[SciPy-user] ANN: IPython 0.6.5 is out

[Fernando Perez]

Hi all,

[sorry for those who'll get this twice, but I figure that enough scipy users 
are also ipython users that at this point the cross-post is forgiven]

[Note better emacs support at the end, which I forgot in the ipython list msg]


I'm glad to announce that IPython 0.6.5 is finally out. IPython's homepage is at:

http://ipython.scipy.org

and downloads are at:

http://ipython.scipy.org/dist

I've provided RPMs for Python 2.2 and 2.3, plus source downloads (.tar.gz and
.zip).

Debian, Fink and BSD packages for this version should be coming soon, as the
respective maintainers (many thanks to Jack Moffit, Andrea Riciputi and Dryice
Liu) have the time to follow their packaging procedures.

Many thanks to Enthought for their continued hosting support for IPython, and
to all the users who contributed ideas, fixes and reports.

I'd promised that 0.6.4 would be the last version before the cleanup, but
Prabhu Ramachandran managed to resucitate the GUI threading support which I'd
worked on recently, but disabled after thinking it could not work.  It turns
out we were very close, and Prabhu did fix the remaining problems.  Since this
is a fairly significant improvement, I decided to make a release for it.  In
the process I added a few minor other things.


*** WHAT is IPython? IPython tries to:

1. Provide an interactive shell superior to Python's default. IPython has many
features for object introspection, system shell access, and its own special
command system for adding functionality when working interactively.

2. Serve as an embeddable, ready to use interpreter for your own programs.
IPython can be started with a single call from inside another program,
providing access to the current namespace.

3. Offer a flexible framework which can be used as the base environment for
other systems with Python as the underlying language.


*** NEW for this release:

As always, the complete NEWS file can be found at
http://ipython.scipy.org/NEWS, and the whole ChangeLog at
http://ipython.scipy.org/ChangeLog.

* Threading support for WXPython and pyGTK.  It is now possible (with the
-wthread and -gthread options) to control wx/gtk graphical interfaces from
within an interactive ipython shell.  Note that your wx/gtk libs need to be
compiled with threading support for this to work.  There is also experimental
(but brittle) support for ALSO running Tkinter graphical interfaces alongside
with wx or gtk ones.

* New -d option to %run, for executing whole scripts with the interactive pdb
debugger.  This allows you to step, watch variables, set breakpoints, etc,
without having to modify your scripts in any way.

* Added filtering support for variable types to %who and %whos. You can now
say 'whos function str' and whos will only list functions and strings, instead
of all variables.  Useful when working with crowded namespaces. (For some
reason I forgot to document this in the ChangeLog).

* Added ipython.el to the end-user distribution, for (X)Emacs support, since
now the official python-mode.el from

http://sourceforge.net/projects/python-mode

has all the necessary fixes for ipython to work correctly (in CVS at this 
moment, it will go into the next release I suppose).

* Other minor fixes and cleanups, both to code and documentation.


Enjoy, and as usual please report any problems.

Regards,

Fernando.