This is Python release 1.5 beta 2

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

The official release date for this version is Friday, December 12,

1997.

If you previously downloaded 1.5b1, here are the most relevant changes

and some documentation has been added). The full list of changes

since 1.5b1 is presented at the end of the Misc/NEWS file.

- Thanks to all who contributed doc strings for library modules!

- The portability problems caused by indented preprocessor commands

and C++ style comments should be gone now.

- Lots of improvements to python-mode.el again.

- 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.

- Locale support in the "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 configuration adds a new main program, "pythonw", and

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

standard 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.