From 1.5.2b1 to 1.5.2b2

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General

-------

- Many memory leaks fixed.

- Many small bugs fixed.

- Command line option -OO (or -O -O) suppresses inclusion of doc

strings in resulting bytecode.

Windows-specific changes

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

- New built-in module winsound provides an interface to the Win32

PlaySound() call.

- Re-enable the audioop module in the config.c file.

- On Windows, support spawnv() and associated P_* symbols.

- Fixed the conversion of times() return values on Windows.

- Removed freeze from the installer -- it doesn't work without the

source tree. (See FAQ 8.11.)

- On Windows 95/98, the Tkinter module now is smart enough to find

Tcl/Tk even when the PATH environment variable hasn't been set -- when

the import of _tkinter fails, it searches in a standard locations,

patches os.environ["PATH"], and tries again. When it still fails, a

clearer error message is produced. This should avoid most

installation problems with Tkinter use (e.g. in IDLE).

- The -i option doesn't make any calls to set[v]buf() for stdin --

this apparentlt screwed up _kbhit() and the _tkinter main loop.

- The ntpath module (and hence, os.path on Windows) now parses out UNC

paths (e.g. \\host\mountpoint\dir\file) as "drive letters", so that

splitdrive() will \\host\mountpoint as the drive and \dir\file as the

path. ** EXPERIMENTAL **

- Added a hack to the exit code so that if (1) the exit status is

nonzero and (2) we think we have our own DOS box (i.e. we're not

started from a command line shell), we print a message and wait for

the user to hit a key before the DOS box is closed.

- Updated the installer to WISE 5.0g. Added a dialog warning about

the imminent Tcl installation. Added a dialog to specify the program

group name in the start menu. Upgraded the Tcl installer to Tcl

8.0.4.

Changes to intrinsics

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

- The repr() or str() of a module object now shows the __file__

attribute (i.e., the file which it was loaded), or the string

"(built-in)" if there is no __file__ attribute.

- The range() function now avoids overflow during its calculations (if

at all possible).

- New info string sys.hexversion, which is an integer encoding the

version in hexadecimal. In other words, hex(sys.hexversion) ==

0x010502b2 for Python 1.5.2b2.

New or improved ports

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

- Support for Nextstep descendants (future Mac systems).

- Improved BeOS support.

- Support dynamic loading of shared libraries on NetBSD platforms that

use ELF (i.e., MIPS and Alpha systems).

Configuration/build changes

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

- The Lib/test directory is no longer included in the default module

search path (sys.path) -- "test" has been a package ever since 1.5.

- Now using autoconf 2.13.

New library modules

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

- New library modules asyncore and asynchat: these form Sam Rushing's

famous asynchronous socket library. Sam has gracefully allowed me to

incorporate these in the standard Python library.

- New module statvfs contains indexing constants for [f]statvfs()

return tuple.

Changes to the library

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

- The wave module (platform-independent support for Windows sound

files) has been fixed to actually make it work.

- The sunau module (platform-independent support for Sun/NeXT sound

files) has been fixed to work across platforms. Also, a weird

encoding bug in the header of the audio test data file has been

corrected.

- Fix a bug in the urllib module that occasionally tripped up

webchecker and other ftp retrieves.

- ConfigParser's get() method now accepts an optional keyword argument

(vars) that is substituted on top of the defaults that were setup in

__init__. You can now also have recusive references in your

configuration file.

- Some improvements to the Queue module, including a put_nowait()

module and an optional "block" second argument, to get() and put(),

defaulting to 1.

- The updated xmllib module is once again compatible with the version

present in Python 1.5.1 (this was accidentally broken in 1.5.2b1).

- The bdb module (base class for the debugger) now supports

canonicalizing pathnames used in breakpoints. The derived class must

override the new canonical() method for this to work. Also changed

clear_break() to the backwards compatible old signature, and added

clear_bpbynumber() for the new functionality.

- In sgmllib (and hence htmllib), recognize attributes even if they

don't have space in front of them. I.e. '<a

name="foo"href="bar.html">' will now have two attributes recognized.

- In the debugger (pdb), change clear syntax to support three

alternatives: clear; clear file:line; clear bpno bpno ...

- The os.path module now pretends to be a submodule within the os

"package", so you can do things like "from os.path import exists".

- The standard exceptions now have doc strings.

- In the smtplib module, exceptions are now classes. Also avoid

inserting a non-standard space after "TO" in rcpt() command.

- The rfc822 module's getaddrlist() method now uses all occurrences of

the specified header instead of just the first. Some other bugfixes

too (to handle more weird addresses found in a very large test set,

and to avoid crashes on certain invalid dates), and a small test

module has been added.

- Fixed bug in urlparse in the common-case code for HTTP URLs; it

would lose the query, fragment, and/or parameter information.

- The sndhdr module no longer supports whatraw() -- it depended on a

rare extenral program.

- The UserList module/class now supports the extend() method, like

real list objects.

- The uu module now deals better with trailing garbage generated by

some broke uuencoders.

- The telnet module now has an my_interact() method which uses threads

instead of select. The interact() method uses this by default on

Windows (where the single-threaded version doesn't work).

- Add a class to mailbox.py for dealing with qmail directory

mailboxes. The test code was extended to notice these being used as

well.

Changes to extension modules

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

- Support for the [f]statvfs() system call, where it exists.

- Fixed some bugs in cPickle where bad input could cause it to dump

core.

- Fixed cStringIO to make the writelines() function actually work.

- Added strop.expandtabs() so string.expandtabs() is now much faster.

- Added fsync() and fdatasync(), if they appear to exist.

- Support for "long files" (64-bit seek pointers).

- Fixed a bug in the zlib module's flush() function.

- Added access() system call. It returns 1 if access granted, 0 if

not.

- The curses module implements an optional nlines argument to

w.scroll(). (It then calls wscrl(win, nlines) instead of scoll(win).)

Changes to tools

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

- Some changes to IDLE; see Tools/idle/NEWS.txt.

- Latest version of Misc/python-mode.el included.

Changes to Tkinter

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

- Avoid tracebacks when an image is deleted after its root has been

destroyed.

Changes to the Python/C API

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

- When parentheses are used in a PyArg_Parse[Tuple]() call, any

sequence is now accepted, instead of requiring a tuple. This is in

line with the general trend towards accepting arbitrary sequences.

- Added PyModule_GetFilename().

- In PyNumber_Power(), remove unneeded and even harmful test for float

to the negative power (which is already and better done in

floatobject.c).

- New version identification symbols; read patchlevel.h for info. The

version numbers are now exported by Python.h.

- Rolled back the API version change -- it's back to 1007!

- The frozenmain.c function calls PyInitFrozenExtensions().

- Added 'N' format character to Py_BuildValue -- like 'O' but doesn't

INCREF.

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