Abstract

    This document describes the development and release schedule for
    Python 2.3.  The schedule primarily concerns itself with PEP-sized
    items.  Small features may be added up to and including the first
    beta release.  Bugs may be fixed until the final release.

    There will be at least two alpha releases, two beta releases, and
    one release candidate.  Alpha and beta releases will be spaced at
    least 4 weeks apart (except if an emergency release must be made
    to correct a blunder in the previous release; then the blunder
    release does not count).  Release candidates will be spaced at
    least one week apart (excepting again blunder corrections).

      alpha 1      --  31 Dec 2002
      alpha 2      --  19 Feb 2003
      beta 1       --  25 Apr 2003
      beta 2       --  29 Jun 2003
      candidate 1  --  18 Jul 2003
      candidate 2  --  24 Jul 2003
      final        --  29 Jul 2003

Release Manager

    Barry Warsaw, Jeremy Hylton, Tim Peters

Completed features for 2.3

    This list is not complete.  See Doc/whatsnew/whatsnew23.tex in CVS
    for more, and of course Misc/NEWS for the full list.

    - Tk 8.4 update.

    - The bool type and its constants, True and False (PEP 285).

    - PyMalloc was greatly enhanced and is enabled by default.

    - Universal newline support (PEP 278).

    - PEP 263  Defining Python Source Code Encodings        Lemburg

      Implemented (at least phase 1, which is all that's planned for
      2.3).

    - Extended slice notation for all built-in sequences.  The patch
      by Michael Hudson is now all checked in.

    - Speed up list iterations by filling tp_iter and other tweaks.
      See http://www.python.org/sf/560736; also done for xrange and
      tuples.

    - Timeout sockets.  http://www.python.org/sf/555085

    - Stage B0 of the int/long integration (PEP 237).  This means
      issuing a FutureWarning about situations where hex or oct
      conversions or left shifts returns a different value for an int
      than for a long with the same value.  The semantics do *not*
      change in Python 2.3; that will happen in Python 2.4.

    - Nuke SET_LINENO from all code objects (providing a different way
      to set debugger breakpoints).  This can boost pystone by >5%.
      http://www.python.org/sf/587993, now checked in.  (Unfortunately
      the pystone boost didn't happen.  What happened?)

    - Write a pymemcompat.h that people can bundle with their
      extensions and then use the 2.3 memory interface with all
      Pythons in the range 1.5.2 to 2.3.  (Michael Hudson checked in
      Misc/pymemcompat.h.)

    - Add a new concept, "pending deprecation", with associated
      warning PendingDeprecationWarning.  This warning is normally
      suppressed, but can be enabled by a suitable -W option.  Only a
      few things use this at this time.

    - Warn when an extension type's tp_compare returns anything except
      -1, 0 or 1.  http://www.python.org/sf/472523

    - Warn for assignment to None (in various forms).

    - PEP 218  Adding a Built-In Set Object Type            Wilson

      Alex Martelli contributed a new version of Greg Wilson's
      prototype, and I've reworked that quite a bit.  It's in the
      standard library now as the module "sets", although some details
      may still change until the first beta release.  (There are no
      plans to make this a built-in type, for now.)

    - PEP 293  Codec error handling callbacks               Dörwald

      Fully implemented.  Error handling in unicode.encode or
      str.decode can now be customized.

    - PEP 282  A Logging System                             Mick

      Vinay Sajip's implementation has been packagized and imported.
      (Documentation and unit tests still pending.)
      http://www.python.org/sf/578494

    - A modified MRO (Method Resolution Order) algorithm.  Consensus
      is that we should adopt C3.  Samuele Pedroni has contributed a
      draft implementation in C, see http://www.python.org/sf/619475
      This has now been checked in.

    - A new command line option parser.  Greg Ward's Optik package
      (http://optik.sf.net) has been adopted, converted to a single
      module named optparse.  See also
      http://www.python.org/sigs/getopt-sig/

    - A standard datetime type.  This started as a wiki:
      http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage .  A
      prototype was coded in nondist/sandbox/datetime/.  Tim Peters
      has finished the C implementation and checked it in.

    - PEP 273  Import Modules from Zip Archives             Ahlstrom

      Implemented as a part of the PEP 302 implementation work.

    - PEP 302  New Import Hooks                             JvR

      Implemented (though the 2.3a1 release contained some bugs that
      have been fixed post-release).

    - A new pickling protocol.  See PEP 307.

    - PEP 305 (CSV File API, by Skip Montanaro et al.) is in; this is
      the csv module.

    - Raymond Hettinger's itertools module is in.

    - PEP 311 (Simplified GIL Acquisition for Extensions, by Mark
      Hammond) has been included in beta 1.

    - Two new PyArg_Parse*() format codes, 'k' returns an unsigned C
      long int that receives the lower LONG_BIT bits of the Python
      argument, truncating without range checking. 'K' returns an
      unsigned C long long int that receives the lower LONG_LONG_BIT
      bits, truncating without range checking.  (SF 595026; Thomas
      Heller did this work.)

    - A new version of IDLE was imported from the IDLEfork project
      (http://idlefork.sf.net).  The code now lives in the idlelib
      package in the standard library and the idle script is installed
      by setup.py.

Planned features for 2.3

    Too late for anything more to get done here.

Ongoing tasks

    The following are ongoing TO-DO items which we should attempt to
    work on without hoping for completion by any particular date.

    - Documentation: complete the distribution and installation
      manuals.

    - Documentation: complete the documentation for new-style
      classes.

    - Look over the Demos/ directory and update where required (Andrew
      Kuchling has done a lot of this)

    - New tests.

    - Fix doc bugs on SF.

    - Remove use of deprecated features in the core.

    - Document deprecated features appropriately.

    - Mark deprecated C APIs with Py_DEPRECATED.

    - Deprecate modules which are unmaintained, or perhaps make a new
      category for modules 'Unmaintained'

    - In general, lots of cleanup so it is easier to move forward.

Open issues

    There are some issues that may need more work and/or thought
    before the final release (and preferably before the first beta
    release):  No issues remaining.

Features that did not make it into Python 2.3

    - The import lock could use some redesign.  (SF 683658.)

    - Set API issues; is the sets module perfect?

      I expect it's good enough to stop polishing it until we've had
      more widespread user experience.

    - A nicer API to open text files, replacing the ugly (in some
      people's eyes) "U" mode flag.  There's a proposal out there to
      have a new built-in type textfile(filename, mode, encoding).
      (Shouldn't it have a bufsize argument too?)

      Ditto.

    - New widgets for Tkinter???

      Has anyone gotten the time for this?  *Are* there any new
      widgets in Tk 8.4?  Note that we've got better Tix support
      already (though not on Windows yet).

    - Fredrik Lundh's basetime proposal:
      http://effbot.org/ideas/time-type.htm

      I believe this is dead now.

    - PEP 304 (Controlling Generation of Bytecode Files by Montanaro)
      seems to have lost steam.

    - For a class defined inside another class, the __name__ should be
      "outer.inner", and pickling should work.  (SF 633930.  I'm no
      longer certain this is easy or even right.)

    - reST is going to be used a lot in Zope3.  Maybe it could become
      a standard library module?  (Since reST's author thinks it's too
      instable, I'm inclined not to do this.)

    - Decide on a clearer deprecation policy (especially for modules)
      and act on it.  For a start, see this message from Neil Norwitz:
      http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2002-April/023165.html
      There seems insufficient interest in moving this further in an
      organized fashion, and it's not particularly important.

    - Provide alternatives for common uses of the types module;
      Skip Montanaro has posted a proto-PEP for this idea:
      http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2002-May/024346.html
      There hasn't been any progress on this, AFAICT.

    - Use pending deprecation for the types and string modules.  This
      requires providing alternatives for the parts that aren't
      covered yet (e.g. string.whitespace and types.TracebackType).
      It seems we can't get consensus on this.

    - Deprecate the buffer object.
      http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2002-July/026388.html
      http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2002-July/026408.html
      It seems that this is never going to be resolved.

    - PEP 269  Pgen Module for Python                       Riehl

      (Some necessary changes are in; the pgen module itself needs to
      mature more.)

    - Add support for the long-awaited Python catalog.  Kapil
      Thangavelu has a Zope-based implementation that he demoed at
      OSCON 2002.  Now all we need is a place to host it and a person
      to champion it.  (Some changes to distutils to support this are
      in, at least.)

    - PEP 266  Optimizing Global Variable/Attribute Access  Montanaro
      PEP 267  Optimized Access to Module Namespaces        Hylton
      PEP 280  Optimizing access to globals                 van Rossum

      These are basically three friendly competing proposals.  Jeremy
      has made a little progress with a new compiler, but it's going
      slow and the compiler is only the first step.  Maybe we'll be
      able to refactor the compiler in this release.  I'm tempted to
      say we won't hold our breath.  In the mean time, Oren Tirosh has
      a much simpler idea that may give a serious boost to the
      performance of accessing globals and built-ins, by optimizing
      and inlining the dict access:
      http://tothink.com/python/fastnames/

    - Lazily tracking tuples?
      http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2002-May/023926.html
      http://www.python.org/sf/558745
      Not much enthusiasm I believe.

    - PEP 286  Enhanced Argument Tuples                     von Loewis

      I haven't had the time to review this thoroughly.  It seems a
      deep optimization hack (also makes better correctness guarantees
      though).

    - Make 'as' a keyword.  It has been a pseudo-keyword long enough.
      Too much effort to bother.

Copyright

    This document has been placed in the public domain.