[ANN] bzr 2.5b2 released

[Vincent Ladeuil]

Hi,

2.5b2 is our second beta for the 2.5 series and I'm pleased to announce
it.

Bazaar <http://bazaar.canonical.com/> is a Canonical project and part of
the GNU project <http://gnu.org/> to produce a free operating system.

2.5.0 is planned to be released in February 2012.

2.5b2 contains all know bug fixes including the ones made for the
previous stable releases.

To wet your appetite: it includes more filtering options for ``bzr log``, idle
connections handling for ``bzr serve``, a ``development-colo`` experimental
format to flesh out the colocated branches UI, better support for foreign
formats, enhancements to the config framework and more.

A warm thank you to all people that send feedback, suggestions, even
merge proposals making bzr better !

Bazaar is now available for download from
https://launchpad.net/bzr/2.5/2.5b2/ as a source tarball.

Installers are available for windows and OSX, packages are on their way
for the usual GNU/Linux distributions that propose our beta releases as
well as the beta PPA for Ubuntu.


External Compatibility Breaks
*****************************

None

New Features
************

* A new ``-O`` standard option (common to all commands) have been added. It
  provides a value for a config option in the ``-Oname=value`` form that
  takes precedence over all definitions found in config files. It can be
  used multiple times to override different options.
  (Vincent Ladeuil, #491196)

* ``bzr log`` now has an option called ``--omit-merges`` to omit
  those commits that merged branches, i.e. those having more than one
  parent.
  In order to avoid confusion, the previous command line option
  ``--include-merges`` has been renamed to ``--include-merged``.
  The old name of the command line option will still be accepted.
  The name change also affects ``bzr missing``.
  (Martin von Gagern)

* ``bzr serve`` will now disconnect clients if they have not issued an RPC
  request after 5minutes. On POSIX platforms, this will also happen for
  ``bzr serve --inet``. This can be overridden with the configuration
  variable ``serve.client_timeout`` or in the command line parameter
  ``bzr serve --client-timeout=X``. Further, it is possible to request
  ``bzr serve [--inet]`` to shutdown gracefully by sending SIGHUP. It will
  finish the current request, and then close the connection.
  (John Arbash Meinel, #824797, #795025)

* The new experimental format ``development-colo`` supports colocated
  branches. This format will eventually be merged back into the ``2a``
  format when it has stabilized and there is adequate UI support for
  colocated branches.
  (Jelmer Vernooij, #831481)

Improvements
************

* Fixed a bug where ``bzr tags -r x..y`` loaded the branch history once for
  every revision in the range; it's now much faster. (Vincent Ladeuil, #857335)

* ``bzr info -v`` can now be run against branches that don't support
  ``last_revision_info``, in which case the branch information will simply
  not be displayed. (Jelmer Vernooij)

Bug Fixes
*********

* ``bzr shelve`` can now be used in emacs shells as the input handling is
  turned into a line-based one when ``INSIDE_EMACS`` is set (which is the
  case for all recent emacs versions). (Vincent Ladeuil, #856261)

* ``bzr tags`` can now be used against remote repositories that do
  not provide access to the revision graph. (Jelmer Vernooij, #858942)

* ``bzr update PATH`` will stop if you seem to be asking it to update
  anything less than a whole tree, because that's not supported by ``bzr``'s
  concept that the whole tree has a single basis revision. Previously, it
  would go ahead and update the whole tree, which was surprising.
  (Martin Pool, #557886)

* Don't crash if ``bzrlib.initialize()`` has not been called while accessing
  configs. (Vincent Ladeuil, #863401)

* Redirects between http and https no longer discard path information
  in some cases. (Jelmer Vernooij, #853765)

* The ``--overwrite`` argument to ``bzr push`` and ``bzr pull`` no longer
  reports all tags as changed. (Jelmer Vernooij, #845396)

* ``WorkingTree.get_file_mtime`` now raises NoSuchId if a file id is
  specified that is unknown. (Jelmer Vernooij, #847435)

API Changes
***********

* ``Branch.get_revision_delta`` has been deprecated. Use
  ``Repository.get_revision_delta`` instead. (Jelmer Vernooij, #859712)

* Plugins that implement custom protocols for ``bzr serve`` should now
  also take an argument ``timeout``. This is used by the the bzr protocol
  to close a connection if a client has been idle for more than X seconds.
  (Default 5minutes). (John Arbash Meinel)

* ``Repository.fileids_altered_by_revision_ids`` has been moved to
  ``VersionedFileRepository`` and is no longer part of the standard
  ``Repository`` interface. (Jelmer Vernooij)

* The argument ``include_merges`` to ``missing.find_unmerged`` has
  been renamed to ``include_merged``. The old name is still supported
  for now but will cause a deprecation warning. (Martin von Gagern)

* The new method ``ControlDirFormat.is_initializable()`` returns a boolean
  indicating whether or not it is possible to use any of the
  initialization methods of that format to create a new control dir.
  (Jelmer Vernooij)

Internals
*********

* ``Branch`` objects can now use a config stack with the newly introduced
  ``get_config_stack()``. Both ``get_config`` and ``get_config_stack`` can
  be used for the same branch but it's recommended to stick to one for a
  given option.

Testing
*******

* Test scripts can now use ``bzr shelve`` and provide their input as
  complete lines. (Vincent Ladeuil, #856261)

* Really corrupt the pack file without depending on a special length or value.
  (Vincent Ladeuil, #807032)