Moved history up to and including 1.5.1 here.

Misc/HISTORY

 Python history
 --------------
 
-This file contains the release messages for previous Python releases
-(slightly edited to adapt them to the format of this file).  As you
-read on you go back to the dark ages of Python's history.
+This file contains the release messages for previous Python releases.
+As you read on you go back to the dark ages of Python's history.
+
+
+======================================================================
+
+
+From 1.5 to 1.5.1
+=================
+
+General
+-------
+
+- The documentation is now unbundled.  It has also been extensively
+modified (mostly to implement a new and more uniform formatting
+style).  We figure that most people will prefer to download one of the
+preformatted documentation sets (HTML, PostScript or PDF) and that
+only a minority have a need for the LaTeX or FrameMaker sources.  Of
+course, the unbundled documentation sources still released -- just not
+in the same archive file, and perhaps not on the same date.
+
+- All bugs noted on the errors page (and many unnoted) are fixed.  All
+new bugs take their places.
+
+- No longer a core dump when attempting to print (or repr(), or str())
+a list or dictionary that contains an instance of itself; instead, the
+recursive entry is printed as [...] or {...}.  See Py_ReprEnter() and
+Py_ReprLeave() below.  Comparisons of such objects still go beserk,
+since this requires a different kind of fix; fortunately, this is a
+less common scenario in practice.
+
+Syntax change
+-------------
+
+- The raise statement can now be used without arguments, to re-raise 
+a previously set exception.  This should be used after catching an
+exception with an except clause only, either in the except clause or
+later in the same function.
+
+Import and module handling
+--------------------------
+
+- The implementation of import has changed to use a mutex (when
+threading is supported).  This means that when two threads
+simultaneously import the same module, the import statements are
+serialized.  Recursive imports are not affected.
+
+- Rewrote the finalization code almost completely, to be much more
+careful with the order in which modules are destroyed.  Destructors
+will now generally be able to reference built-in names such as None
+without trouble.
+
+- Case-insensitive platforms such as Mac and Windows require the case
+of a module's filename to match the case of the module name as
+specified in the import statement (see below).
+
+- The code for figuring out the default path now distinguishes between
+files, modules, executable files, and directories.  When expecting a
+module, we also look for the .pyc or .pyo file.
+
+Parser/tokenizer changes
+------------------------
+
+- The tokenizer can now warn you when your source code mixes tabs and
+spaces for indentation in a manner that depends on how much a tab is
+worth in spaces.  Use "python -t" or "python -v" to enable this
+option.  Use "python -tt" to turn the warnings into errors.  (See also
+tabnanny.py and tabpolice.py below.)
+
+- Return unsigned characters from tok_nextc(), so '\377' isn't
+mistaken for an EOF character.
+
+- Fixed two pernicious bugs in the tokenizer that only affected AIX.
+One was actually a general bug that was triggered by AIX's smaller I/O
+buffer size.  The other was a bug in the AIX optimizer's loop
+unrolling code; swapping two statements made the problem go away.
+
+Tools, demos and miscellaneous files
+------------------------------------
+
+- There's a new version of Misc/python-mode.el (the Emacs mode for
+Python) which is much smarter about guessing the indentation style
+used in a particular file.  Lots of other cool features too!
+
+- There are two new tools in Tools/scripts: tabnanny.py and
+tabpolice.py, implementing two different ways of checking whether a
+file uses indentation in a way that is sensitive to the interpretation
+of a tab.  The preferred module is tabnanny.py (by Tim Peters).
+
+- Some new demo programs:
+
+	Demo/tkinter/guido/paint.py -- Dave Mitchell
+	Demo/sockets/unixserver.py -- Piet van Oostrum
+	
+
+- Much better freeze support.  The freeze script can now freeze
+hierarchical module names (with a corresponding change to import.c),
+and has a few extra options (e.g. to suppress freezing specific
+modules).  It also does much more on Windows NT.
+
+- Version 1.0 of the faq wizard is included (only very small changes
+since version 0.9.0).
+
+- New feature for the ftpmirror script: when removing local files
+(i.e., only when -r is used), do a recursive delete.
+
+Configuring and building Python
+-------------------------------
+
+- Get rid of the check for -linet -- recent Sequent Dynix systems don't
+need this any more and apparently it screws up their configuration.
+
+- Some changes because gcc on SGI doesn't support '-all'.
+
+- Changed the build rules to use $(LIBRARY) instead of
+  -L.. -lpython$(VERSION)
+since the latter trips up the SunOS 4.1.x linker (sigh).
+
+- Fix the bug where the '# dgux is broken' comment in the Makefile
+tripped over Make on some platforms.
+
+- Changes for AIX: install the python.exp file; properly use
+$(srcdir); the makexp_aix script now removes C++ entries of the form
+Class::method.
+
+- Deleted some Makefile targets only used by the (long obsolete)
+gMakefile hacks.
+
+Extension modules
+-----------------
+
+- Performance and threading improvements to the socket and bsddb
+modules, by Christopher Lindblad of Infoseek.
+
+- Added operator.__not__ and operator.not_.
+
+- In the thread module, when a thread exits due to an unhandled
+exception, don't store the exception information in sys.last_*; it
+prevents proper calling of destructors of local variables.
+
+- Fixed a number of small bugs in the cPickle module.
+
+- Changed find() and rfind() in the strop module so that
+find("x","",2) returns -1, matching the implementation in string.py.
+
+- In the time module, be more careful with the result of ctime(), and
+test for HAVE_MKTIME before usinmg mktime().
+
+- Doc strings contributed by Mitch Chapman to the termios, pwd, gdbm
+modules.
+
+- Added the LOG_SYSLOG constant to the syslog module, if defined.
+
+Standard library modules
+------------------------
+
+- All standard library modules have been converted to an indentation
+style using either only tabs or only spaces -- never a mixture -- if
+they weren't already consistent according to tabnanny.  This means
+that the new -t option (see above) won't complain about standard
+library modules.
+
+- New standard library modules:
+
+	threading -- GvR and the thread-sig
+		Java style thread objects -- USE THIS!!!
+
+	getpass -- Piers Lauder
+		simple utilities to prompt for a password and to
+		retrieve the current username
+
+	imaplib -- Piers Lauder
+		interface for the IMAP4 protocol
+
+	poplib -- David Ascher, Piers Lauder
+		interface for the POP3 protocol
+
+	smtplib -- Dragon De Monsyne
+		interface for the SMTP protocol
+
+- Some obsolete modules moved to a separate directory (Lib/lib-old)
+which is *not* in the default module search path:
+
+	Para
+	addpack
+	codehack
+	fmt
+	lockfile
+	newdir
+	ni
+	rand
+	tb
+
+- New version of the PCRE code (Perl Compatible Regular Expressions --
+the re module and the supporting pcre extension) by Andrew Kuchling.
+Incompatible new feature in re.sub(): the handling of escapes in the
+replacement string has changed.
+
+- Interface change in the copy module: a __deepcopy__ method is now
+called with the memo dictionary as an argument.
+
+- Feature change in the tokenize module: differentiate between NEWLINE
+token (an official newline) and NL token (a newline that the grammar
+ignores).
+
+- Several bugfixes to the urllib module.  It is now truly thread-safe,
+and several bugs and a portability problem have been fixed.  New
+features, all due to Sjoerd Mullender: When creating a temporary file,
+it gives it an appropriate suffix.  Support the "data:" URL scheme.
+The open() method uses the tempcache.
+
+- New version of the xmllib module (this time with a test suite!) by
+Sjoerd Mullender.
+
+- Added debugging code to the telnetlib module, to be able to trace
+the actual traffic.
+
+- In the rfc822 module, added support for deleting a header (still no
+support for adding headers, though).  Also fixed a bug where an
+illegal address would cause a crash in getrouteaddr(), fixed a
+sign reversal in mktime_tz(), and use the local timezone by default
+(the latter two due to Bill van Melle).
+
+- The normpath() function in the dospath and ntpath modules no longer
+does case normalization -- for that, use the separate function
+normcase() (which always existed); normcase() has been sped up and
+fixed (it was the cause of a crash in Mark Hammond's installer in
+certain locales).
+
+- New command supported by the ftplib module: rmd(); also fixed some
+minor bugs.
+
+- The profile module now uses a different timer function by default -- 
+time.clock() is generally better than os.times().  This makes it work
+better on Windows NT, too.
+
+- The tempfile module now recovers when os.getcwd() raises an
+exception.
+
+- Fixed some bugs in the random module; gauss() was subtly wrong, and
+vonmisesvariate() should return a full circle.  Courtesy Mike Miller,
+Lambert Meertens (gauss()), and Magnus Kessler (vonmisesvariate()).
+
+- Better default seed in the whrandom module, courtesy Andrew Kuchling.
+
+- Fix slow close() in shelve module.
+
+- The Unix mailbox class in the mailbox module is now more robust when
+a line begins with the string "From " but is definitely not the start
+of a new message.  The pattern used can be changed by overriding a
+method or class variable.
+
+- Added a rmtree() function to the copy module.
+
+- Fixed several typos in the pickle module.  Also fixed problems when
+unpickling in restricted execution environments.
+
+- Added docstrings and fixed a typo in the py_compile and compileall
+modules.  At Mark Hammond's repeated request, py_compile now append a
+newline to the source if it needs one.  Both modules support an extra
+parameter to specify the purported source filename (to be used in
+error messages).
+
+- Some performance tweaks by Jeremy Hylton to the gzip module.
+
+- Fixed a bug in the merge order of dictionaries in the ConfigParser
+module.  Courtesy Barry Warsaw.
+
+- In the multifile module, support the optional second parameter to
+seek() when possible.
+
+- Several fixes to the gopherlib module by Lars Marius Garshol.  Also, 
+urlparse now correctly handles Gopher URLs with query strings.
+
+- Fixed a tiny bug in format_exception() in the traceback module.
+Also rewrite tb_lineno() to be compatible with JPython (and not
+disturb the current exception!); by Jim Hugunin.
+
+- The httplib module is more robust when servers send a short response 
+-- courtesy Tim O'Malley.
+
+Tkinter and friends
+-------------------
+
+- Various typos and bugs fixed.
+
+- New module Tkdnd implements a drag-and-drop protocol (within one
+application only).
+
+- The event_*() widget methods have been restructured slightly -- they
+no longer use the default root.
+
+- The interfaces for the bind*() and unbind() widget methods have been
+redesigned; the bind*() methods now return the name of the Tcl command 
+created for the callback, and this can be passed as a optional
+argument to unbind() in order to delete the command (normally, such
+commands are automatically unbound when the widget is destroyed, but
+for some applications this isn't enough).
+
+- Variable objects now have trace methods to interface to Tcl's
+variable tracing facilities.
+
+- Image objects now have an optional keyword argument, 'master', to
+specify a widget (tree) to which they belong.  The image_names() and
+image_types() calls are now also widget methods.
+
+- There's a new global call, Tkinter.NoDefaultRoot(), which disables
+all use of the default root by the Tkinter library.  This is useful to
+debug applications that are in the process of being converted from
+relying on the default root to explicit specification of the root
+widget.
+
+- The 'exit' command is deleted from the Tcl interpreter, since it
+provided a loophole by which one could (accidentally) exit the Python
+interpreter without invoking any cleanup code.
+
+- Tcl_Finalize() is now registered as a Python low-level exit handle,
+so Tcl will be finalized when Python exits.
+
+The Python/C API
+----------------
+
+- New function PyThreadState_GetDict() returns a per-thread dictionary
+intended for storing thread-local global variables.
+
+- New functions Py_ReprEnter() and Py_ReprLeave() use the per-thread
+dictionary to allow recursive container types to detect recursion in
+their repr(), str() and print implementations.
+
+- New function PyObject_Not(x) calculates (not x) according to Python's 
+standard rules (basically, it negates the outcome PyObject_IsTrue(x).
+
+- New function _PyModule_Clear(), which clears a module's dictionary
+carefully without removing the __builtins__ entry.  This is implied
+when a module object is deallocated (this used to clear the dictionary
+completely).
+
+- New function PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(), which extends
+PyImport_ExecCodeModule() by adding an extra parameter to pass it the
+true file.
+
+- New functions Py_GetPythonHome() and Py_SetPythonHome(), intended to
+allow embedded applications to force a different value for PYTHONHOME.
+
+- New global flag Py_FrozenFlag is set when this is a "frozen" Python
+binary; it suppresses warnings about not being able to find the
+standard library directories.
+
+- New global flag Py_TabcheckFlag is incremented by the -t option and
+causes the tokenizer to issue warnings or errors about inconsistent
+mixing of tabs and spaces for indentation.
+
+Miscellaneous minor changes and bug fixes
+-----------------------------------------
+
+- Improved the error message when an attribute of an attribute-less
+object is requested -- include the name of the attribute and the type
+of the object in the message.
+
+- Sped up int(), long(), float() a bit.
+
+- Fixed a bug in list.sort() that would occasionally dump core.
+
+- Fixed a bug in PyNumber_Power() that caused numeric arrays to fail
+when taken tothe real power.
+
+- Fixed a number of bugs in the file reading code, at least one of
+which could cause a core dump on NT, and one of which would
+occasionally cause file.read() to return less than the full contents
+of the file.
+
+- Performance hack by Vladimir Marangozov for stack frame creation.
+
+- Make sure setvbuf() isn't used unless HAVE_SETVBUF is defined.
+
+Windows 95/NT
+-------------
+
+- The .lib files are now part of the distribution; they are collected
+in the subdirectory "libs" of the installation directory.
+
+- The extension modules (.pyd files) are now collected in a separate
+subdirectory of the installation directory named "DLLs".
+
+- The case of a module's filename must now match the case of the
+module name as specified in the import statement.  This is an
+experimental feature -- if it turns out to break in too many
+situations, it will be removed (or disabled by default) in the future.
+It can be disabled on a per-case basis by setting the environment
+variable PYTHONCASEOK (to any value).
+
+
+======================================================================
+
+
+From 1.5b2 to 1.5
+=================
+
+- Newly documentated module: BaseHTTPServer.py, thanks to Greg Stein.
+
+- Added doc strings to string.py, stropmodule.c, structmodule.c,
+thanks to Charles Waldman.
+
+- Many nits fixed in the manuals, thanks to Fred Drake and many others
+(especially Rob Hooft and Andrew Kuchling).  The HTML version now uses
+HTML markup instead of inline GIF images for tables; only two images
+are left (for obsure bits of math).  The index of the HTML version has
+also been much improved.  Finally, it is once again possible to
+generate an Emacs info file from the library manual (but I don't
+commit to supporting this in future versions).
+
+- New module: telnetlib.py (a simple telnet client library).
+
+- New tool: Tools/versioncheck/, by Jack Jansen.
+
+- Ported zlibmodule.c and bsddbmodule.c to NT; The project file for MS
+DevStudio 5.0 now includes new subprojects to build the zlib and bsddb
+extension modules.
+
+- Many small changes again to Tkinter.py -- mostly bugfixes and adding
+missing routines.  Thanks to Greg McFarlane for reporting a bunch of
+problems and proofreading my fixes.
+
+- The re module and its documentation are up to date with the latest
+version released to the string-sig (Dec. 22).
+
+- Stop test_grp.py from failing when the /etc/group file is empty
+(yes, this happens!).
+
+- Fix bug in integer conversion (mystrtoul.c) that caused
+4294967296==0 to be true!
+
+- The VC++ 4.2 project file should be complete again.
+
+- In tempfile.py, use a better template on NT, and add a new optional
+argument "suffix" with default "" to specify a specific extension for
+the temporary filename (needed sometimes on NT but perhaps also handy
+elsewhere).
+
+- Fixed some bugs in the FAQ wizard, and converted it to use re
+instead of regex.
+
+- Fixed a mysteriously undetected error in dlmodule.c (it was using a
+totally bogus routine name to raise an exception).
+
+- Fixed bug in import.c which wasn't using the new "dos-8x3" name yet.
+
+- Hopefully harmless changes to the build process to support shared
+libraries on DG/UX.  This adds a target to create
+libpython$(VERSION).so; however this target is *only* for DG/UX.
+
+- Fixed a bug in the new format string error checking in getargs.c.
+
+- A simple fix for infinite recursion when printing __builtins__:
+reset '_' to None before printing and set it to the printed variable
+*after* printing (and only when printing is successful).
+
+- Fixed lib-tk/SimpleDialog.py to keep the dialog visible even if the
+parent window is not (Skip Montanaro).
+
+- Fixed the two most annoying problems with ftp URLs in
+urllib.urlopen(); an empty file now correctly raises an error, and it
+is no longer required to explicitly close the returned "file" object
+before opening another ftp URL to the same host and directory.
+
+
+======================================================================
+
+
+From 1.5b1 to 1.5b2
+===================
+
+- Fixed a bug in cPickle.c that caused it to crash right away because
+the version string had a different format.
+
+- 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.  The cPickle.c changes and some pickle.py
+changes are courtesy Jim Fulton.
+
+- Locale support in he "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 installer now installs in the "Program Files" folder on
+the proper volume by default.
+
+- The Windows configuration adds a new main program, "pythonw", and
+registers a new extension, ".pyw" that invokes this.  This is a
+pstandard 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.  Also, both python.exe and pythonw.exe now have a pretty icon
+(a green snake in a box, courtesy Mark Hammond).
+
+- Lots of improvements to emacs-mode.el again.  See Barry's web page:
+http://www.python.org/ftp/emacs/pmdetails.html.
+
+- Lots of improvements and additions to the library reference manual;
+many by Fred Drake.
+
+- Doc strings for the following modules: rfc822.py, posixpath.py,
+ntpath.py, httplib.py.  Thanks to Mitch Chapman and Charles Waldman.
+
+- Some more regression testing.
+
+- An optional 4th (maxsplit) argument to strop.replace().
+
+- Fixed handling of maxsplit in string.splitfields().
+
+- Tweaked os.environ so it can be pickled and copied.
+
+- The portability problems caused by indented preprocessor commands
+and C++ style comments should be gone now.
+
+- In random.py, added Pareto and Weibull distributions.
+
+- The crypt module is now disabled in Modules/Setup.in by default; it
+is rarely needed and causes errors on some systems where users often
+don't know how to deal with those.
+
+- Some improvements to the _tkinter build line suggested by Case Roole.
+
+- A full suite of platform specific files for NetBSD 1.x, submitted by 
+Anders Andersen.
+
+- New Solaris specific header STROPTS.py.
+
+- Moved a confusing occurrence of *shared* from the comments in
+Modules/Setup.in (people would enable this one instead of the real
+one, and get disappointing results).
+
+- Changed the default mode for directories to be group-writable when
+the installation process creates them.
+
+- Check for pthread support in "-l_r" for FreeBSD/NetBSD, and support
+shared libraries for both.
+
+- Support FreeBSD and NetBSD in posixfile.py.
+
+- Support for the "event" command, new in Tk 4.2.  By Case Roole.
+
+- Add Tix_SafeInit() support to tkappinit.c.
+
+- Various bugs fixed in "re.py" and "pcre.c".
+
+- Fixed a bug (broken use of the syntax table) in the old "regexpr.c".
+
+- In frozenmain.c, stdin is made unbuffered too when PYTHONUNBUFFERED
+is set.
+
+- Provide default blocksize for retrbinary in ftplib.py (Skip
+Montanaro).
+
+- In NT, pick the username up from different places in user.py (Jeff
+Bauer).
+
+- Patch to urlparse.urljoin() for ".." and "..#1", Marc Lemburg.
+
+- Many small improvements to Jeff Rush' OS/2 support.
+
+- ospath.py is gone; it's been obsolete for so many years now...
+
+- The reference manual is now set up to prepare better HTML (still
+using webmaker, alas).
+
+- Add special handling to /Tools/freeze for Python modules that are
+imported implicitly by the Python runtime: 'site' and 'exceptions'.
+
+- Tools/faqwiz 0.8.3 -- add an option to suppress URL processing
+inside <PRE>, by "Scott".
+
+- Added ConfigParser.py, a generic parser for sectioned configuration
+files.
+
+- In _localemodule.c, LC_MESSAGES is not always defined; put it
+between #ifdefs.
+
+- Typo in resource.c: RUSAGE_CHILDERN -> RUSAGE_CHILDREN.
+
+- Demo/scripts/newslist.py: Fix the way the version number is gotten
+out of the RCS revision.
+
+- PyArg_Parse[Tuple] now explicitly check for bad characters at the
+end of the format string.
+
+- Revamped PC/example_nt to support VC++ 5.x.
+
+- <listobject>.sort() now uses a modified quicksort by Raymund Galvin,
+after studying the GNU libg++ quicksort.  This should be much faster
+if there are lots of duplicates, and otherwise at least as good.
+
+- Added "uue" as an alias for "uuencode" to mimetools.py.  (Hm, the
+uudecode bug where it complaints about trailing garbage is still there 
+:-( ).
+
+- pickle.py requires integers in text mode to be in decimal notation
+(it used to accept octal and hex, even though it would only generate
+decimal numbers).
+
+- In string.atof(), don't fail when the "re" module is unavailable.
+Plug the ensueing security leak by supplying an empty __builtins__
+directory to eval().
+
+- A bunch of small fixes and improvements to Tkinter.py.
+
+- Fixed a buffer overrun in PC/getpathp.c.
+
+
+======================================================================
+
+
+From 1.5a4 to 1.5b1
+===================
+
+- The Windows NT/95 installer now includes full HTML of all manuals.
+It also has a checkbox that lets you decide whether to install the
+interpreter and library.  The WISE installer script for the installer
+is included in the source tree as PC/python15.wse, and so are the
+icons used for Python files.  The config.c file for the Windows build
+is now complete with the pcre module.
+
+- sys.ps1 and sys.ps2 can now arbitrary objects; their str() is
+evaluated for the prompt.
+
+- The reference manual is brought up to date (more or less -- it still
+needs work, e.g. in the area of package import).
+
+- The icons used by latex2html are now included in the Doc
+subdirectory (mostly so that tarring up the HTML files can be fully
+automated).  A simple index.html is also added to Doc (it only works
+after you have successfully run latex2html).
+
+- For all you would-be proselytizers out there: a new version of
+Misc/BLURB describes Python more concisely, and Misc/comparisons
+compares Python to several other languages.  Misc/BLURB.WINDOWS
+contains a blurb specifically aimed at Windows programmers (by Mark
+Hammond).
+
+- A new version of the Python mode for Emacs is included as
+Misc/python-mode.el.  There are too many new features to list here.
+See http://www.python.org/ftp/emacs/pmdetails.html for more info.
+
+- New module fileinput makes iterating over the lines of a list of
+files easier.  (This still needs some more thinking to make it more
+extensible.)
+
+- There's full OS/2 support, courtesy Jeff Rush.  To build the OS/2
+version, see PC/readme.txt and PC/os2vacpp.  This is for IBM's Visual
+Age C++ compiler.  I expect that Jeff will also provide a binary
+release for this platform.
+
+- On Linux, the configure script now uses '-Xlinker -export-dynamic'
+instead of '-rdynamic' to link the main program so that it exports its
+symbols to shared libraries it loads dynamically.  I hope this doesn't
+break on older Linux versions; it is needed for mklinux and appears to
+work on Linux 2.0.30.
+
+- Some Tkinter resstructuring: the geometry methods that apply to a
+master are now properly usable on toplevel master widgets.  There's a
+new (internal) widget class, BaseWidget.  New, longer "official" names
+for the geometry manager methods have been added,
+e.g. "grid_columnconfigure()" instead of "columnconfigure()".  The old
+shorter names still work, and where there's ambiguity, pack wins over
+place wins over grid.  Also, the bind_class method now returns its
+value.
+
+- New, RFC-822 conformant parsing of email addresses and address lists
+in the rfc822 module, courtesy Ben Escoto.
+
+- New, revamped tkappinit.c with support for popular packages (PIL,
+TIX, BLT, TOGL).  For the last three, you need to execute the Tcl
+command "load {} Tix" (or Blt, or Togl) to gain access to them.
+The Modules/Setup line for the _tkinter module has been rewritten
+using the cool line-breaking feature of most Bourne shells.
+
+- New socket method connect_ex() returns the error code from connect()
+instead of raising an exception on errors; this makes the logic
+required for asynchronous connects simpler and more efficient.
+
+- New "locale" module with (still experimental) interface to the
+standard C library locale interface, courtesy Martin von Loewis.  This
+does not repeat my mistake in 1.5a4 of always calling
+setlocale(LC_ALL, "").  In fact, we've pretty much decided that
+Python's standard numerical formatting operations should always use
+the conventions for the C locale; the locale module contains utility
+functions to format numbers according to the user specified locale.
+(All this is accomplished by an explicit call to setlocale(LC_NUMERIC,
+"C") after locale-changing calls.)  See the library manual. (Alas, the
+promised changes to the "re" module for locale support have not been
+materialized yet.  If you care, volunteer!)
+
+- Memory leak plugged in Py_BuildValue when building a dictionary.
+
+- Shared modules can now live inside packages (hierarchical module
+namespaces).  No changes to the shared module itself are needed.
+
+- Improved policy for __builtins__: this is a module in __main__ and a
+dictionary everywhere else.
+
+- Python no longer catches SIGHUP and SIGTERM by default.  This was
+impossible to get right in the light of thread contexts.  If you want
+your program to clean up when a signal happens, use the signal module
+to set up your own signal handler.
+
+- New Python/C API PyNumber_CoerceEx() does not return an exception
+when no coercion is possible.  This is used to fix a problem where
+comparing incompatible numbers for equality would raise an exception
+rather than return false as in Python 1.4 -- it once again will return
+false.
+
+- The errno module is changed again -- the table of error messages
+(errorstr) is removed.  Instead, you can use os.strerror().  This
+removes redundance and a potential locale dependency.
+
+- New module xmllib, to parse XML files.  By Sjoerd Mullender.
+
+- New C API PyOS_AfterFork() is called after fork() in posixmodule.c.
+It resets the signal module's notion of what the current process ID
+and thread are, so that signal handlers will work after (and across)
+calls to os.fork().
+
+- Fixed most occurrences of fatal errors due to missing thread state.
+
+- For vgrind (a flexible source pretty printer) fans, there's a simple
+Python definition in Misc/vgrindefs, courtesy Neale Pickett.
+
+- Fixed memory leak in exec statement.
+
+- The test.pystone module has a new function, pystones(loops=LOOPS),
+which returns a (benchtime, stones) tuple.  The main() function now
+calls this and prints the report.
+
+- Package directories now *require* the presence of an __init__.py (or
+__init__.pyc) file before they are considered as packages.  This is
+done to prevent accidental subdirectories with common names from
+overriding modules with the same name.
+
+- Fixed some strange exceptions in __del__ methods in library modules
+(e.g. urllib).  This happens because the builtin names are already
+deleted by the time __del__ is called.  The solution (a hack, but it
+works) is to set some instance variables to 0 instead of None.
+
+- The table of built-in module initializers is replaced by a pointer
+variable.  This makes it possible to switch to a different table at
+run time, e.g. when a collection of modules is loaded from a shared
+library.  (No example code of how to do this is given, but it is
+possible.)  The table is still there of course, its name prefixed with
+an underscore and used to initialize the pointer.
+
+- The warning about a thread still having a frame now only happens in
+verbose mode.
+
+- Change the signal finialization so that it also resets the signal
+handlers.  After this has been called, our signal handlers are no
+longer active!
+
+- New version of tokenize.py (by Ka-Ping Yee) recognizes raw string
+literals.  There's now also a test fort this module.
+
+- The copy module now also uses __dict__.update(state) instead of
+going through individual attribute assignments, for class instances
+without a __setstate__ method.
+
+- New module reconvert translates old-style (regex module) regular
+expressions to new-style (re module, Perl-style) regular expressions.
+
+- Most modules that used to use the regex module now use the re
+module.  The grep module has a new pgrep() function which uses
+Perl-style regular expressions.
+
+- The (very old, backwards compatibility) regexp.py module has been
+deleted.
+
+- Restricted execution (rexec): added the pcre module (support for the
+re module) to the list of trusted extension modules.
+
+- New version of Jim Fulton's CObject object type, adds
+PyCObject_FromVoidPtrAndDesc() and PyCObject_GetDesc() APIs.
+
+- Some patches to Lee Busby's fpectl mods that accidentally didn't
+make it into 1.5a4.
+
+- In the string module, add an optional 4th argument to count(),
+matching find() etc.
+
+- Patch for the nntplib module by Charles Waldman to add optional user
+and password arguments to NNTP.__init__(), for nntp servers that need
+them.
+
+- The str() function for class objects now returns
+"modulename.classname" instead of returning the same as repr().
+
+- The parsing of \xXX escapes no longer relies on sscanf().
+
+- The "sharedmodules" subdirectory of the installation is renamed to
+"lib-dynload".  (You may have to edit your Modules/Setup file to fix
+this in an existing installation!)
+
+- Fixed Don Beaudry's mess-up with the OPT test in the configure
+script.  Certain SGI platforms will still issue a warning for each
+compile; there's not much I can do about this since the compiler's
+exit status doesn't indicate that I was using an obsolete option.
+
+- Fixed Barry's mess-up with {}.get(), and added test cases for it.
+
+- Shared libraries didn't quite work under AIX because of the change
+in status of the GNU readline interface.  Fix due to by Vladimir
+Marangozov.
+
+
+======================================================================
+
+
+From 1.5a3 to 1.5a4
+===================
+
+- faqwiz.py: version 0.8; Recognize https:// as URL; <html>...</html>
+feature; better install instructions; removed faqmain.py (which was an
+older version).
+
+- nntplib.py: Fixed some bugs reported by Lars Wirzenius (to Debian)
+about the treatment of lines starting with '.'.  Added a minimal test
+function.
+
+- struct module: ignore most whitespace in format strings.
+
+- urllib.py: close the socket and temp file in URLopener.retrieve() so
+that multiple retrievals using the same connection work.
+
+- All standard exceptions are now classes by default; use -X to make
+them strings (for backward compatibility only).
+
+- There's a new standard exception hierarchy, defined in the standard
+library module exceptions.py (which you never need to import
+explicitly).  See
+http://grail.cnri.reston.va.us/python/essays/stdexceptions.html for
+more info.
+
+- Three new C API functions:
+
+  - int PyErr_GivenExceptionMatches(obj1, obj2)
+
+    Returns 1 if obj1 and obj2 are the same object, or if obj1 is an
+    instance of type obj2, or of a class derived from obj2
+
+  - int PyErr_ExceptionMatches(obj)
+
+    Higher level wrapper around PyErr_GivenExceptionMatches() which uses
+    PyErr_Occurred() as obj1.  This will be the more commonly called
+    function.
+
+  - void PyErr_NormalizeException(typeptr, valptr, tbptr)
+
+    Normalizes exceptions, and places the normalized values in the
+    arguments.  If type is not a class, this does nothing.  If type is a
+    class, then it makes sure that value is an instance of the class by:
+
+    1. if instance is of the type, or a class derived from type, it does
+       nothing.
+
+    2. otherwise it instantiates the class, using the value as an
+       argument.  If value is None, it uses an empty arg tuple, and if
+       the value is a tuple, it uses just that.
+
+- Another new C API function: PyErr_NewException() creates a new
+exception class derived from Exception; when -X is given, it creates a
+new string exception.
+
+- core interpreter: remove the distinction between tuple and list
+unpacking; allow an arbitrary sequence on the right hand side of any
+unpack instruction.  (UNPACK_LIST and UNPACK_TUPLE now do the same
+thing, which should really be called UNPACK_SEQUENCE.)
+
+- classes: Allow assignments to an instance's __dict__ or __class__,
+so you can change ivars (including shared ivars -- shock horror) and
+change classes dynamically.  Also make the check on read-only
+attributes of classes less draconic -- only the specials names
+__dict__, __bases__, __name__ and __{get,set,del}attr__ can't be
+assigned.
+
+- Two new built-in functions: issubclass() and isinstance().  Both
+take classes as their second arguments.  The former takes a class as
+the first argument and returns true iff first is second, or is a
+subclass of second.  The latter takes any object as the first argument
+and returns true iff first is an instance of the second, or any
+subclass of second.
+
+- configure: Added configuration tests for presence of alarm(),
+pause(), and getpwent().
+
+- Doc/Makefile: changed latex2html targets.
+
+- classes: Reverse the search order for the Don Beaudry hook so that
+the first class with an applicable hook wins.  Makes more sense.
+
+- Changed the checks made in Py_Initialize() and Py_Finalize().  It is
+now legal to call these more than once.  The first call to
+Py_Initialize() initializes, the first call to Py_Finalize()
+finalizes.  There's also a new API, Py_IsInitalized() which checks
+whether we are already initialized (in case you want to leave things
+as they were).
+
+- Completely disable the declarations for malloc(), realloc() and
+free().  Any 90's C compiler has these in header files, and the tests
+to decide whether to suppress the declarations kept failing on some
+platforms.
+
+- *Before* (instead of after) signalmodule.o is added, remove both
+intrcheck.o and sigcheck.o.  This should get rid of warnings in ar or
+ld on various systems.
+
+- Added reop to PC/config.c
+
+- configure: Decided to use -Aa -D_HPUX_SOURCE on HP-UX platforms.
+Removed outdated HP-UX comments from README.  Added Cray T3E comments.
+
+- Various renames of statically defined functions that had name
+conflicts on some systems, e.g. strndup (GNU libc), join (Cray),
+roundup (sys/types.h).
+
+- urllib.py: Interpret three slashes in file: URL as local file (for
+Netscape on Windows/Mac).
+
+- copy.py: Make sure the objects returned by __getinitargs__() are
+kept alive (in the memo) to avoid a certain kind of nasty crash.  (Not
+easily reproducable because it requires a later call to
+__getinitargs__() to return a tuple that happens to be allocated at
+the same address.)
+
+- Added definition of AR to toplevel Makefile.  Renamed @buildno temp
+file to buildno1.
+
+- Moved Include/assert.h to Parser/assert.h, which seems to be the
+only place where it's needed.
+
+- Tweaked the dictionary lookup code again for some more speed
+(Vladimir Marangozov).
+
+- NT build: Changed the way python15.lib is included in the other
+projects.  Per Mark Hammond's suggestion, add it to the extra libs in
+Settings instead of to the project's source files.
+
+- regrtest.py: Change default verbosity so that there are only three
+levels left: -q, default and -v.  In default mode, the name of each
+test is now printed.  -v is the same as the old -vv.  -q is more quiet
+than the old default mode.
+
+- Removed the old FAQ from the distribution.  You now have to get it
+from the web!
+
+- Removed the PC/make_nt.in file from the distribution; it is no
+longer needed.
+
+- Changed the build sequence so that shared modules are built last.
+This fixes things for AIX and doesn't hurt elsewhere.
+
+- Improved test for GNU MP v1 in mpzmodule.c
+
+- fileobject.c: ftell() on Linux discards all buffered data; changed
+read() code to use lseek() instead to get the same effect
+
+- configure.in, configure, importdl.c: NeXT sharedlib fixes
+
+- tupleobject.c: PyTuple_SetItem asserts refcnt==1
+
+- resource.c: Different strategy regarding whether to declare
+getrusage() and getpagesize() -- #ifdef doesn't work, Linux has
+conflicting decls in its headers.  Choice: only declare the return
+type, not the argument prototype, and not on Linux.
+
+- importdl.c, configure*: set sharedlib extensions properly for NeXT
+
+- configure*, Makefile.in, Modules/Makefile.pre.in: AIX shared libraries
+fixed; moved addition of PURIFY to LINKCC to configure
+
+- reopmodule.c, regexmodule.c, regexpr.c, zlibmodule.c: needed casts
+added to shup up various compilers.
+
+- _tkinter.c: removed buggy mac #ifndef
+
+- Doc: various Mac documentation changes, added docs for 'ic' module
+
+- PC/make_nt.in: deleted
+
+- test_time.py, test_strftime.py: tweaks to catch %Z (which may return
+"")
+
+- test_rotor.py: print b -> print `b`
+
+- Tkinter.py: (tagOrId) -> (tagOrId,)
+
+- Tkinter.py: the Tk class now also has a configure() method and
+friends (they have been moved to the Misc class to accomplish this).
+
+- dict.get(key[, default]) returns dict[key] if it exists, or default
+if it doesn't.  The default defaults to None.  This is quicker for
+some applications than using either has_key() or try:...except
+KeyError:....
+
+- Tools/webchecker/: some small changes to webchecker.py; added
+websucker.py (a simple web site mirroring script).
+
+- Dictionary objects now have a get() method (also in UserDict.py).
+dict.get(key, default) returns dict[key] if it exists and default
+otherwise; default defaults to None.
+
+- Tools/scripts/logmerge.py: print the author, too.
+
+- Changes to import: support for "import a.b.c" is now built in.  See
+http://grail.cnri.reston.va.us/python/essays/packages.html
+for more info.  Most important deviations from "ni.py": __init__.py is
+executed in the package's namespace instead of as a submodule; and
+there's no support for "__" or "__domain__".  Note that "ni.py" is not
+changed to match this -- it is simply declared obsolete (while at the
+same time, it is documented...:-( ).
+Unfortunately, "ihooks.py" has not been upgraded (but see "knee.py"
+for an example implementation of hierarchical module import written in
+Python).
+
+- More changes to import: the site.py module is now imported by
+default when Python is initialized; use -S to disable it.  The site.py
+module extends the path with several more directories: site-packages
+inside the lib/python1.5/ directory, site-python in the lib/
+directory, and pathnames mentioned in *.pth files found in either of
+those directories.  See
+http://grail.cnri.reston.va.us/python/essays/packages.html
+for more info.
+
+- Changes to standard library subdirectory names: those subdirectories
+that are not packages have been renamed with a hypen in their name,
+e.g. lib-tk, lib-stdwin, plat-win, plat-linux2, plat-sunos5, dos-8x3.
+The test suite is now a package -- to run a test, you must now use
+"import test.test_foo".
+
+- A completely new re.py module is provided (thanks to Andrew
+Kuchling, Tim Peters and Jeffrey Ollie) which uses Philip Hazel's
+"pcre" re compiler and engine.  For a while, the "old" re.py (which
+was new in 1.5a3!) will be kept around as re1.py.  The "old" regex
+module and underlying parser and engine are still present -- while
+regex is now officially obsolete, it will probably take several major
+release cycles before it can be removed.
+
+- The posix module now has a strerror() function which translates an
+error code to a string.
+
+- The emacs.py module (which was long obsolete) has been removed.
+
+- The universal makefile Misc/Makefile.pre.in now features an
+"install" target.  By default, installed shared libraries go into
+$exec_prefix/lib/python$VERSION/site-packages/.
+
+- The install-sh script is installed with the other configuration
+specific files (in the config/ subdirectory).
+
+- It turns out whatsound.py and sndhdr.py were identical modules.
+Since there's also an imghdr.py file, I propose to make sndhdr.py the
+official one.  For compatibility, whatsound.py imports * from
+sndhdr.py.
+
+- Class objects have a new attribute, __module__, giving the name of
+the module in which they were declared.  This is useful for pickle and
+for printing the full name of a class exception.
+
+- Many extension modules no longer issue a fatal error when their
+initialization fails; the importing code now checks whether an error
+occurred during module initialization, and correctly propagates the
+exception to the import statement.
+
+- Most extension modules now raise class-based exceptions (except when
+-X is used).
+
+- Subtle changes to PyEval_{Save,Restore}Thread(): always swap the
+thread state -- just don't manipulate the lock if it isn't there.
+
+- Fixed a bug in Python/getopt.c that made it do the wrong thing when
+an option was a single '-'.  Thanks to Andrew Kuchling.
+
+- New module mimetypes.py will guess a MIME type from a filename's
+extension.
+
+- Windows: the DLL version is now settable via a resource rather than
+being hardcoded.  This can be used for "branding" a binary Python
+distribution.
+
+- urllib.py is now threadsafe -- it now uses re instead of regex, and
+sys.exc_info() instead of sys.exc_{type,value}.
+
+- Many other library modules that used to use
+sys.exc_{type,value,traceback} are now more thread-safe by virtue of
+using sys.exc_info().
+
+- The functions in popen2 have an optional buffer size parameter.
+Also, the command argument can now be either a string (passed to the
+shell) or a list of arguments (passed directly to execv).
+
+- Alas, the thread support for _tkinter released with 1.5a3 didn't
+work.  It's been rewritten.  The bad news is that it now requires a
+modified version of a file in the standard Tcl distribution, which you
+must compile with a -I option pointing to the standard Tcl source
+tree.  For this reason, the thread support is disabled by default.
+
+- The errno extension module adds two tables: errorcode maps errno
+numbers to errno names (e.g. EINTR), and errorstr maps them to
+message strings.  (The latter is redundant because the new call
+posix.strerror() now does the same, but alla...)  (Marc-Andre Lemburg)
+
+- The readline extension module now provides some interfaces to
+internal readline routines that make it possible to write a completer
+in Python.  An example completer, rlcompleter.py, is provided.
+
+	When completing a simple identifier, it completes keywords,
+	built-ins and globals in __main__; when completing
+	NAME.NAME..., it evaluates (!) the expression up to the last
+	dot and completes its attributes.
+
+	It's very cool to do "import string" type "string.", hit the
+	completion key (twice), and see the list of names defined by
+	the string module!
+
+	Tip: to use the tab key as the completion key, call
+
+	    readline.parse_and_bind("tab: complete")
+
+- The traceback.py module has a new function tb_lineno() by Marc-Andre
+Lemburg which extracts the line number from the linenumber table in
+the code object.  Apparently the traceback object doesn't contains the
+right linenumber when -O is used.  Rather than guessing whether -O is
+on or off, the module itself uses tb_lineno() unconditionally.
+
+- Fixed Demo/tkinter/matt/canvas-moving-or-creating.py: change bind()
+to tag_bind() so it works again.
+
+- The pystone script is now a standard library module.  Example use:
+"import test.pystone; test.pystone.main()".
+
+- The import of the readline module in interactive mode is now also
+attempted when -i is specified.  (Yes, I know, giving in to Marc-Andre
+Lemburg, who asked for this. :-)
+
+- rfc822.py: Entirely rewritten parseaddr() function by Sjoerd
+Mullender, to be closer to the standard.  This fixes the getaddr()
+method.  Unfortunately, getaddrlist() is as broken as ever, since it
+splits on commas without regard for RFC 822 quoting conventions.
+
+- pprint.py: correctly emit trailing "," in singleton tuples.
+
+- _tkinter.c: export names for its type objects, TkappType and
+TkttType.
+
+- pickle.py: use __module__ when defined; fix a particularly hard to
+reproduce bug that confuses the memo when temporary objects are
+returned by custom pickling interfaces; and a semantic change: when
+unpickling the instance variables of an instance, use
+inst.__dict__.update(value) instead of a for loop with setattr() over
+the value.keys().  This is more consistent (the pickling doesn't use
+getattr() either but pickles inst.__dict__) and avoids problems with
+instances that have a __setattr__ hook.  But it *is* a semantic change
+(because the setattr hook is no longer used).  So beware!
+
+- config.h is now installed (at last) in
+$exec_prefix/include/python1.5/.  For most sites, this means that it
+is actually in $prefix/include/python1.5/, with all the other Python
+include files, since $prefix and $exec_prefix are the same by
+default.
+
+- The imp module now supports parts of the functionality to implement
+import of hierarchical module names.  It now supports find_module()
+and load_module() for all types of modules.  Docstrings have been
+added for those functions in the built-in imp module that are still
+relevant (some old interfaces are obsolete).  For a sample
+implementation of hierarchical module import in Python, see the new
+library module knee.py.
+
+- The % operator on string objects now allows arbitrary nested parens
+in a %(...)X style format.  (Brad Howes)
+
+- Reverse the order in which Setup and Setup.local are passed to the
+makesetup script.  This allows variable definitions in Setup.local to
+override definitions in Setup.  (But you'll still have to edit Setup
+if you want to disable modules that are enabled by default, or if such
+modules need non-standard options.)
+
+- Added PyImport_ImportModuleEx(name, globals, locals, fromlist); this
+is like PyImport_ImporModule(name) but receives the globals and locals
+dict and the fromlist arguments as well.  (The name is a char*; the
+others are PyObject*s).
+
+- The 'p' format in the struct extension module alloded to above is
+new in 1.5a4.
+
+- The types.py module now uses try-except in a few places to make it
+more likely that it can be imported in restricted mode.  Some type
+names are undefined in that case, e.g. CodeType (inaccessible),
+FileType (not always accessible), and TracebackType and FrameType
+(inaccessible).
+
+- In urllib.py: added separate administration of temporary files
+created y URLopener.retrieve() so cleanup() can properly remove them.
+The old code removed everything in tempcache which was a bad idea if
+the user had passed a non-temp file into it.  Also, in basejoin(),
+interpret relative paths starting in "../".  This is necessary if the
+server uses symbolic links.
+
+- The Windows build procedure and project files are now based on
+Microsoft Visual C++ 5.x.  The build now takes place in the PCbuild
+directory.  It is much more robust, and properly builds separate Debug
+and Release versions.  (The installer will be added shortly.)
+
+- Added casts and changed some return types in regexpr.c to avoid
+compiler warnings or errors on some platforms.
+
+- The AIX build tools for shared libraries now supports VPATH.  (Donn
+Cave)
+
+- By default, disable the "portable" multimedia modules audioop,
+imageop, and rgbimg, since they don't work on 64-bit platforms.
+
+- Fixed a nasty bug in cStringIO.c when code was actually using the
+close() method (the destructors would try to free certain fields a
+second time).
+
+- For those who think they need it, there's a "user.py" module.  This
+is *not* imported by default, but can be imported to run user-specific
+setup commands, ~/.pythonrc.py.
+
+- Various speedups suggested by Fredrik Lundh, Marc-Andre Lemburg,
+Vladimir Marangozov, and others.
+
+- Added os.altsep; this is '/' on DOS/Windows, and None on systems
+with a sane filename syntax.
+
+- os.py: Write out the dynamic OS choice, to avoid exec statements.
+Adding support for a new OS is now a bit more work, but I bet that
+'dos' or 'nt' will cover most situations...
+
+- The obsolete exception AccessError is now really gone.
+
+- Tools/faqwiz/: New installation instructions show how to maintain
+multiple FAQs.  Removed bootstrap script from end of faqwiz.py module.
+Added instructions to bootstrap script, too.  Version bumped to 0.8.1.
+Added <html>...</html> feature suggested by Skip Montanaro.  Added
+leading text for Roulette, default to 'Hit Reload ...'.  Fix typo in
+default SRCDIR.
+
+- Documentation for the relatively new modules "keyword" and "symbol"
+has been added (to the end of the section on the parser extension
+module).
+
+- In module bisect.py, but functions have two optional argument 'lo'
+and 'hi' which allow you to specify a subsequence of the array to
+operate on.
+
+- In ftplib.py, changed most methods to return their status (even when
+it is always "200 OK") rather than swallowing it.
+
+- main() now calls setlocale(LC_ALL, ""), if setlocale() and
+<locale.h> are defined.
+
+- Changes to configure.in, the configure script, and both
+Makefile.pre.in files, to support SGI's SGI_ABI platform selection
+environment variable.
+
+
+======================================================================
+
+
+From 1.4 to 1.5a3
+=================
+
+Security
+--------
+
+- If you are using the setuid script C wrapper (Misc/setuid-prog.c),
+please use the new version.  The old version has a huge security leak.
+
+Miscellaneous
+-------------
+
+- Because of various (small) incompatible changes in the Python
+bytecode interpreter, the magic number for .pyc files has changed
+again.
+
+- The default module search path is now much saner.  Both on Unix and
+Windows, it is essentially derived from the path to the executable
+(which can be overridden by setting the environment variable
+$PYTHONHOME).  The value of $PYTHONPATH on Windows is now inserted in
+front of the default path, like in Unix (instead of overriding the
+default path).  On Windows, the directory containing the executable is
+added to the end of the path.
+
+- A new version of python-mode.el for Emacs has been included.  Also,
+a new file ccpy-style.el has been added to configure Emacs cc-mode for
+the preferred style in Python C sources.
+
+- On Unix, when using sys.argv[0] to insert the script directory in
+front of sys.path, expand a symbolic link.  You can now install a
+program in a private directory and have a symbolic link to it in a
+public bin directory, and it will put the private directory in the
+module search path.  Note that the symlink is expanded in sys.path[0]
+but not in sys.argv[0], so you can still tell the name by which you
+were invoked.
+
+- It is now recommended to use ``#!/usr/bin/env python'' instead of
+``#!/usr/local/bin/python'' at the start of executable scripts, except
+for CGI scripts.  It has been determined that the use of /usr/bin/env
+is more portable than that of /usr/local/bin/python -- scripts almost
+never have to be edited when the Python interpreter lives in a
+non-standard place.  Note that this doesn't work for CGI scripts since
+the python executable often doesn't live in the HTTP server's default
+search path.
+
+- The silly -s command line option and the corresponding
+PYTHONSUPPRESS environment variable (and the Py_SuppressPrint global
+flag in the Python/C API) are gone.
+
+- Most problems on 64-bit platforms should now be fixed.  Andrew
+Kuchling helped.  Some uncommon extension modules are still not
+clean (image and audio ops?).
+
+- Fixed a bug where multiple anonymous tuple arguments would be mixed up
+when using the debugger or profiler (reported by Just van Rossum).
+The simplest example is ``def f((a,b),(c,d)): print a,b,c,d''; this
+would print the wrong value when run under the debugger or profiler.
+
+- The hacks that the dictionary implementation used to speed up
+repeated lookups of the same C string were removed; these were a
+source of subtle problems and don't seem to serve much of a purpose
+any longer.
+
+- All traces of support for the long dead access statement have been
+removed from the sources.
+
+- Plugged the two-byte memory leak in the tokenizer when reading an
+interactive EOF.
+
+- There's a -O option to the interpreter that removes SET_LINENO
+instructions and assert statements (see below); it uses and produces
+.pyo files instead of .pyc files.  The speedup is only a few percent
+in most cases.  The line numbers are still available in the .pyo file,
+as a separate table (which is also available in .pyc files).  However,
+the removal of the SET_LINENO instructions means that the debugger
+(pdb) can't set breakpoints on lines in -O mode.  The traceback module
+contains a function to extract a line number from the code object
+referenced in a traceback object.  In the future it should be possible
+to write external bytecode optimizers that create better optimized
+.pyo files, and there should be more control over optimization;
+consider the -O option a "teaser".  Without -O, the assert statement
+actually generates code that first checks __debug__; if this variable
+is false, the assertion is not checked.  __debug__ is a built-in
+variable whose value is initialized to track the -O flag (it's true
+iff -O is not specified).  With -O, no code is generated for assert
+statements, nor for code of the form ``if __debug__: <something>''.
+Sorry, no further constant folding happens.
+
+
+Performance
+-----------
+
+- It's much faster (almost twice for pystone.py -- see
+Tools/scripts).  See the entry on string interning below.
+
+- Some speedup by using separate free lists for method objects (both
+the C and the Python variety) and for floating point numbers.
+
+- Big speedup by allocating frame objects with a single malloc() call.
+The Python/C API for frames is changed (you shouldn't be using this
+anyway).
+
+- Significant speedup by inlining some common opcodes for common operand 
+types (e.g.  i+i, i-i, and list[i]).  Fredrik Lundh.
+
+- Small speedup by reordering the method tables of some common
+objects (e.g. list.append is now first).
+
+- Big optimization to the read() method of file objects.  A read()
+without arguments now attempts to use fstat to allocate a buffer of
+the right size; for pipes and sockets, it will fall back to doubling
+the buffer size.  While that the improvement is real on all systems,
+it is most dramatic on Windows.
+
+
+Documentation
+-------------
+
+- Many new pieces of library documentation were contributed, mostly by
+Andrew Kuchling.  Even cmath is now documented!  There's also a
+chapter of the library manual, "libundoc.tex", which provides a
+listing of all undocumented modules, plus their status (e.g. internal,
+obsolete, or in need of documentation).  Also contributions by Sue
+Williams, Skip Montanaro, and some module authors who succumbed to
+pressure to document their own contributed modules :-).  Note that
+printing the documentation now kills fewer trees -- the margins have
+been reduced.
+
+- I have started documenting the Python/C API. Unfortunately this project 
+hasn't been completed yet.  It will be complete before the final release of 
+Python 1.5, though.  At the moment, it's better to read the LaTeX source 
+than to attempt to run it through LaTeX and print the resulting dvi file.
+
+- The posix module (and hence os.py) now has doc strings!  Thanks to Neil 
+Schemenauer.  I received a few other contributions of doc strings.  In most 
+other places, doc strings are still wishful thinking...
+
+
+Language changes
+----------------
+
+- Private variables with leading double underscore are now a permanent 
+feature of the language.  (These were experimental in release 1.4.  I have 
+favorable experience using them; I can't label them "experimental" 
+forever.)
+
+- There's new string literal syntax for "raw strings".  Prefixing a string 
+literal with the letter r (or R) disables all escape processing in the 
+string; for example, r'\n' is a two-character string consisting of a 
+backslash followed by the letter n.  This combines with all forms of string 
+quotes; it is actually useful for triple quoted doc strings which might 
+contain references to \n or \t.  An embedded quote prefixed with a 
+backslash does not terminate the string, but the backslash is still 
+included in the string; for example, r'\'' is a two-character string 
+consisting of a backslash and a quote.  (Raw strings are also 
+affectionately known as Robin strings, after their inventor, Robin 
+Friedrich.)
+
+- There's a simple assert statement, and a new exception
+AssertionError.  For example, ``assert foo > 0'' is equivalent to ``if
+not foo > 0: raise AssertionError''.  Sorry, the text of the asserted
+condition is not available; it would be too complicated to generate
+code for this (since the code is generated from a parse tree).
+However, the text is displayed as part of the traceback!
+
+- The raise statement has a new feature: when using "raise SomeClass,
+somevalue" where somevalue is not an instance of SomeClass, it
+instantiates SomeClass(somevalue).  In 1.5a4, if somevalue is an
+instance of a *derived* class of SomeClass, the exception class raised
+is set to somevalue.__class__, and SomeClass is ignored after that.
+
+- Duplicate keyword arguments are now detected at compile time;
+f(a=1,a=2) is now a syntax error.
+
+
+Changes to builtin features
+---------------------------
+
+- There's a new exception FloatingPointError (used only by Lee Busby's
+patches to catch floating point exceptions, at the moment).
+
+- The obsolete exception ConflictError (presumably used by the long
+obsolete access statement) has been deleted.
+
+- There's a new function sys.exc_info() which returns the tuple 
+(sys.exc_type, sys.exc_value, sys.exc_traceback) in a thread-safe way.
+
+- There's a new variable sys.executable, pointing to the executable file 
+for the Python interpreter.
+
+- The sort() methods for lists no longer uses the C library qsort(); I
+wrote my own quicksort implementation, with lots of help (in the form
+of a kind of competition) from Tim Peters.  This solves a bug in
+dictionary comparisons on some Solaris versions when Python is built
+with threads, and makes sorting lists even faster.
+
+- The semantics of comparing two dictionaries have changed, to make
+comparison of unequal dictionaries faster.  A shorter dictionary is
+always considered smaller than a larger dictionary.  For dictionaries
+of the same size, the smallest differing element determines the
+outcome (which yields the same results as before in this case, without
+explicit sorting).  Thanks to Aaron Watters for suggesting something
+like this.
+
+- The semantics of try-except have changed subtly so that calling a
+function in an exception handler that itself raises and catches an
+exception no longer overwrites the sys.exc_* variables.  This also
+alleviates the problem that objects referenced in a stack frame that
+caught an exception are kept alive until another exception is caught
+-- the sys.exc_* variables are restored to their previous value when
+returning from a function that caught an exception.
+
+- There's a new "buffer" interface.  Certain objects (e.g. strings and
+arrays) now support the "buffer" protocol.  Buffer objects are acceptable 
+whenever formerly a string was required for a write operation; mutable 
+buffer objects can be the target of a read operation using the call
+f.readinto(buffer).  A cool feature is that regular expression matching now 
+also work on array objects.  Contribution by Jack Jansen.  (Needs 
+documentation.)
+
+- String interning: dictionary lookups are faster when the lookup
+string object is the same object as the key in the dictionary, not
+just a string with the same value.  This is done by having a pool of
+"interned" strings.  Most names generated by the interpreter are now
+automatically interned, and there's a new built-in function intern(s)
+that returns the interned version of a string.  Interned strings are
+not a different object type, and interning is totally optional, but by
+interning most keys a speedup of about 15% was obtained for the
+pystone benchmark.
+
+- Dictionary objects have several new methods; clear() and copy() have
+the obvious semantics, while update(d) merges the contents of another
+dictionary d into this one, overriding existing keys.  The dictionary
+implementation file is now called dictobject.c rather than the
+confusing mappingobject.c.
+
+- The intrinsic function dir() is much smarter; it looks in __dict__,
+__members__ and __methods__.
+
+- The intrinsic functions int(), long() and float() can now take a
+string argument and then do the same thing as string.atoi(),
+string.atol(), and string.atof().  No second 'base' argument is
+allowed, and complex() does not take a string (nobody cared enough).
+
+- When a module is deleted, its globals are now deleted in two phases.
+In the first phase, all variables whose name begins with exactly one
+underscore are replaced by None; in the second phase, all variables
+are deleted.  This makes it possible to have global objects whose
+destructors depend on other globals.  The deletion order within each
+phase is still random.
+
+- It is no longer an error for a function to be called without a
+global variable __builtins__ -- an empty directory will be provided
+by default.
+
+- Guido's corollary to the "Don Beaudry hook": it is now possible to
+do metaprogramming by using an instance as a base class.  Not for the
+faint of heart; and undocumented as yet, but basically if a base class
+is an instance, its class will be instantiated to create the new
+class.  Jim Fulton will love it -- it also works with instances of his
+"extension classes", since it is triggered by the presence of a
+__class__ attribute on the purported base class.  See
+Demo/metaclasses/index.html for an explanation and see that directory
+for examples.
+
+- Another change is that the Don Beaudry hook is now invoked when
+*any* base class is special.  (Up to 1.5a3, the *last* special base
+class is used; in 1.5a4, the more rational choice of the *first*
+special base class is used.)
+
+- New optional parameter to the readlines() method of file objects.
+This indicates the number of bytes to read (the actual number of bytes
+read will be somewhat larger due to buffering reading until the end of
+the line).  Some optimizations have also been made to speed it up (but
+not as much as read()).
+
+- Complex numbers no longer have the ".conj" pseudo attribute; use
+z.conjugate() instead, or complex(z.real, -z.imag).  Complex numbers
+now *do* support the __members__ and __methods__ special attributes.
+
+- The complex() function now looks for a __complex__() method on class
+instances before giving up.
+
+- Long integers now support arbitrary shift counts, so you can now
+write 1L<<1000000, memory permitting.  (Python 1.4 reports "outrageous
+shift count for this.)
+
+- The hex() and oct() functions have been changed so that for regular
+integers, they never emit a minus sign.  For example, on a 32-bit
+machine, oct(-1) now returns '037777777777' and hex(-1) returns
+'0xffffffff'.  While this may seem inconsistent, it is much more
+useful.  (For long integers, a minus sign is used as before, to fit
+the result in memory :-)
+
+- The hash() function computes better hashes for several data types,
+including strings, floating point numbers, and complex numbers.
+
+
+New extension modules
+---------------------
+
+- New extension modules cStringIO.c and cPickle.c, written by Jim
+Fulton and other folks at Digital Creations.  These are much more
+efficient than their Python counterparts StringIO.py and pickle.py,
+but don't support subclassing.  cPickle.c clocks up to 1000 times
+faster than pickle.py; cStringIO.c's improvement is less dramatic but
+still significant.
+
+- New extension module zlibmodule.c, interfacing to the free zlib
+library (gzip compatible compression).  There's also a module gzip.py
+which provides a higher level interface.  Written by Andrew Kuchling
+and Jeremy Hylton.
+
+- New module readline; see the "miscellaneous" section above.
+
+- New Unix extension module resource.c, by Jeremy Hylton, provides
+access to getrlimit(), getrusage(), setrusage(), getpagesize(), and
+related symbolic constants.
+
+- New extension puremodule.c, by Barry Warsaw, which interfaces to the
+Purify(TM) C API.  See also the file Misc/PURIFY.README.  It is also
+possible to enable Purify by simply setting the PURIFY Makefile
+variable in the Modules/Setup file.
+
+
+Changes in extension modules
+----------------------------
+
+- The struct extension module has several new features to control byte
+order and word size.  It supports reading and writing IEEE floats even
+on platforms where this is not the native format.  It uses uppercase
+format codes for unsigned integers of various sizes (always using
+Python long ints for 'I' and 'L'), 's' with a size prefix for strings,
+and 'p' for "Pascal strings" (with a leading length byte, included in
+the size; blame Hannu Krosing; new in 1.5a4).  A prefix '>' forces
+big-endian data and '<' forces little-endian data; these also select
+standard data sizes and disable automatic alignment (use pad bytes as
+needed).
+
+- The array module supports uppercase format codes for unsigned data
+formats (like the struct module).
+
+- The fcntl extension module now exports the needed symbolic
+constants.  (Formerly these were in FCNTL.py which was not available
+or correct for all platforms.)
+
+- The extension modules dbm, gdbm and bsddb now check that the
+database is still open before making any new calls.
+
+- The dbhash module is no more.  Use bsddb instead.  (There's a third
+party interface for the BSD 2.x code somewhere on the web; support for
+bsddb will be deprecated.)
+
+- The gdbm module now supports a sync() method.
+
+- The socket module now has some new functions: getprotobyname(), and
+the set {ntoh,hton}{s,l}().
+
+- Various modules now export their type object: socket.SocketType,
+array.ArrayType.
+
+- The socket module's accept() method now returns unknown addresses as
+a tuple rather than raising an exception.  (This can happen in
+promiscuous mode.)  Theres' also a new function getprotobyname().
+
+- The pthread support for the thread module now works on most platforms.
+
+- STDWIN is now officially obsolete.  Support for it will eventually
+be removed from the distribution.
+
+- The binascii extension module is now hopefully fully debugged.
+(XXX Oops -- Fredrik Lundh promised me a uuencode fix that I never
+received.)
+
+- audioop.c: added a ratecv() function; better handling of overflow in
+add().
+
+- posixmodule.c: now exports the O_* flags (O_APPEND etc.).  On
+Windows, also O_TEXT and O_BINARY.  The 'error' variable (the
+exception is raises) is renamed -- its string value is now "os.error",
+so newbies don't believe they have to import posix (or nt) to catch
+it when they see os.error reported as posix.error.  The execve()
+function now accepts any mapping object for the environment.
+
+- A new version of the al (audio library) module for SGI was
+contributed by Sjoerd Mullender.
+
+- The regex module has a new function get_syntax() which retrieves the
+syntax setting set by set_syntax().  The code was also sanitized,
+removing worries about unclean error handling.  See also below for its
+successor, re.py.
+
+- The "new" module (which creates new objects of various types) once
+again has a fully functioning new.function() method.  Dangerous as
+ever!  Also, new.code() has several new arguments.
+
+- A problem has been fixed in the rotor module: on systems with signed
+characters, rotor-encoded data was not portable when the key contained
+8-bit characters.  Also, setkey() now requires its argument rather
+than having broken code to default it.
+
+- The sys.builtin_module_names variable is now a tuple.  Another new
+variables in sys is sys.executable (the full path to the Python
+binary, if known).
+
+- The specs for time.strftime() have undergone some revisions.  It
+appears that not all format characters are supported in the same way
+on all platforms.  Rather than reimplement it, we note these
+differences in the documentation, and emphasize the shared set of
+features.  There's also a thorough test set (that occasionally finds
+problems in the C library implementation, e.g. on some Linuxes),
+thanks to Skip Montanaro.
+
+- The nis module seems broken when used with NIS+; unfortunately
+nobody knows how to fix it.  It should still work with old NIS.
+
+
+New library modules
+-------------------
+
+- New (still experimental) Perl-style regular expression module,
+re.py, which uses a new interface for matching as well as a new
+syntax; the new interface avoids the thread-unsafety of the regex
+interface.  This comes with a helper extension reopmodule.c and vastly
+rewritten regexpr.c.  Most work on this was done by Jeffrey Ollie, Tim
+Peters, and Andrew Kuchling.  See the documentation libre.tex.  In
+1.5, the old regex module is still fully supported; in the future, it
+will become obsolete.
+
+- New module gzip.py; see zlib above.
+
+- New module keyword.py exports knowledge about Python's built-in
+keywords.  (New version by Ka-Ping Yee.)
+
+- New module pprint.py (with documentation) which supports
+pretty-printing of lists, tuples, & dictionaries recursively.  By Fred
+Drake.
+
+- New module code.py.  The function code.compile_command() can
+determine whether an interactively entered command is complete or not,
+distinguishing incomplete from invalid input.  (XXX Unfortunately,
+this seems broken at this moment, and I don't have the time to fix
+it.  It's probably better to add an explicit interface to the parser
+for this.)
+
+- There is now a library module xdrlib.py which can read and write the
+XDR data format as used by Sun RPC, for example.  It uses the struct
+module.
+
+
+Changes in library modules
+--------------------------
+
+- Module codehack.py is now completely obsolete.
+
+- The pickle.py module has been updated to make it compatible with the
+new binary format that cPickle.c produces.  By default it produces the
+old all-ASCII format compatible with the old pickle.py, still much
+faster than pickle.py; it will read both formats automatically.  A few
+other updates have been made.
+
+- A new helper module, copy_reg.py, is provided to register extensions
+to the pickling code.
+
+- Revamped module tokenize.py is much more accurate and has an
+interface that makes it a breeze to write code to colorize Python
+source code.  Contributed by Ka-Ping Yee.
+
+- In ihooks.py, ModuleLoader.load_module() now closes the file under
+all circumstances.
+
+- The tempfile.py module has a new class, TemporaryFile, which creates
+an open temporary file that will be deleted automatically when
+closed.  This works on Windows and MacOS as well as on Unix.  (Jim
+Fulton.)
+
+- Changes to the cgi.py module: Most imports are now done at the
+top of the module, which provides a speedup when using ni (Jim
+Fulton).  The problem with file upload to a Windows platform is solved
+by using the new tempfile.TemporaryFile class; temporary files are now
+always opened in binary mode (Jim Fulton).  The cgi.escape() function
+now takes an optional flag argument that quotes '"' to '&quot;'.  It
+is now possible to invoke cgi.py from a command line script, to test
+cgi scripts more easily outside an http server.  There's an optional
+limit to the size of uploads to POST (Skip Montanaro).  Added a
+'strict_parsing' option to all parsing functions (Jim Fulton).  The
+function parse_qs() now uses urllib.unquote() on the name as well as
+the value of fields (Clarence Gardner).  The FieldStorage class now
+has a __len__() method.
+
+- httplib.py: the socket object is no longer closed; all HTTP/1.*
+responses are now accepted; and it is now thread-safe (by not using
+the regex module).
+
+- BaseHTTPModule.py: treat all HTTP/1.* versions the same.
+
+- The popen2.py module is now rewritten using a class, which makes
+access to the standard error stream and the process id of the
+subprocess possible.
+
+- Added timezone support to the rfc822.py module, in the form of a
+getdate_tz() method and a parsedate_tz() function; also a mktime_tz().
+Also added recognition of some non-standard date formats, by Lars
+Wirzenius, and RFC 850 dates (Chris Lawrence).
+
+- mhlib.py: various enhancements, including almost compatible parsing
+of message sequence specifiers without invoking a subprocess.  Also
+added a createmessage() method by Lars Wirzenius.
+
+- The StringIO.StringIO class now supports readline(nbytes).  (Lars 
+Wirzenius.)  (Of course, you should be using cStringIO for performance.)
+
+- UserDict.py supports the new dictionary methods as well.
+
+- Improvements for whrandom.py by Tim Peters: use 32-bit arithmetic to
+speed it up, and replace 0 seed values by 1 to avoid degeneration.
+A bug was fixed in the test for invalid arguments.
+
+- Module ftplib.py: added support for parsing a .netrc file (Fred
+Drake).  Also added an ntransfercmd() method to the FTP class, which
+allows access to the expected size of a transfer when available, and a
+parse150() function to the module which parses the corresponding 150
+response.
+
+- urllib.py: the ftp cache is now limited to 10 entries.  Added
+quote_plus() and unquote_plus() functions which are like quote() and
+unquote() but also replace spaces with '+' or vice versa, for
+encoding/decoding CGI form arguments.  Catch all errors from the ftp
+module.  HTTP requests now add the Host: header line.  The proxy
+variable names are now mapped to lower case, for Windows.  The
+spliturl() function no longer erroneously throws away all data past
+the first newline.  The basejoin() function now intereprets "../"
+correctly.  I *believe* that the problems with "exception raised in
+__del__" under certain circumstances have been fixed (mostly by
+changes elsewher in the interpreter).
+
+- In urlparse.py, there is a cache for results in urlparse.urlparse();
+its size limit is set to 20.  Also, new URL schemes shttp, https, and
+snews are "supported".
+
+- shelve.py: use cPickle and cStringIO when available.  Also added
+a sync() method, which calls the database's sync() method if there is
+one.
+
+- The mimetools.py module now uses the available Python modules for
+decoding quoted-printable, uuencode and base64 formats, rather than
+creating a subprocess.
+
+- The python debugger (pdb.py, and its base class bdb.py) now support
+conditional breakpoints.  See the docs.
+
+- The modules base64.py, uu.py and quopri.py can now be used as simple
+command line utilities.
+
+- Various small fixes to the nntplib.py module that I can't bother to
+document in detail.
+
+- Sjoerd Mullender's mimify.py module now supports base64 encoding and 
+includes functions to handle the funny encoding you sometimes see in mail 
+headers.  It is now documented.
+
+- mailbox.py: Added BabylMailbox.  Improved the way the mailbox is
+gotten from the environment.
+
+- Many more modules now correctly open files in binary mode when this
+is necessary on non-Unix platforms.
+
+- The copying functions in the undocumented module shutil.py are
+smarter.
+
+- The Writer classes in the formatter.py module now have a flush()
+method.
+
+- The sgmllib.py module accepts hyphens and periods in the middle of
+attribute names.  While this is against the SGML standard, there is
+some HTML out there that uses this...
+
+- The interface for the Python bytecode disassembler module, dis.py,
+has been enhanced quite a bit.  There's now one main function,
+dis.dis(), which takes almost any kind of object (function, module,
+class, instance, method, code object) and disassembles it; without
+arguments it disassembles the last frame of the last traceback.  The
+other functions have changed slightly, too.
+
+- The imghdr.py module recognizes new image types: BMP, PNG.
+
+- The string.py module has a new function replace(str, old, new,
+[maxsplit]) which does substring replacements.  It is actually
+implemented in C in the strop module.  The functions [r]find() an
+[r]index() have an optional 4th argument indicating the end of the
+substring to search, alsoo implemented by their strop counterparts.
+(Remember, never import strop -- import string uses strop when
+available with zero overhead.)
+
+- The string.join() function now accepts any sequence argument, not
+just lists and tuples.
+
+- The string.maketrans() requires its first two arguments to be
+present.  The old version didn't require them, but there's not much
+point without them, and the documentation suggests that they are
+required, so we fixed the code to match the documentation.
+
+- The regsub.py module has a function clear_cache(), which clears its
+internal cache of compiled regular expressions.  Also, the cache now
+takes the current syntax setting into account.  (However, this module
+is now obsolete -- use the sub() or subn() functions or methods in the
+re module.)
+
+- The undocumented module Complex.py has been removed, now that Python
+has built-in complex numbers.  A similar module remains as
+Demo/classes/Complex.py, as an example.
+
+
+Changes to the build process
+----------------------------
+
+- The way GNU readline is configured is totally different.  The
+--with-readline configure option is gone.  It is now an extension
+module, which may be loaded dynamically.  You must enable it (and
+specify the correct linraries to link with) in the Modules/Setup file.
+Importing the module installs some hooks which enable command line
+editing.  When the interpreter shell is invoked interactively, it
+attempts to import the readline module; when this fails, the default
+input mechanism is used.  The hook variables are PyOS_InputHook and
+PyOS_ReadlineFunctionPointer.  (Code contributed by Lee Busby, with
+ideas from William Magro.)
+
+- New build procedure: a single library, libpython1.5.a, is now built,
+which contains absolutely everything except for a one-line main()
+program (which calls Py_Main(argc, argv) to start the interpreter
+shell).  This makes life much simpler for applications that need to
+embed Python.  The serial number of the build is now included in the
+version string (sys.version).
+
+- As far as I can tell, neither gcc -Wall nor the Microsoft compiler
+emits a single warning any more when compiling Python.
+
+- A number of new Makefile variables have been added for special
+situations, e.g. LDLAST is appended to the link command.  These are
+used by editing the Makefile or passing them on the make command
+line.
+
+- A set of patches from Lee Busby has been integrated that make it
+possible to catch floating point exceptions.  Use the configure option
+--with-fpectl to enable the patches; the extension modules fpectl and
+fpetest provide control to enable/disable and test the feature,
+respectively.
+
+- The support for shared libraries under AIX is now simpler and more
+robust.  Thanks to Vladimir Marangozov for revamping his own patches!
+
+- The Modules/makesetup script now reads a file Setup.local as well as
+a file Setup.  Most changes to the Setup script can be done by editing
+Setup.local instead, which makes it easier to carry a particular setup
+over from one release to the next.
+
+- The Modules/makesetup script now copies any "include" lines it
+encounters verbatim into the output Makefile.  It also recognizes .cxx
+and .cpp as C++ source files.
+
+- The configure script is smarter about C compiler options; e.g. with
+gcc it uses -O2 and -g when possible, and on some other platforms it
+uses -Olimit 1500 to avoid a warning from the optimizer about the main
+loop in ceval.c (which has more than 1000 basic blocks).
+
+- The configure script now detects whether malloc(0) returns a NULL
+pointer or a valid block (of length zero).  This avoids the nonsense
+of always adding one byte to all malloc() arguments on most platforms.
+
+- The configure script has a new option, --with-dec-threads, to enable
+DEC threads on DEC Alpha platforms.  Also, --with-threads is now an
+alias for --with-thread (this was the Most Common Typo in configure
+arguments).
+
+- Many changes in Doc/Makefile; amongst others, latex2html is now used
+to generate HTML from all latex documents.
+
+
+Change to the Python/C API
+--------------------------
+
+- Because some interfaces have changed, the PYTHON_API macro has been
+bumped.  Most extensions built for the old API version will still run,
+but I can't guarantee this.  Python prints a warning message on
+version mismatches; it dumps core when the version mismatch causes a
+serious problem :-)
+
+- I've completed the Grand Renaming, with the help of Roger Masse and
+Barry Warsaw.  This makes reading or debugging the code much easier.
+Many other unrelated code reorganizations have also been carried out.
+The allobjects.h header file is gone; instead, you would have to
+include Python.h followed by rename2.h.  But you're better off running
+Tools/scripts/fixcid.py -s Misc/RENAME on your source, so you can omit
+the rename2.h; it will disappear in the next release.
+
+- Various and sundry small bugs in the "abstract" interfaces have been
+fixed.  Thanks to all the (involuntary) testers of the Python 1.4
+version!  Some new functions have been added, e.g. PySequence_List(o),
+equivalent to list(o) in Python.
+
+- New API functions PyLong_FromUnsignedLong() and
+PyLong_AsUnsignedLong().
+
+- The API functions in the file cgensupport.c are no longer
+supported.  This file has been moved to Modules and is only ever
+compiled when the SGI specific 'gl' module is built.
+
+- PyObject_Compare() can now raise an exception.  Check with
+PyErr_Occurred().  The comparison function in an object type may also
+raise an exception.
+
+- The slice interface uses an upper bound of INT_MAX when no explicit
+upper bound is given (e.x. for a[1:]).  It used to ask the object for
+its length and do the calculations.
+
+- Support for multiple independent interpreters.  See Doc/api.tex,
+functions Py_NewInterpreter() and Py_EndInterpreter().  Since the
+documentation is incomplete, also see the new Demo/pysvr example
+(which shows how to use these in a threaded application) and the
+source code.
+
+- There is now a Py_Finalize() function which "de-initializes"
+Python.  It is possible to completely restart the interpreter
+repeatedly by calling Py_Finalize() followed by Py_Initialize().  A
+change of functionality in Py_Initialize() means that it is now a
+fatal error to call it while the interpreter is already initialized.
+The old, half-hearted Py_Cleanup() routine is gone.  Use of Py_Exit()
+is deprecated (it is nothing more than Py_Finalize() followed by
+exit()).
+
+- There are no known memory leaks left.  While Py_Finalize() doesn't
+free *all* allocated memory (some of it is hard to track down),
+repeated calls to Py_Finalize() and Py_Initialize() do not create
+unaccessible heap blocks.
+
+- There is now explicit per-thread state.  (Inspired by, but not the
+same as, Greg Stein's free threading patches.)
+
+- There is now better support for threading C applications.  There are
+now explicit APIs to manipulate the interpreter lock.  Read the source
+or the Demo/pysvr example; the new functions are
+PyEval_{Acquire,Release}{Lock,Thread}().
+
+- The test macro DEBUG has changed to Py_DEBUG, to avoid interference
+with other libraries' DEBUG macros.  Likewise for any other test
+macros that didn't yet start with Py_.
+
+- New wrappers around malloc() and friends: Py_Malloc() etc. call
+malloc() and call PyErr_NoMemory() when it fails; PyMem_Malloc() call
+just malloc().  Use of these wrappers could be essential if multiple
+memory allocators exist (e.g. when using certain DLL setups under
+Windows).  (Idea by Jim Fulton.)
+
+- New C API PyImport_Import() which uses whatever __import__() hook
+that is installed for the current execution environment.  By Jim
+Fulton.
+
+- It is now possible for an extension module's init function to fail
+non-fatally, by calling one of the PyErr_* functions and returning.
+
+- The PyInt_AS_LONG() and PyFloat_AS_DOUBLE() macros now cast their
+argument to the proper type, like the similar PyString macros already
+did.  (Suggestion by Marc-Andre Lemburg.)  Similar for PyList_GET_SIZE
+and PyList_GET_ITEM.
+
+- Some of the Py_Get* function, like Py_GetVersion() (but not yet
+Py_GetPath()) are now declared as returning a const char *.  (More
+should follow.)
+
+- Changed the run-time library to check for exceptions after object
+comparisons.  PyObject_Compare() can now return an exception; use
+PyErr_Occurred() to check (there is *no* special return value).
+
+- PyFile_WriteString() and Py_Flushline() now return error indicators
+instead of clearing exceptions.  This fixes an obscure bug where using
+these would clear a pending exception, discovered by Just van Rossum.
+
+- There's a new function, PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords(), which parses
+an argument list including keyword arguments.  Contributed by Geoff
+Philbrick.
+
+- PyArg_GetInt() is gone.
+
+- It's no longer necessary to include graminit.h when calling one of
+the extended parser API functions.  The three public grammar start
+symbols are now in Python.h as Py_single_input, Py_file_input, and
+Py_eval_input.
+
+- The CObject interface has a new function,
+PyCObject_Import(module, name).  It calls PyCObject_AsVoidPtr()
+on the object referenced by "module.name".
+
+
+Tkinter
+-------
+
+- On popular demand, _tkinter once again installs a hook for readline
+that processes certain Tk events while waiting for the user to type
+(using PyOS_InputHook).
+
+- A patch by Craig McPheeters plugs the most obnoxious memory leaks,
+caused by command definitions referencing widget objects beyond their
+lifetime.
+
+- New standard dialog modules: tkColorChooser.py, tkCommonDialog.py,
+tkMessageBox.py, tkFileDialog.py, tkSimpleDialog.py These interface
+with the new Tk dialog scripts, and provide more "native platform"
+style file selection dialog boxes on some platforms.  Contributed by
+Fredrik Lundh.
+
+- Tkinter.py: when the first Tk object is destroyed, it sets the
+hiddel global _default_root to None, so that when another Tk object is
+created it becomes the new default root.  Other miscellaneous
+changes and fixes.
+
+- The Image class now has a configure method.
+
+- Added a bunch of new winfo options to Tkinter.py; we should now be
+up to date with Tk 4.2.  The new winfo options supported are:
+mananger, pointerx, pointerxy, pointery, server, viewable, visualid,
+visualsavailable.
+
+- The broken bind() method on Canvas objects defined in the Canvas.py
+module has been fixed.  The CanvasItem and Group classes now also have
+an unbind() method.
+
+- The problem with Tkinter.py falling back to trying to import
+"tkinter" when "_tkinter" is not found has been fixed -- it no longer
+tries "tkinter", ever.  This makes diagnosing the problem "_tkinter
+not configured" much easier and will hopefully reduce the newsgroup
+traffic on this topic.
+
+- The ScrolledText module once again supports the 'cnf' parameter, to
+be compatible with the examples in Mark Lutz' book (I know, I know,
+too late...)
+
+- The _tkinter.c extension module has been revamped.  It now support
+Tk versions 4.1 through 8.0; support for 4.0 has been dropped.  It
+works well under Windows and Mac (with the latest Tk ports to those
+platforms).  It also supports threading -- it is safe for one
+(Python-created) thread to be blocked in _tkinter.mainloop() while
+other threads modify widgets.  To make the changes visible, those
+threads must use update_idletasks()method.  (The patch for threading
+in 1.5a3 was broken; in 1.5a4, it is back in a different version,
+which requires access to the Tcl sources to get it to work -- hence it
+is disabled by default.)
+
+- A bug in _tkinter.c has been fixed, where Split() with a string
+containing an unmatched '"' could cause an exception or core dump.
+
+- Unfortunately, on Windows and Mac, Tk 8.0 no longer supports
+CreateFileHandler, so _tkinter.createfilehandler is not available on
+those platforms when using Tk 8.0 or later.  I will have to rethink
+how to interface with Tcl's lower-level event mechanism, or with its
+channels (which are like Python's file-like objects).  Jack Jansen has
+provided a fix for the Mac, so createfilehandler *is* actually
+supported there; maybe I can adapt his fix for Windows.
+
+
+Tools and Demos
+---------------
+
+- A new regression test suite is provided, which tests most of the
+standard and built-in modules.  The regression test is run by invoking
+the script Lib/test/regrtest.py.  Barry Warsaw wrote the test harnass;
+he and Roger Masse contributed most of the new tests.
+
+- New tool: faqwiz -- the CGI script that is used to maintain the
+Python FAQ (http://grail.cnri.reston.va.us/cgi-bin/faqw.py).  In
+Tools/faqwiz.
+
+- New tool: webchecker -- a simple extensible web robot that, when
+aimed at a web server, checks that server for dead links.  Available
+are a command line utility as well as a Tkinter based GUI version.  In
+Tools/webchecker.  A simplified version of this program is dissected
+in my article in O'Reilly's WWW Journal, the issue on Scripting
+Languages (Vol 2, No 2); Scripting the Web with Python (pp 97-120).
+Includes a parser for robots.txt files by Skip Montanaro.
+
+- New small tools: cvsfiles.py (prints a list of all files under CVS
+n a particular directory tree), treesync.py (a rather Guido-specific
+script to synchronize two source trees, one on Windows NT, the other
+one on Unix under CVS but accessible from the NT box), and logmerge.py
+(sort a collection of RCS or CVS logs by date).  In Tools/scripts.
+
+- The freeze script now also works under Windows (NT).  Another
+feature allows the -p option to be pointed at the Python source tree
+instead of the installation prefix.  This was loosely based on part of
+xfreeze by Sam Rushing and Bill Tutt.
+
+- New examples (Demo/extend) that show how to use the generic
+extension makefile (Misc/Makefile.pre.in).
+
+- Tools/scripts/h2py.py now supports C++ comments.
+
+- Tools/scripts/pystone.py script is upgraded to version 1.1; there
+was a bug in version 1.0 (distributed with Python 1.4) that leaked
+memory.  Also, in 1.1, the LOOPS variable is incremented to 10000.
+
+- Demo/classes/Rat.py completely rewritten by Sjoerd Mullender.
+
+
+Windows (NT and 95)
+-------------------
+
+- New project files for Developer Studio (Visual C++) 5.0 for Windows
+NT (the old VC++ 4.2 Makefile is also still supported, but will
+eventually be withdrawn due to its bulkiness).
+
+- See the note on the new module search path in the "Miscellaneous" section 
+above.
+
+- Support for Win32s (the 32-bit Windows API under Windows 3.1) is
+basically withdrawn.  If it still works for you, you're lucky.
+
+- There's a new extension module, msvcrt.c, which provides various 
+low-level operations defined in the Microsoft Visual C++ Runtime Library.  
+These include locking(), setmode(), get_osfhandle(), set_osfhandle(), and 
+console I/O functions like kbhit(), getch() and putch().
+
+- The -u option not only sets the standard I/O streams to unbuffered
+status, but also sets them in binary mode.  (This can also be done
+using msvcrt.setmode(), by the way.)
+
+- The, sys.prefix and sys.exec_prefix variables point to the directory 
+where Python is installed, or to the top of the source tree, if it was run 
+from there.
+
+- The various os.path modules (posixpath, ntpath, macpath) now support
+passing more than two arguments to the join() function, so
+os.path.join(a, b, c) is the same as os.path.join(a, os.path.join(b,
+c)).
+
+- The ntpath module (normally used as os.path) supports ~ to $HOME 
+expansion in expanduser().
+
+- The freeze tool now works on Windows.
+
+- See also the Tkinter category for a sad note on
+_tkinter.createfilehandler().
+
+- The truncate() method for file objects now works on Windows.
+
+- Py_Initialize() is no longer called when the DLL is loaded.  You
+must call it yourself.
+
+- The time module's clock() function now has good precision through
+the use of the Win32 API QueryPerformanceCounter().
+
+- Mark Hammond will release Python 1.5 versions of PythonWin and his
+other Windows specific code: the win32api extensions, COM/ActiveX
+support, and the MFC interface.
+
+
+Mac
+---
+
+- As always, the Macintosh port will be done by Jack Jansen.  He will
+make a separate announcement for the Mac specific source code and the
+binary distribution(s) when these are ready.
+
+
+======================================================================
 
 
 =====================================