1.6 is history.

1 files changed, 305 insertions, 1 deletions

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@@ -1,4 +1,4 @@
-Python history
+Python History
 --------------
 
 This file contains the release messages for previous Python releases.
@@ -8,6 +8,310 @@ As you read on you go back to the dark ages of Python's history.
 ======================================================================
 
 
+What's new in release 1.6?
+==========================
+
+Below is a list of all relevant changes since release 1.5.2.
+
+
+Source Incompatibilities
+------------------------
+
+Several small incompatible library changes may trip you up:
+
+  - The append() method for lists can no longer be invoked with more
+  than one argument.  This used to append a single tuple made out of
+  all arguments, but was undocumented.  To append a tuple, use
+  e.g. l.append((a, b, c)).
+
+  - The connect(), connect_ex() and bind() methods for sockets require
+  exactly one argument.  Previously, you could call s.connect(host,
+  port), but this was undocumented. You must now write
+  s.connect((host, port)).
+
+  - The str() and repr() functions are now different more often.  For
+  long integers, str() no longer appends a 'L'.  Thus, str(1L) == '1',
+  which used to be '1L'; repr(1L) is unchanged and still returns '1L'.
+  For floats, repr() now gives 17 digits of precision, to ensure no
+  precision is lost (on all current hardware).
+
+  - The -X option is gone.  Built-in exceptions are now always
+  classes.  Many more library modules also have been converted to
+  class-based exceptions.
+
+
+Binary Incompatibilities
+------------------------
+
+- Third party extensions built for Python 1.5.x cannot be used with
+Python 1.6; these extensions will have to be rebuilt for Python 1.6.
+
+- On Windows, attempting to import a third party extension built for
+Python 1.5.x results in an immediate crash; there's not much we can do
+about this.  Check your PYTHONPATH environment variable!
+
+
+Overview of Changes since 1.5.2
+-------------------------------
+
+For this overview, I have borrowed from the document "What's New in
+Python 2.0" by Andrew Kuchling and Moshe Zadka:
+http://starship.python.net/crew/amk/python/writing/new-python/.
+
+There are lots of new modules and lots of bugs have been fixed.  A
+list of all new modules is included below.
+
+Probably the most pervasive change is the addition of Unicode support.
+We've added a new fundamental datatype, the Unicode string, a new
+build-in function unicode(), an numerous C APIs to deal with Unicode
+and encodings.  See the file Misc/unicode.txt for details, or
+http://starship.python.net/crew/lemburg/unicode-proposal.txt.
+
+Two other big changes, related to the Unicode support, are the
+addition of string methods and (yet another) new regular expression
+engine.
+
+  - String methods mean that you can now say s.lower() etc. instead of
+  importing the string module and saying string.lower(s) etc.  One
+  peculiarity is that the equivalent of string.join(sequence,
+  delimiter) is delimiter.join(sequence).  Use " ".join(sequence) for
+  the effect of string.join(sequence); to make this more readable, try
+  space=" " first.  Note that the maxsplit argument defaults in
+  split() and replace() have changed from 0 to -1.
+
+  - The new regular expression engine, SRE by Fredrik Lundh, is fully
+  backwards compatible with the old engine, and is in fact invoked
+  using the same interface (the "re" module).  You can explicitly
+  invoke the old engine by import pre, or the SRE engine by importing
+  sre.  SRE is faster than pre, and supports Unicode (which was the
+  main reason to put effort in yet another new regular expression
+  engine -- this is at least the fourth!).
+
+
+Other Changes
+-------------
+
+Other changes that won't break code but are nice to know about:
+
+Deleting objects is now safe even for deeply nested data structures.
+
+Long/int unifications: long integers can be used in seek() calls, as
+slice indexes.
+
+String formatting (s % args) has a new formatting option, '%r', which
+acts like '%s' but inserts repr(arg) instead of str(arg). (Not yet in
+alpha 1.)
+
+Greg Ward's "distutils" package is included: this will make
+installing, building and distributing third party packages much
+simpler.
+
+There's now special syntax that you can use instead of the apply()
+function.  f(*args, **kwds) is equivalent to apply(f, args, kwds).
+You can also use variations f(a1, a2, *args, **kwds) and you can leave
+one or the other out: f(*args), f(**kwds).
+
+The built-ins int() and long() take an optional second argument to
+indicate the conversion base -- of course only if the first argument
+is a string.  This makes string.atoi() and string.atol() obsolete.
+(string.atof() was already obsolete).
+
+When a local variable is known to the compiler but undefined when
+used, a new exception UnboundLocalError is raised.  This is a class
+derived from NameError so code catching NameError should still work.
+The purpose is to provide better diagnostics in the following example:
+  x = 1
+  def f():
+      print x
+      x = x+1
+This used to raise a NameError on the print statement, which confused
+even experienced Python programmers (especially if there are several
+hundreds of lines of code between the reference and the assignment to
+x :-).
+
+You can now override the 'in' operator by defining a __contains__
+method.  Note that it has its arguments backwards: x in a causes
+a.__contains__(x) to be called.  That's why the name isn't __in__.
+
+The exception AttributeError will have a more friendly error message,
+e.g.: <code>'Spam' instance has no attribute 'eggs'</code>.  This may
+<b>break code</b> that expects the message to be exactly the attribute
+name.
+
+
+New Modules in 1.6
+------------------
+
+UserString - base class for deriving from the string type.
+
+distutils - tools for distributing Python modules.
+
+robotparser - parse a robots.txt file, for writing web spiders.
+(Moved from Tools/webchecker/.)
+
+linuxaudiodev - audio for Linux.
+
+mmap - treat a file as a memory buffer.  (Windows and Unix.)
+
+sre - regular expressions (fast, supports unicode).  Currently, this
+code is very rough.  Eventually, the re module will be reimplemented
+using sre (without changes to the re API).
+
+filecmp - supersedes the old cmp.py and dircmp.py modules.
+
+tabnanny - check Python sources for tab-width dependance.  (Moved from
+Tools/scripts/.)
+
+urllib2 - new and improved but incompatible version of urllib (still
+experimental).
+
+zipfile - read and write zip archives.
+
+codecs - support for Unicode encoders/decoders.
+
+unicodedata - provides access to the Unicode 3.0 database.
+
+_winreg - Windows registry access.
+
+encodings - package which provides a large set of standard codecs --
+currently only for the new Unicode support. It has a drop-in extension
+mechanism which allows you to add new codecs by simply copying them
+into the encodings package directory. Asian codec support will
+probably be made available as separate distribution package built upon
+this technique and the new distutils package.
+
+
+Changed Modules
+---------------
+
+readline, ConfigParser, cgi, calendar, posix, readline, xmllib, aifc,
+chunk, wave, random, shelve, nntplib - minor enhancements.
+
+socket, httplib, urllib - optional OpenSSL support (Unix only).
+
+_tkinter - support for 8.0 up to 8.3.  Support for versions older than
+8.0 has been dropped.
+
+string - most of this module is deprecated now that strings have
+methods.  This no longer uses the built-in strop module, but takes
+advantage of the new string methods to provide transparent support for
+both Unicode and ordinary strings.
+
+
+Changes on Windows
+------------------
+
+The installer no longer runs a separate Tcl/Tk installer; instead, it
+installs the needed Tcl/Tk files directly in the Python directory.  If
+you already have a Tcl/Tk installation, this wastes some disk space
+(about 4 Megs) but avoids problems with conflincting Tcl/Tk
+installations, and makes it much easier for Python to ensure that
+Tcl/Tk can find all its files.  Note: the alpha installers don't
+include the documentation.
+
+The Windows installer now installs by default in \Python16\ on the
+default volume, instead of \Program Files\Python-1.6\.
+
+
+Changed Tools
+-------------
+
+IDLE - complete overhaul.  See the <a href="../idle/">IDLE home
+page</a> for more information.  (Python 1.6 alpha 1 will come with
+IDLE 0.6.)
+
+Tools/i18n/pygettext.py - Python equivalent of xgettext(1).  A message
+text extraction tool used for internationalizing applications written
+in Python.
+
+
+Obsolete Modules
+----------------
+
+stdwin and everything that uses it.  (Get Python 1.5.2 if you need
+it. :-)
+
+soundex.  (Skip Montanaro has a version in Python but it won't be
+included in the Python release.)
+
+cmp, cmpcache, dircmp.  (Replaced by filecmp.)
+
+dump.  (Use pickle.)
+
+find.  (Easily coded using os.walk().)
+
+grep.  (Not very useful as a library module.)
+
+packmail.  (No longer has any use.)
+
+poly, zmod.  (These were poor examples at best.)
+
+strop.  (No longer needed by the string module.)
+
+util.  (This functionality was long ago built in elsewhere).
+
+whatsound.  (Use sndhdr.)
+
+
+Detailed Changes from 1.6b1 to 1.6
+----------------------------------
+
+- Slight changes to the CNRI license.  A copyright notice has been
+added; the requirement to indicate the nature of modifications now
+applies when making a derivative work available "to others" instead of
+just "to the public"; the version and date are updated.  The new
+license has a new handle.
+
+- Added the Tools/compiler package.  This is a project led by Jeremy
+Hylton to write the Python bytecode generator in Python.
+
+- The function math.rint() is removed.
+
+- In Python.h, "#define _GNU_SOURCE 1" was added.
+
+- Version 0.9.1 of Greg Ward's distutils is included (instead of
+version 0.9).
+
+- A new version of SRE is included.  It is more stable, and more
+compatible with the old RE module.  Non-matching ranges are indicated
+by -1, not None.  (The documentation said None, but the PRE
+implementation used -1; changing to None would break existing code.)
+
+- The winreg module has been renamed to _winreg.  (There are plans for
+a higher-level API called winreg, but this has not yet materialized in
+a form that is acceptable to the experts.)
+
+- The _locale module is enabled by default.
+
+- Fixed the configuration line for the _curses module.
+
+- A few crashes have been fixed, notably <file>.writelines() with a
+list containing non-string objects would crash, and there were
+situations where a lost SyntaxError could dump core.
+
+- The <list>.extend() method now accepts an arbitrary sequence
+argument.
+
+- If __str__() or __repr__() returns a Unicode object, this is
+converted to an 8-bit string.
+
+- Unicode string comparisons is no longer aware of UTF-16
+encoding peculiarities; it's a straight 16-bit compare.
+
+- The Windows installer now installs the LICENSE file and no longer
+registers the Python DLL version in the registry (this is no longer
+needed).  It now uses Tcl/Tk 8.3.2.
+
+- A few portability problems have been fixed, in particular a
+compilation error involving socklen_t.
+
+- The PC configuration is slightly friendlier to non-Microsoft
+compilers.
+
+
+======================================================================
+
+
 From 1.5.2c1 to 1.5.2 (final)
 =============================