[ANN] bzr 2.4b2 released !

Sat May 7 14:11:51 UTC 2011

The Bazaar team is happy to announce availability of a new
release of the bzr adaptive version control system.
Bazaar is part of the GNU system <http://gnu.org/>.

This release includes all bug fixed in previous series known at the time of
this release.

Thanks to everyone who contributed patches, suggestions, and feedback.

Bazaar is now available for download from
https://launchpad.net/bzr/2.4/2.4b2/ as a source tarball; packages for
various systems will be available soon, OSX installers are already
available from the url above. The bzr beta ppa already contains 2.4b2.

bzr 2.4b2
#########

:2.4b2: 2011-04-28

This is the second beta of the 2.4 series, leading to a 2.4.0 release in
August 2011. Beta releases are suitable for everyday use but may cause some
incompatibilities with plugins.

This release includes all bug fixed in previous series known at the time of
this release.

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

.. These may require users to change the way they use Bazaar.

* Two command synonyms for ``bzr branch`` have been deprecated, to avoid
  confusion and to allow the names to later be reused.  The removed names
  are: ``get`` and ``clone``.   (Martin Pool, #506265)

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

.. New commands, options, etc that users may wish to try out.

* ``bzr commit`` now supports a ``--lossy`` argument that can be used
  to discard any data that can not be natively represented when committing
  to a foreign VCS. (Jelmer Vernooij, #587721)

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

.. Improvements to existing commands, especially improved performance 
   or memory usage, or better results.

* ``bzr merge`` in large trees is now significantly faster. On a 70k entry
  tree, the time went from ~3min down to 30s.
  (John Arbash Meinel, #759091)

* Resolve ``lp:FOO`` urls locally rather than doing an XMLRPC request if
  the user has done ``bzr launchpad-login``. The bzr+ssh URLs were already
  being handed off to the remote server anyway (xmlrpc has been mapping
  ``lp:bzr`` to ``bzr+ssh://bazaar.launchpad.net/+branch/bzr``, rather
  than ``bzr+ssh://bazaar.launchpad.net/~bzr-pqm/bzr/bzr.dev`` for a few
  months now.) By doing it ourselves, we can cut out substantial startup
  time. From Netherlands to London it was taking 368ms to do the XMLRPC
  call as much as 2s from Sydney. You can test the local logic by using
  ``-Dlaunchpad``.  (John Arbash Meinel, #397739)

* When building a new WorkingTree (such as during ``bzr co`` or
  ``bzr branch``) we now properly store the stat and hash of files that
  are old enough. This saves a fair amount of time on the first
  ``bzr status`` (on a 500MB tree, it saves about 30+s).
  (John Arbash Meinel, #740932)

Bug Fixes
*********

.. Fixes for situations where bzr would previously crash or give incorrect
   or undesirable results.

* Arguments that can't be decoded to unicode in the current posix locale give
  a clearer error message without a traceback. (Martin [gz], #745712)

* ``bzrlib.log._DEFAULT_REQUEST_PARAMS`` is no longer accidentally
  mutated by ``bzrlib.log._apply_log_request_defaults``.  In practice
  these default values aren't relied on very often so this probably
  wasn't causing any trouble.  (Andrew Bennetts)

* ``bzr log`` now works on revisions which are not in the current branch.
  (Matt Giuca, #241998)

* Lazy hooks are now reset between test runs. (Jelmer Vernooij, #745566)

* ``bzrlib.merge.Merge`` now calls ``iter_changes`` without
  ``include_unversioned=True``. This makes it significantly faster in many
  cases, because it only looks at modified files, rather than building
  information about all files. This can cause failures in other
  TreeTransform code, because it had been expecting to know the names of
  things which had not changed (such as parent directories). All cases we
  know about so far have been fixed, but there may be fallout for edge
  cases that we are missing. (John Arbash Meinel, #759091)

* Standalone bzr.exe installation on Windows: user can put additional python 
  libraries into ``site-packages`` subdirectory of the installation directory,
  this might be required for "installing" extra dependencies for some plugins.
  (Alexander Belchenko, #743256)

* ``TreeTransform.create_file/new_file`` can now take an optional ``sha1``
  parameter. If supplied, when the transform is applied, it will then call
  ``self._tree._observed_sha1`` for those files. This lets us update the
  hash-cache for content that we create, preventing us from re-reading the
  content in the next ``bzr status``.  (John Arbash Meinel, #740932)

Documentation
*************

* Added a section about using a shared SSH account on a server for bzr+ssh
  access.  (Russell Smith)

* The documentation now recommends using SSH rather than SFTP in the
  tutorials and the examples, because that will generally be much faster
  and better in cases where it can be used.  SFTP is still available and
  mentioned as an alternative.  (Martin Pool, #636712)

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

.. Changes that may require updates in plugins or other code that uses
   bzrlib.

* ``Branch.update_revisions`` has been made private and should no
  longer be used by external users. Use ``Branch.pull`` or ``Branch.push``
  instead. (Jelmer Vernooij, #771765)

* Commands now have an `invoked_as` attribute, showing the name under
  which they were called before alias expansion.
  (Martin Pool)

* ``Hooks.create_hook`` is now deprecated in favour of ``Hooks.add_hook``.
  (Jelmer Vernooij)

* If you call `bzrlib.initialize` but forget to enter the resulting object
  as a context manager, bzrlib will now be initialized anyhow.
  (Previously simple programs calling bzrlib might find the library was
  mysteriously silent.)
  (Martin Pool)

* Inventory-specific functionality has been split out of ``Tree`` into
  a new ``InventoryTree`` class. Tree instances no longer
  necessarily provide an ``inventory`` attribute. (Jelmer Vernooij)

* Inventory-specific functionality has been split out of ``RevisionTree``
  into a new ``InventoryRevisionTree`` class. RevisionTree instances no
  longer necessarily provide an ``inventory`` attribute. (Jelmer Vernooij)

* New method ``Hooks.uninstall_named_hook``. (Jelmer Vernooij, #301472)

* ``revision_graph_can_have_wrong_parents`` is now an attribute
  on ``RepositoryFormat`` rather than a method on ``Repository``.
  (Jelmer Vernooij)

* ``Testament`` now takes a ``tree`` rather than an
  ``inventory``. (Jelmer Vernooij, #762608)

* ``TestCase.failUnlessExists`` and ``failIfExists`` are deprecated in
  favour of ``assertPathExists`` and ``assertPathDoesNotExist`` 
  respectively.
  (Martin Pool)

* The ``revno`` parameter of ``log.LogRevision`` may now be None,
  representing a revision which is not in the current branch.
  (Matt Giuca, #241998)

* The various knit pack repository format classes have been moved
  from ``bzrlib.repofmt.pack_repo`` to
  ``bzrlib.repofmt.knitpack_repo``. (Jelmer Vernooij)

* ``RevisionTree`` now has a new method ``get_file_revision``.
  (Jelmer Vernooij)

* ``WorkingTree`` no longer provides an ``inventory``. Instead,
  all inventory-related functionality is now on the subclass
  ``InventoryWorkingTree`` that all native Bazaar working tree
  implementations derive from. (Jelmer Vernooij)

Internals
*********

.. Major internal changes, unlikely to be visible to users or plugin 
   developers, but interesting for bzr developers.

* Added ``osutils.lstat`` and ``osutils.fstat``. These are just the ``os``
  functions on Linux, but they are wrapped on Windows so that fstat
  matches lstat results across all python versions.
  (John Arbash Meinel)

* ``WorkingTree._observed_sha1`` also updates the 'size' column. It
  happened to be updated as a side-effect of commit, but if we start using
  the function elsewhere we might as well do it directly.
  (John Arbash Meinel)

Testing
*******

.. Fixes and changes that are only relevant to bzr's test framework and 
   suite.  This can include new facilities for writing tests, fixes to 
   spurious test failures and changes to the way things should be tested.

* Stop using `failIf`, `failUnless`, `failIfEqual`, etc, that give
  `PendingDeprecationWarnings` on Python2.7. 
  (Martin Pool, #760435)