summaryrefslogtreecommitdiffstats
path: root/README
diff options
context:
space:
mode:
Diffstat (limited to 'README')
-rw-r--r--README51
1 files changed, 40 insertions, 11 deletions
diff --git a/README b/README
index a2a337b..bdbaae2 100644
--- a/README
+++ b/README
@@ -1,14 +1,43 @@
-This is Python release 1.2
-==========================
+This is Python release 1.3b1
+============================
+
+I.e., the first beta release of Python 1.3.
What's new in this release?
---------------------------
-This version provides new functionality as well as bug fixes, lots of
-new documentation, and quite a few new library modules. Everyone
-should upgrade. For a full list of what's new and changed, see
-Misc/NEWS.
+- Keyword parameters (see the last chapter of the tutorial).
+- Third argument to raise (the stacktrace to provide).
+- Faster function and method calls.
+- Jim Fulton's abstract object interface (Include/abstract.h).
+- Support for Tk 4.0 in Tkinter (Tkinter now supports keywords!).
+- Rewritten htmllib.py (HTML parser), with new formatter.py.
+- Rewritten rexec.py (restricted execution).
+- New modules ni.py and ihooks.py (package support and more).
+- And lots more that you'll have to discover on your own.
+
+
+Why is it called a beta release?
+--------------------------------
+
+Because it is. There's no documentation except the source. A few
+things are broken by the changes for keyword parameters (the access
+statement, the profiler, half of newmodule.c). It has only been tested
+on two Unix platforms (IRIX 5.3 and Solaris 2.4). The Mac and Windows
+sopport has not been fully re-integrated.
+
+
+Why do I release it anyway?
+---------------------------
+
+Because I'm also releasing a prototype of Grail, an extensible web
+browser that is its answer to Java and could become Python's "Killer
+App". Grail depends heavily on some features of Python 1.3 (such as
+keyword parameters). The release date for Grail is determined by other
+factors and I don't want to release it without full source.
+
+Oh, and I'm going on a two week holiday as well :-)
What is Python anyway?
@@ -424,11 +453,8 @@ The Tk interface
Tk (the user interface component of John Ousterhout's Tcl language) is
also usable from Python. Since this requires that you first build and
install Tcl/Tk, the Tk interface is not enabled by default. It
-requires Tcl 7.3 and Tk 3.6. It doesn't work yet with Tk 4.0-beta!
-(Actually, the C code does, but the Tkinter.py module hasn't been
-adapted yet.) For more info about Tk, including pointers to the
-source, see John Ousterhout's home page at
-<URL:http://playground.sun.com/~ouster/>.
+requires Tcl 7.4 and Tk 4.0. (Support for Tk 3.6 and Tcl 7.3 can be
+found in Lib/tk3inter/.)
To enable the Python/Tk interface, once you've built and installed
Tcl/Tk, all you need to do is edit two lines in Modules/Setup; search
@@ -457,6 +483,9 @@ also use dynamic loading for the C tkinter module, in which case you
must manually fix up sys.path or set $PYTHONPATH for the Python
Tkinter module.)
+See <URL:http://www.sunlabs.com/research/tcl/> for more info on where
+to get Tcl/Tk.
+
Distribution structure
----------------------