[ANN] bzr 2.5b4 released

Wed Dec 14 08:58:45 UTC 2011

Hi,

This is our fourth beta for the 2.5 series: 2.5b4

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.

2.5b4 contains all know bug fixes including the ones made for the
previous stable releases.

This release includes many improvements in the smart server, UI polish for
the colocated branches, optimizations for revision specifiers to avoid
history sized operations, enhancements to the config framework, bug fixes
related to unicode paths and more.

A warm thank you to all of you sending feedback, suggestions, even merge
proposals making bzr better !

Bazaar is now available for download from
https://launchpad.net/bzr/2.5/2.5b4/ as a source tarball.

Packages have been uploaded for debian and Ubuntu Precise, an installer
is available for OSX and windows and the 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
************

* Provides a ``po_merge`` plugin to automatically merge ``.po`` files with
  ``msgmerge``. See ``bzr help po_merge`` for details.
  (Vincent Ladeuil, #884270)

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

* ``bzr branch --stacked`` now only makes a single connection to the remote
  server rather than three. (Jelmer Vernooij, #444293)

* ``bzr export --uncommitted`` will export the uncommitted tree.
  (Jelmer Vernooij, #555613)

* ``bzr rmbranch`` can now remove colocated branches.
  (Jelmer Vernooij, #831464)

* ``bzr status`` no longer shows shelves if files are specified.
  (Francis Devereux)

* ``bzr switch`` now accepts colocated branch names to switch to.
  (Jelmer Vernooij, #826814)

* Plugins can now register additional "location aliases".
  (Jelmer Vernooij)

* Revision specifiers will now only browse as much history as they
  need to, rather than grabbing the whole history unnecessarily in some
  cases. (Jelmer Vernooij)

* When using ``bzr switch`` to switch to a sibling of the current
  branch, the relative branch name should no longer be url-encoded.
  (Jelmer Vernooij)

Bug Fixes
*********

* A new section local option ``basename`` is available to help support some
  ``bzr-pipeline`` workflows and more generally help mapping local paths to
  remote ones. See ``bzr help configuration`` for more details.
  (Vincent Ladeuil, #843211)

* Add HPSS call for looking up revision numbers from revision ids on
  remote repositories. (Jelmer Vernooij, #640253)

* Add HPSS call for retrieving file contents from remote repositories.
  Should improve performance for lightweight checkouts and exports of
  from remote repositories.  (Jelmer Vernooij, #368717, #762330,
  #608640)

* Allow lazy compiled patterns from ``bzrlib.lazy_regex`` to be
  pickled. (Jelmer Vernooij, #893149)

* ``bzr info`` no longer shows empty output if only a control
  directory is present. (Jelmer Vernooij, #159098)

* Cope with missing revision ids being specified to
  ``Repository.gather_stats`` HPSS call. (Jelmer Vernooij, #411290)

* Fix test failures on windows related to locations.conf handling.
  (Vincent Ladeuil, #892992)

* Fixed parsing of the timestamp given to ``commit --commit-time``. Now
  prohibits several invalid strings, reads the correct number of seconds,
  and gives a better error message if the time zone offset is not given.
  (Matt Giuca, #892657)

* Give meaningful file/line references when reporting deprecation warnings
  for _CompatabilityThunkFeature based test features.
  (Vincent Ladeuil, #897718)

* Make reporting of mistakes involving unversioned files with non-ascii
  filenames work again without 'Unprintable exception' being shown.
  (Martin Packman, #898408)

* Provide names for lazily registered hooks. 
  (Neil Martinsen-Burrell, #894609)

* Raise BadIndexKey exception in btree_index when a key is too large, fixing 
  an infinite recursion issue. (Shannon Weyrick, #720853)

* Resolve regression from colocated branch path handling, by ensuring that
  unreserved characters are unquoted in URLs. (Martin Packman, #842223)

* Split segments from URLs for colocated branches without assuming the
  combined form is a valid. (Martin Packman, #842233)

* Support looking up revision numbers by revision id in empty branches.
  (Jelmer Vernooij, #535031)

* Support verifying signatures on remote repositories.
  (Jelmer Vernooij, #889694)

* Teach the bzr client how to reconnect if we get ``ConnectionReset``
  while making an RPC request. This doesn't handle all possible network
  disconnects, but it should at least handle when the server is asked to
  shutdown gracefully. (John Arbash Meinel, #819604)

* When a remote format is unknown, bzr will now print a single-line error
  message rather than a backtrace. (Jelmer Vernooij, #687226)

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

* ``BzrDir.open_branch`` and ``BranchFormat.open`` now take an optional
  ``possible_transports`` argument. (Jelmer Vernooij)

* New method ``Transport.set_segment_parameter``.  (Jelmer Vernooij)

* ``Repository.verify_revision`` has been renamed to
  ``Repository.verify_revision_signature``. (Jelmer Vernooij)

* ``RevisionSpec.wants_revision_history`` now defaults to ``False`` and
  is deprecated. The ``revs`` argument of
  ``RevisionInfo.from_revision_id`` is now deprecated. (Jelmer Vernooij)

* ``Tree.get_file_by_path`` is now deprecated. Use ``Tree.get_file`` instead.
  (Jelmer Vernooij, #666897)

* Some global options for use with commands have been removed, construct
  an ``Option`` with the name instead. (Martin Packman)

* The unused exception ``HistoryMissing`` has been removed.
  (Jelmer Vernooij)

Internals
*********

* Add HPSS call for ``Repository.pack``. (Jelmer Vernooij, #894461)

* ``bzr config`` uses the new configuration implementation.
  (Vincent Ladeuil)

* Custom HPSS error handlers can now be installed in the smart server client
  using the ``error_translators`` and ``no_context_error_translators``
  registries. (Jelmer Vernooij)

* New HPSS calls ``Repository.has_signature_for_revision_id``,
  ``Repository.make_working_trees``, ``BzrDir.destroy_repository``,
  ``BzrDir.has_workingtree``, ``Repository.get_physical_lock_status``,
  ``Branch.get_physical_lock_status``,
  ``Branch.put_config_file``, ``Branch.break_lock``,
  ``BzrDir.destroy_branch``, ``Repository.break_lock``,
  ``VersionedFileRepository.get_serializer_format``,
  ``Repository.all_revision_ids``, ``Repository.start_write_group``,
  ``Repository.commit_write_group``, ``Repository.abort_write_group``
  ``Repository.check_write_group``, ``Repository.iter_revisions``,
  ``Repository.add_signature_revision_text`` and
  ``Repository.get_revision_signature_text``.
  (Jelmer Vernooij)

* ``RemoteBranch.get_config_stack`` and ``RemoteBzrDir.get_config_stack``
  will now use HPSS calls where possible. (Jelmer Vernooij)

* Custom HPSS error handlers can now be installed in the smart server client
  using the ``error_translators`` and ``no_context_error_translators``
  registries. (Jelmer Vernooij)

* The registry of merge types has been moved to ``merge`` from ``option`` but
  ``merge.get_merge_type_registry`` remains as an accessor. (Martin Packman)

Testing
*******

* Avoid failures in test_transform when OS error messages are localised.
  (Martin Packman, #891582)

* Tests are now subject to a time limit: by default 300s, and 120s when
  run from 'make check', controlled by the `selftest.timeout`
  configuration option.  This is currently not supported on Windows.
  (Martin Pool)