Release 0.10.2

IPython 0.10.2 was released April 9, 2011. This is a minor bugfix release that preserves backward compatibility. At this point, all IPython development resources are focused on the 0.11 series that includes a complete architectural restructuring of the project as well as many new capabilities, so this is likely to be the last release of the 0.10.x series. We have tried to fix all major bugs in this series so that it remains a viable platform for those not ready yet to transition to the 0.11 and newer codebase (since that will require some porting effort, as a number of APIs have changed).

Thus, we are not opening a 0.10.3 active development branch yet, but if the user community requires new patches and is willing to maintain/release such a branch, we'll be happy to host it on the IPython github repositories.

Highlights of this release:

• The main one is the closing of github ticket #185, a major regression we had in 0.10.1 where pylab mode with GTK (or gthread) was not working correctly, hence plots were blocking with GTK. Since this is the default matplotlib backend on Unix systems, this was a major annoyance for many users. Many thanks to Paul Ivanov for helping resolve this issue.
• Fix IOError bug on Windows when used with -gthread.
• Work robustly if $HOME is missing from environment.
• Better POSIX support in ssh scripts (remove bash-specific idioms).
• Improved support for non-ascii characters in log files.
• Work correctly in environments where GTK can be imported but not started (such as a linux text console without X11).

For this release we merged 24 commits, contributed by the following people (please let us know if we ommitted your name and we'll gladly fix this in the notes for the future):

• Fernando Perez
• MinRK
• Paul Ivanov
• Pieter Cristiaan de Groot
• TvrtkoM

Release 0.10.1

IPython 0.10.1 was released October 11, 2010, over a year after version 0.10. This is mostly a bugfix release, since after version 0.10 was released, the development team's energy has been focused on the 0.11 series. We have nonetheless tried to backport what fixes we could into 0.10.1, as it remains the stable series that many users have in production systems they rely on.

Since the 0.11 series changes many APIs in backwards-incompatible ways, we are willing to continue maintaining the 0.10.x series. We don't really have time to actively write new code for 0.10.x, but we are happy to accept patches and pull requests on the IPython github site. If sufficient contributions are made that improve 0.10.1, we will roll them into future releases. For this purpose, we will have a branch called 0.10.2 on github, on which you can base your contributions.

For this release, we applied approximately 60 commits totaling a diff of over 7000 lines:

(0.10.1)amirbar[dist]> git diff --oneline rel-0.10.. | wc -l
7296

Highlights of this release:

• The only significant new feature is that IPython's parallel computing machinery now supports natively the Sun Grid Engine and LSF schedulers. This work was a joint contribution from Justin Riley, Satra Ghosh and Matthieu Brucher, who put a lot of work into it. We also improved traceback handling in remote tasks, as well as providing better control for remote task IDs.

• New IPython Sphinx directive contributed by John Hunter. You can use this directive to mark blocks in reSructuredText documents as containing IPython syntax (including figures) and the will be executed during the build:

  In [2]: plt.figure()  # ensure a fresh figure
  
  @savefig psimple.png width=4in
  In [3]: plt.plot([1,2,3])
  Out[3]: [<matplotlib.lines.Line2D object at 0x9b74d8c>]
  

• Various fixes to the standalone ipython-wx application.

• We now ship internally the excellent argparse library, graciously licensed under BSD terms by Steven Bethard. Now (2010) that argparse has become part of Python 2.7 this will be less of an issue, but Steven's relicensing allowed us to start updating IPython to using argparse well before Python 2.7. Many thanks!

• Robustness improvements so that IPython doesn't crash if the readline library is absent (though obviously a lot of functionality that requires readline will not be available).

• Improvements to tab completion in Emacs with Python 2.6.

• Logging now supports timestamps (see %logstart? for full details).

• A long-standing and quite annoying bug where parentheses would be added to print statements, under Python 2.5 and 2.6, was finally fixed.

• Improved handling of libreadline on Apple OSX.

• Fix reload method of IPython demos, which was broken.

• Fixes for the ipipe/ibrowse system on OSX.

• Fixes for Zope profile.

• Fix %timeit reporting when the time is longer than 1000s.

• Avoid lockups with ? or ?? in SunOS, due to a bug in termios.

• The usual assortment of miscellaneous bug fixes and small improvements.

The following people contributed to this release (please let us know if we omitted your name and we'll gladly fix this in the notes for the future):

• Beni Cherniavsky
• Boyd Waters.
• David Warde-Farley
• Fernando Perez
• Gökhan Sever
• John Hunter
• Justin Riley
• Kiorky
• Laurent Dufrechou
• Mark E. Smith
• Matthieu Brucher
• Satrajit Ghosh
• Sebastian Busch
• Václav Šmilauer

Release 0.10

This release brings months of slow but steady development, and will be the last before a major restructuring and cleanup of IPython's internals that is already under way. For this reason, we hope that 0.10 will be a stable and robust release so that while users adapt to some of the API changes that will come with the refactoring that will become IPython 0.11, they can safely use 0.10 in all existing projects with minimal changes (if any).

IPython 0.10 is now a medium-sized project, with roughly (as reported by David Wheeler's :command:`sloccount` utility) 40750 lines of Python code, and a diff between 0.9.1 and this release that contains almost 28000 lines of code and documentation. Our documentation, in PDF format, is a 495-page long PDF document (also available in HTML format, both generated from the same sources).

Many users and developers contributed code, features, bug reports and ideas to this release. Please do not hesitate in contacting us if we've failed to acknowledge your contribution here. In particular, for this release we have contribution from the following people, a mix of new and regular names (in alphabetical order by first name):

• Alexander Clausen: fix #341726.
• Brian Granger: lots of work everywhere (features, bug fixes, etc).
• Daniel Ashbrook: bug report on MemoryError during compilation, now fixed.
• Darren Dale: improvements to documentation build system, feedback, design ideas.
• Fernando Perez: various places.
• Gaël Varoquaux: core code, ipythonx GUI, design discussions, etc. Lots...
• John Hunter: suggestions, bug fixes, feedback.
• Jorgen Stenarson: work on many fronts, tests, fixes, win32 support, etc.
• Laurent Dufréchou: many improvements to ipython-wx standalone app.
• Lukasz Pankowski: prefilter, %edit, demo improvements.
• Matt Foster: TextMate support in %edit.
• Nathaniel Smith: fix #237073.
• Pauli Virtanen: fixes and improvements to extensions, documentation.
• Prabhu Ramachandran: improvements to %timeit.
• Robert Kern: several extensions.
• Sameer D'Costa: help on critical bug #269966.
• Stephan Peijnik: feedback on Debian compliance and many man pages.
• Steven Bethard: we are now shipping his :mod:`argparse` module.
• Tom Fetherston: many improvements to :mod:`IPython.demo` module.
• Ville Vainio: lots of work everywhere (features, bug fixes, etc).
• Vishal Vasta: ssh support in ipcluster.
• Walter Doerwald: work on the :mod:`IPython.ipipe` system.

Below we give an overview of new features, bug fixes and backwards-incompatible changes. For a detailed account of every change made, feel free to view the project log with :command:`bzr log`.