Python history

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

This file contains the release messages for previous Python releases.

As you read on you go back to the dark ages of Python's history.

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

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.

- Module "ni" has been removed. (If you really need it, it's been

renamed to "ni1". Let me know if this causes any problems for you.

Package authors are encouraged to write __init__.py files that

support both ni and 1.5 package support, so the same version can be

used with Python 1.4 as well as 1.5.)

- The thread module is now automatically included when threads are

configured. (You must remove it from your existing Setup file,

since it is now in its own Setup.thread file.)

- New command line option "-x" to skip the first line of the script;

handy to make executable scripts on non-Unix platforms.

- In importdl.c, add the RTLD_GLOBAL to the dlopen() flags. I

haven't checked how this affects things, but it should make symbols

in one shared library available to the next one.

- The Windows installer now installs in the "Program Files" folder on

the proper volume by default.

- The Windows configuration adds a new main program, "pythonw", and

registers a new extension, ".pyw" that invokes this. This is a

pstandard Python interpreter that does not pop up a console window;

handy for pure Tkinter applications. All output to the original

stdout and stderr is lost; reading from the original stdin yields

EOF. Also, both python.exe and pythonw.exe now have a pretty icon

(a green snake in a box, courtesy Mark Hammond).

- Lots of improvements to emacs-mode.el again. See Barry's web page:

http://www.python.org/ftp/emacs/pmdetails.html.

- Lots of improvements and additions to the library reference manual;

many by Fred Drake.

- Doc strings for the following modules: rfc822.py, posixpath.py,

ntpath.py, httplib.py. Thanks to Mitch Chapman and Charles Waldman.

- Some more regression testing.

- An optional 4th (maxsplit) argument to strop.replace().

- Fixed handling of maxsplit in string.splitfields().

- Tweaked os.environ so it can be pickled and copied.

- The portability problems caused by indented preprocessor commands

and C++ style comments should be gone now.

- In random.py, added Pareto and Weibull distributions.

- The crypt module is now disabled in Modules/Setup.in by default; it

is rarely needed and causes errors on some systems where users often

don't know how to deal with those.

- Some improvements to the _tkinter build line suggested by Case Roole.

- A full suite of platform specific files for NetBSD 1.x, submitted by

Anders Andersen.

- New Solaris specific header STROPTS.py.

- Moved a confusing occurrence of *shared* from the comments in

Modules/Setup.in (people would enable this one instead of the real

one, and get disappointing results).

- Changed the default mode for directories to be group-writable when

the installation process creates them.

- Check for pthread support in "-l_r" for FreeBSD/NetBSD, and support

shared libraries for both.

- Support FreeBSD and NetBSD in posixfile.py.

- Support for the "event" command, new in Tk 4.2. By Case Roole.

- Add Tix_SafeInit() support to tkappinit.c.

- Various bugs fixed in "re.py" and "pcre.c".

- Fixed a bug (broken use of the syntax table) in the old "regexpr.c".

- In frozenmain.c, stdin is made unbuffered too when PYTHONUNBUFFERED

is set.

- Provide default blocksize for retrbinary in ftplib.py (Skip

Montanaro).

- In NT, pick the username up from different places in user.py (Jeff

Bauer).

- Patch to urlparse.urljoin() for ".." and "..#1", Marc Lemburg.

- Many small improvements to Jeff Rush' OS/2 support.

- ospath.py is gone; it's been obsolete for so many years now...

- The reference manual is now set up to prepare better HTML (still

using webmaker, alas).

- Add special handling to /Tools/freeze for Python modules that are

imported implicitly by the Python runtime: 'site' and 'exceptions'.

- Tools/faqwiz 0.8.3 -- add an option to suppress URL processing

inside <PRE>, by "Scott".

- Added ConfigParser.py, a generic parser for sectioned configuration

files.

- In _localemodule.c, LC_MESSAGES is not always defined; put it

between #ifdefs.

- Typo in resource.c: RUSAGE_CHILDERN -> RUSAGE_CHILDREN.

- Demo/scripts/newslist.py: Fix the way the version number is gotten

out of the RCS revision.

- PyArg_Parse[Tuple] now explicitly check for bad characters at the

end of the format string.

- Revamped PC/example_nt to support VC++ 5.x.

- <listobject>.sort() now uses a modified quicksort by Raymund Galvin,

after studying the GNU libg++ quicksort. This should be much faster

if there are lots of duplicates, and otherwise at least as good.

- Added "uue" as an alias for "uuencode" to mimetools.py. (Hm, the

uudecode bug where it complaints about trailing garbage is still there

:-( ).

- pickle.py requires integers in text mode to be in decimal notation

(it used to accept octal and hex, even though it would only generate

decimal numbers).

- In string.atof(), don't fail when the "re" module is unavailable.

Plug the ensueing security leak by supplying an empty __builtins__

directory to eval().

- A bunch of small fixes and improvements to Tkinter.py.

- Fixed a buffer overrun in PC/getpathp.c.

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

From 1.5a4 to 1.5b1

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

- The Windows NT/95 installer now includes full HTML of all manuals.

It also has a checkbox that lets you decide whether to install the

interpreter and library. The WISE installer script for the installer

is included in the source tree as PC/python15.wse, and so are the

icons used for Python files. The config.c file for the Windows build

is now complete with the pcre module.

- sys.ps1 and sys.ps2 can now arbitrary objects; their str() is

evaluated for the prompt.

- The reference manual is brought up to date (more or less -- it still

needs work, e.g. in the area of package import).

- The icons used by latex2html are now included in the Doc

subdirectory (mostly so that tarring up the HTML files can be fully

automated). A simple index.html is also added to Doc (it only works

after you have successfully run latex2html).

- For all you would-be proselytizers out there: a new version of

Misc/BLURB describes Python more concisely, and Misc/comparisons

compares Python to several other languages. Misc/BLURB.WINDOWS

contains a blurb specifically aimed at Windows programmers (by Mark

Hammond).

- A new version of the Python mode for Emacs is included as

Misc/python-mode.el. There are too many new features to list here.

See http://www.python.org/ftp/emacs/pmdetails.html for more info.

- New module fileinput makes iterating over the lines of a list of

files easier. (This still needs some more thinking to make it more

extensible.)

- There's full OS/2 support, courtesy Jeff Rush. To build the OS/2

version, see PC/readme.txt and PC/os2vacpp. This is for IBM's Visual

Age C++ compiler. I expect that Jeff will also provide a binary

release for this platform.

- On Linux, the configure script now uses '-Xlinker -export-dynamic'

instead of '-rdynamic' to link the main program so that it exports its

symbols to shared libraries it loads dynamically. I hope this doesn't

break on older Linux versions; it is needed for mklinux and appears to

work on Linux 2.0.30.

- Some Tkinter resstructuring: the geometry methods that apply to a

master are now properly usable on toplevel master widgets. There's a

new (internal) widget class, BaseWidget. New, longer "official" names

for the geometry manager methods have been added,

e.g. "grid_columnconfigure()" instead of "columnconfigure()". The old

shorter names still work, and where there's ambiguity, pack wins over

place wins over grid. Also, the bind_class method now returns its

value.

- New, RFC-822 conformant parsing of email addresses and address lists

in the rfc822 module, courtesy Ben Escoto.

- New, revamped tkappinit.c with support for popular packages (PIL,

TIX, BLT, TOGL). For the last three, you need to execute the Tcl

command "load {} Tix" (or Blt, or Togl) to gain access to them.

The Modules/Setup line for the _tkinter module has been rewritten

using the cool line-breaking feature of most Bourne shells.

- New socket method connect_ex() returns the error code from connect()

instead of raising an exception on errors; this makes the logic

required for asynchronous connects simpler and more efficient.

- New "locale" module with (still experimental) interface to the

standard C library locale interface, courtesy Martin von Loewis. This

does not repeat my mistake in 1.5a4 of always calling

setlocale(LC_ALL, ""). In fact, we've pretty much decided that

Python's standard numerical formatting operations should always use

the conventions for the C locale; the locale module contains utility

functions to format numbers according to the user specified locale.

(All this is accomplished by an explicit call to setlocale(LC_NUMERIC,

"C") after locale-changing calls.) See the library manual. (Alas, the

promised changes to the "re" module for locale support have not been

materialized yet. If you care, volunteer!)

- Memory leak plugged in Py_BuildValue when building a dictionary.

- Shared modules can now live inside packages (hierarchical module

namespaces). No changes to the shared module itself are needed.

- Improved policy for __builtins__: this is a module in __main__ and a

dictionary everywhere else.

- Python no longer catches SIGHUP and SIGTERM by default. This was

impossible to get right in the light of thread contexts. If you want

your program to clean up when a signal happens, use the signal module

to set up your own signal handler.

- New Python/C API PyNumber_CoerceEx() does not return an exception

when no coercion is possible. This is used to fix a problem where

comparing incompatible numbers for equality would raise an exception

rather than return false as in Python 1.4 -- it once again will return

false.

- The errno module is changed again -- the table of error messages

(errorstr) is removed. Instead, you can use os.strerror(). This

removes redundance and a potential locale dependency.

- New module xmllib, to parse XML files. By Sjoerd Mullender.

- New C API PyOS_AfterFork() is called after fork() in posixmodule.c.

It resets the signal module's notion of what the current process ID

and thread are, so that signal handlers will work after (and across)

calls to os.fork().

- Fixed most occurrences of fatal errors due to missing thread state.

- For vgrind (a flexible source pretty printer) fans, there's a simple

Python definition in Misc/vgrindefs, courtesy Neale Pickett.

- Fixed memory leak in exec statement.

- The test.pystone module has a new function, pystones(loops=LOOPS),

which returns a (benchtime, stones) tuple. The main() function now

calls this and prints the report.

- Package directories now *require* the presence of an __init__.py (or

__init__.pyc) file before they are considered as packages. This is

done to prevent accidental subdirectories with common names from

overriding modules with the same name.

- Fixed some strange exceptions in __del__ methods in library modules

(e.g. urllib). This happens because the builtin names are already

deleted by the time __del__ is called. The solution (a hack, but it

works) is to set some instance variables to 0 instead of None.

- The table of built-in module initializers is replaced by a pointer

variable. This makes it possible to switch to a different table at

run time, e.g. when a collection of modules is loaded from a shared

library. (No example code of how to do this is given, but it is

possible.) The table is still there of course, its name prefixed with

an underscore and used to initialize the pointer.

- The warning about a thread still having a frame now only happens in

verbose mode.

- Change the signal finialization so that it also resets the signal

handlers. After this has been called, our signal handlers are no

longer active!

- New version of tokenize.py (by Ka-Ping Yee) recognizes raw string

literals. There's now also a test fort this module.

- The copy module now also uses __dict__.update(state) instead of

going through individual attribute assignments, for class instances

without a __setstate__ method.

- New module reconvert translates old-style (regex module) regular

expressions to new-style (re module, Perl-style) regular expressions.

- Most modules that used to use the regex module now use the re

module. The grep module has a new pgrep() function which uses

Perl-style regular expressions.

- The (very old, backwards compatibility) regexp.py module has been

deleted.

- Restricted execution (rexec): added the pcre module (support for the

re module) to the list of trusted extension modules.

- New version of Jim Fulton's CObject object type, adds

PyCObject_FromVoidPtrAndDesc() and PyCObject_GetDesc() APIs.

- Some patches to Lee Busby's fpectl mods that accidentally didn't

make it into 1.5a4.

- In the string module, add an optional 4th argument to count(),

matching find() etc.

- Patch for the nntplib module by Charles Waldman to add optional user

and password arguments to NNTP.__init__(), for nntp servers that need

them.

- The str() function for class objects now returns

"modulename.classname" instead of returning the same as repr().

- The parsing of \xXX escapes no longer relies on sscanf().

- The "sharedmodules" subdirectory of the installation is renamed to

"lib-dynload". (You may have to edit your Modules/Setup file to fix

this in an existing installation!)

- Fixed Don Beaudry's mess-up with the OPT test in the configure

script. Certain SGI platforms will still issue a warning for each

compile; there's not much I can do about this since the compiler's

exit status doesn't indicate that I was using an obsolete option.

- Fixed Barry's mess-up with {}.get(), and added test cases for it.

- Shared libraries didn't quite work under AIX because of the change

in status of the GNU readline interface. Fix due to by Vladimir

Marangozov.

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

From 1.5a3 to 1.5a4

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

- faqwiz.py: version 0.8; Recognize https:// as URL; <html>...</html>

feature; better install instructions; removed faqmain.py (which was an

older version).

- nntplib.py: Fixed some bugs reported by Lars Wirzenius (to Debian)

about the treatment of lines starting with '.'. Added a minimal test

function.

- struct module: ignore most whitespace in format strings.

- urllib.py: close the socket and temp file in URLopener.retrieve() so

that multiple retrievals using the same connection work.

- All standard exceptions are now classes by default; use -X to make

them strings (for backward compatibility only).

- There's a new standard exception hierarchy, defined in the standard

library module exceptions.py (which you never need to import

explicitly). See

http://grail.cnri.reston.va.us/python/essays/stdexceptions.html for

more info.

- Three new C API functions:

- int PyErr_GivenExceptionMatches(obj1, obj2)

Returns 1 if obj1 and obj2 are the same object, or if obj1 is an

instance of type obj2, or of a class derived from obj2

- int PyErr_ExceptionMatches(obj)

Higher level wrapper around PyErr_GivenExceptionMatches() which uses

PyErr_Occurred() as obj1. This will be the more commonly called

function.

- void PyErr_NormalizeException(typeptr, valptr, tbptr)

Normalizes exceptions, and places the normalized values in the

arguments. If type is not a class, this does nothing. If type is a

class, then it makes sure that value is an instance of the class by:

1. if instance is of the type, or a class derived from type, it does

nothing.

2. otherwise it instantiates the class, using the value as an

argument. If value is None, it uses an empty arg tuple, and if

the value is a tuple, it uses just that.

- Another new C API function: PyErr_NewException() creates a new

exception class derived from Exception; when -X is given, it creates a

new string exception.

- core interpreter: remove the distinction between tuple and list

unpacking; allow an arbitrary sequence on the right hand side of any

unpack instruction. (UNPACK_LIST and UNPACK_TUPLE now do the same

thing, which should really be called UNPACK_SEQUENCE.)

- classes: Allow assignments to an instance's __dict__ or __class__,

so you can change ivars (including shared ivars -- shock horror) and

change classes dynamically. Also make the check on read-only

attributes of classes less draconic -- only the specials names

__dict__, __bases__, __name__ and __{get,set,del}attr__ can't be

assigned.

- Two new built-in functions: issubclass() and isinstance(). Both

take classes as their second arguments. The former takes a class as

the first argument and returns true iff first is second, or is a

subclass of second. The latter takes any object as the first argument

and returns true iff first is an instance of the second, or any

subclass of second.

- configure: Added configuration tests for presence of alarm(),

pause(), and getpwent().

- Doc/Makefile: changed latex2html targets.

- classes: Reverse the search order for the Don Beaudry hook so that

the first class with an applicable hook wins. Makes more sense.

- Changed the checks made in Py_Initialize() and Py_Finalize(). It is

now legal to call these more than once. The first call to

Py_Initialize() initializes, the first call to Py_Finalize()

finalizes. There's also a new API, Py_IsInitalized() which checks

whether we are already initialized (in case you want to leave things

as they were).

- Completely disable the declarations for malloc(), realloc() and

free(). Any 90's C compiler has these in header files, and the tests

to decide whether to suppress the declarations kept failing on some

platforms.

- *Before* (instead of after) signalmodule.o is added, remove both

intrcheck.o and sigcheck.o. This should get rid of warnings in ar or

ld on various systems.

- Added reop to PC/config.c

- configure: Decided to use -Aa -D_HPUX_SOURCE on HP-UX platforms.

Removed outdated HP-UX comments from README. Added Cray T3E comments.

- Various renames of statically defined functions that had name

conflicts on some systems, e.g. strndup (GNU libc), join (Cray),

roundup (sys/types.h).

- urllib.py: Interpret three slashes in file: URL as local file (for

Netscape on Windows/Mac).

- copy.py: Make sure the objects returned by __getinitargs__() are

kept alive (in the memo) to avoid a certain kind of nasty crash. (Not

easily reproducable because it requires a later call to

__getinitargs__() to return a tuple that happens to be allocated at

the same address.)

- Added definition of AR to toplevel Makefile. Renamed @buildno temp

file to buildno1.

- Moved Include/assert.h to Parser/assert.h, which seems to be the

only place where it's needed.

- Tweaked the dictionary lookup code again for some more speed

(Vladimir Marangozov).

- NT build: Changed the way python15.lib is included in the other

projects. Per Mark Hammond's suggestion, add it to the extra libs in

Settings instead of to the project's source files.

- regrtest.py: Change default verbosity so that there are only three

levels left: -q, default and -v. In default mode, the name of each

test is now printed. -v is the same as the old -vv. -q is more quiet

than the old default mode.

- Removed the old FAQ from the distribution. You now have to get it

from the web!

- Removed the PC/make_nt.in file from the distribution; it is no

longer needed.

- Changed the build sequence so that shared modules are built last.

This fixes things for AIX and doesn't hurt elsewhere.

- Improved test for GNU MP v1 in mpzmodule.c

- fileobject.c: ftell() on Linux discards all buffered data; changed

read() code to use lseek() instead to get the same effect

- configure.in, configure, importdl.c: NeXT sharedlib fixes

- tupleobject.c: PyTuple_SetItem asserts refcnt==1

- resource.c: Different strategy regarding whether to declare

getrusage() and getpagesize() -- #ifdef doesn't work, Linux has

conflicting decls in its headers. Choice: only declare the return