[pygame] Pygame 1.7 Prerelease

[Pete Shinners <pete@shinners.org>]

The 1.7 prerelease is ready. This month has seen a ton of work on Pygame 
to get it ready. At this point all the features are implemented, but we 
need a few weeks to shake out any problems. There will likely be another 
prerelease in one week.

http://pygame.org/ftp/pygame-1.6.2.win32-py2.3.exe
http://pygame.org/ftp/pygame-1.6.2.tar.bz2

One of the biggest internal changes is switching most types to the 
newstyle Python objects. This means the minimum Python release is now 
2.2. There is a totally rewritten sprite module, it should be backwards 
compatable, but could use more testing. There is also the new 
experimental movie backend that requires ffmpeg. This new 'movieext' 
module needs a some simple hand editing to get built. I've also tried to 
 apply all the appropriate downstream patches (from Debian, FreeBSD, 
etc). Outside that it is mainly new features and bugfixes. Here they are.

  better SysFont support on unix
  sndarray got several cleanups from Chad Lester
  more Surface safety with bad sizes and init lifetimes
  Surface, Rect, Sound, and Font are weakref'able
  transform.chop() added from Matthias Spiller
  Surface.get_rect() accepts keyword arguments for assignment
  (that is my favorite new one, "mysurf.get_rect(center=(100,100))")
  cleaned up draw.arc() crashes and artifacts
  no more Surface.set_clip() crashes
  new cursors and "xor" compiling from Bo Jangeborg
  new Overlay objects for accessing video overlays from Dmitry Borisov
  display.get_wm_info() added for platform dependant info
  mixer.music.get_pos() works with paused music
  mixer.set_num_channels() used to crash, no longer
  draw.aaline() properly assigns perpixel alphas
  image.frombuffer() lightning quick creates a Surface from strings

Before we reach a final 1.7 we will probably have an image.tobuffer() 
function. I am also expecting more functionality for the new Overlay 
objects from Dmitry.

My big project before the next release is to completely reorganize the 
documentation. I know what needs to be done, but I need to work with the 
generation tools I have.

The most important thing to test is the new sprite module and ensure 
nothing goes wrong with the newstyle types. Of course all the actual new 
features need more banging on.