b2

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

- Fixed a bug in cPickle.c that caused it to crash right away because

the version string had a different format.

- Changes in pickle.py and cPickle.c: when unpickling an instance of a

class that doesn't define the __getinitargs__() method, the __init__()

constructor is no longer called. This makes a much larger group of

classes picklable by default, but may occasionally change semantics.

To force calling __init__() on unpickling, define a __getinitargs__()

method. Other changes too, in particular cPickle now handles classes

defined in packages correctly. The same change applies to copying

instances with copy.py. The cPickle.c changes and some pickle.py

changes are courtesy Jim Fulton.

- Locale support in he "re" (Perl regular expressions) module. Use

the flag re.L (or re.LOCALE) to enable locale-specific matching

rules for \w and \b. The in-line syntax for this flag is (?L).

- The built-in function isinstance(x, y) now also succeeds when y is

a type object and type(x) is y.

- repr() and str() of class and instance objects now reflect the

package/module in which the class is defined.