diff options
Diffstat (limited to 'Doc/whatsnew')
| -rw-r--r-- | Doc/whatsnew/2.6.rst | 75 |
1 files changed, 60 insertions, 15 deletions
diff --git a/Doc/whatsnew/2.6.rst b/Doc/whatsnew/2.6.rst index eb5d4b2..9c4a877 100644 --- a/Doc/whatsnew/2.6.rst +++ b/Doc/whatsnew/2.6.rst @@ -119,7 +119,7 @@ While 2.6 was being developed, the Python development process underwent two significant changes: the developer group switched from SourceForge's issue tracker to a customized Roundup installation, and the documentation was converted from -LaTeX to reStructured Text. +LaTeX to reStructuredText. New Issue Tracker: Roundup @@ -137,7 +137,7 @@ SourceForge. Four different trackers were examined: Atlassian's `Jira <http://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/>`__, `Launchpad <http://www.launchpad.net>`__, `Roundup <http://roundup.sourceforge.net/>`__, and -Trac <http://trac.edgewall.org/>`__. +`Trac <http://trac.edgewall.org/>`__. The committee eventually settled on Jira and Roundup as the two candidates. Jira is a commercial product that offers a no-cost hosted instance to free-software projects; Roundup @@ -171,7 +171,7 @@ http://svn.python.org/view/tracker/importer/. Roundup downloads and documentation. -New Documentation Format: ReStructured Text Using Sphinx +New Documentation Format: reStructuredText Using Sphinx ----------------------------------------------------------- Since the Python project's inception around 1989, the documentation @@ -195,7 +195,7 @@ and no one pursued the task to completion. During the 2.6 development cycle, Georg Brandl put a substantial effort into building a new toolchain for processing the documentation. The resulting package is called Sphinx, and is available from -http://sphinx.pocoo.org/. The input format is reStructured Text, a +http://sphinx.pocoo.org/. The input format is reStructuredText, a markup commonly used in the Python community that supports custom extensions and directives. Sphinx concentrates on HTML output, producing attractively styled and modern HTML, though printed output @@ -211,7 +211,7 @@ standalone package that can be used in documenting other projects. Documentation and code for the Sphinx toolchain. `Docutils <http://docutils.sf.net>`__ - The underlying reStructured Text parser and toolset. + The underlying reStructuredText parser and toolset. PEP 343: The 'with' statement @@ -734,7 +734,8 @@ and it also supports the ``b''`` notation. There's also a ``__future__`` import that causes all string literals to become Unicode strings. This means that ``\u`` escape sequences -can be used to include Unicode characters. +can be used to include Unicode characters:: + from __future__ import unicode_literals @@ -744,6 +745,7 @@ can be used to include Unicode characters. print len(s) # 12 Unicode characters + .. seealso:: :pep:`3112` - Bytes literals in Python 3000 @@ -1383,6 +1385,11 @@ Here are all of the changes that Python 2.6 makes to the core Python language. Optimizations ------------- +* The :mod:`warnings` module has been rewritten in C. This makes + it possible to invoke warnings from the parser, and may also + make the interpreter's startup faster. + (Contributed by Neal Norwitz and Brett Cannon; :issue:`1631171`.) + * Type objects now have a cache of methods that can reduce the amount of work required to find the correct method implementation for a particular class; once cached, the interpreter doesn't need to @@ -1401,7 +1408,7 @@ Optimizations built-in types. This speeds up checking if an object is a subclass of one of these types. (Contributed by Neal Norwitz.) -* Unicode strings now uses faster code for detecting +* Unicode strings now use faster code for detecting whitespace and line breaks; this speeds up the :meth:`split` method by about 25% and :meth:`splitlines` by 35%. (Contributed by Antoine Pitrou.) Memory usage is reduced @@ -1801,6 +1808,24 @@ complete list of changes, or look through the CVS logs for all the details. opcodes, returning a shorter pickle that contains the same data structure. (Contributed by Raymond Hettinger.) +* A :func:`get_data` function was added to the :mod:`pkgutil` + module that returns the contents of resource files included + with an installed Python package. For example:: + + >>> import pkgutil + >>> pkgutil.get_data('test', 'exception_hierarchy.txt') + 'BaseException + +-- SystemExit + +-- KeyboardInterrupt + +-- GeneratorExit + +-- Exception + +-- StopIteration + +-- StandardError + ...' + >>> + + (Contributed by Paul Moore; :issue:`2439`.) + * New functions in the :mod:`posix` module: :func:`chflags` and :func:`lchflags` are wrappers for the corresponding system calls (where they're available). Constants for the flag values are defined in the :mod:`stat` module; some @@ -1934,6 +1959,13 @@ complete list of changes, or look through the CVS logs for all the details. * The :mod:`struct` module now supports the C99 :ctype:`_Bool` type, using the format character ``'?'``. (Contributed by David Remahl.) + +* The :class:`Popen` objects provided by the :mod:`subprocess` module + now have :meth:`terminate`, :meth:`kill`, and :meth:`send_signal` methods. + On Windows, :meth:`send_signal` only supports the :const:`SIGTERM` + signal, and all these methods are aliases for the Win32 API function + :cfunc:`TerminateProcess`. + (Contributed by Christian Heimes.) * A new variable in the :mod:`sys` module, :attr:`float_info`, is an object @@ -2088,6 +2120,14 @@ complete list of changes, or look through the CVS logs for all the details. information. (Contributed by Alan McIntyre as part of his project for Google's Summer of Code 2007.) +* The :mod:`xmlrpclib` module no longer automatically converts + :class:`datetime.date` and :class:`datetime.time` to the + :class:`xmlrpclib.DateTime` type; the conversion semantics were + not necessarily correct for all applications. Code using + :mod:`xmlrpclib` should convert :class:`date` and :class:`time` + instances. (:issue:`1330538`) The code can also handle + dates before 1900. (Contributed by Ralf Schmitt; :issue:`2014`.) + * The :mod:`zipfile` module's :class:`ZipFile` class now has :meth:`extract` and :meth:`extractall` methods that will unpack a single file or all the files in the archive to the current directory, or @@ -2120,17 +2160,12 @@ though it will be removed in Python 3.0. To use the new module, first you must create a TCP connection in the usual way and then pass it to the :func:`ssl.wrap_socket` function. -XXX describe parameters. - -XXX Can specify if certificate is required, and obtain certificate info -by calling getpeercert method. - -XXX Certain features require the OpenSSL package to be installed, notably - the 'openssl' binary. +It's possible to specify whether a certificate is required, and to +obtain certificate info by calling the :meth:`getpeercert` method. .. seealso:: - SSL module documentation. + The documentation for the :mod:`ssl` module. .. ====================================================================== @@ -2271,12 +2306,22 @@ Changes to Python's build process and to the C API include: have been updated. (Contributed by Brett Cannon.) + Another new target, "make profile-opt", compiles a Python binary + using GCC's profile-guided optimization. It compiles Python with + profiling enabled, runs the test suite to obtain a set of profiling + results, and then compiles using these results for optimization. + (Contributed by Gregory P. Smith.) + + .. ====================================================================== Port-Specific Changes: Windows ----------------------------------- +* The support for Windows 95, 98, ME and NT4 has been dropped. + Python 2.6 requires at least Windows 2000 SP4. + * The :mod:`msvcrt` module now supports both the normal and wide char variants of the console I/O API. The :func:`getwch` function reads a keypress and returns a Unicode |