~bzr-pqm/bzr/bzr.dev

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What's New in Bazaar 2.3?

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Bazaar 2.3 has been released on the 3rd of February 2011 and marks the start

of another long-term-stable series. From here, we will only make bugfix

releases on the 2.3 series (2.3.1, etc), while 2.4 will become our new

development series. The 2.1 and 2.2 series will also continue to get

bugfixes. (Currently 2.0 is planned to be EOLed circa September 2011.)

This document accumulates a high level summary of what's changed.

See the

:doc:`../release-notes/index` for a full list.

Users are encouraged to upgrade from the other stable series.  This document

outlines the improvements in Bazaar 2.3 vs Bazaar 2.2. As well as summarizing

improvements made to the core product, it highlights enhancements within the

broader Bazaar world of potential interest to those upgrading.

Bazaar 2.3.1 includes all the fixes in the un-released 2.0.7, 2.1.4 and 2.2.5

versions that weren't included in 2.3.0 and fixes some bugs on its own.

Bazaar 2.3.2 is a bugfix release that was never released.

Bazaar 2.3.3 is a bugfix release including the fixes in 2.3.2 and

fixing the test helpers deprecated by python-2.7.

Bazaar 2.3.4 is a bugfix release.

See the :doc:`../release-notes/index` for details.

Bazaar 2.3 is fully compatible both locally and on the network with 2.0, 2.1,

and 2.2. It can read and write repositories generated by all previous

versions.

Changed Behaviour

*****************

* Committing a new revision in a stacked branch is now supported, as long as

  you are using the current repository format (2a). It will preserve the

  stacking invariants, etc, so that fetching after commit is guaranteed to

  work. (John Arbash Meinel, #375013)

* Support for some old development formats have been removed:

  ``development-rich-root``, ``development6-rich-root``, and

  ``development7-rich-root``.  These formats were always labelled experimental

  and not used unless the user specifically asked for them.  If you have

  repositories using these old formats you should upgrade them to ``2a`` using

  Bazaar 2.2.  (Andrew Bennetts)

* The default ``ignore`` file created by Bazaar will contain ``__pycache__``,

  which is the name of the directory that will be used by Python to store

  bytecode files.

  (Andrea Corbellini, #626687)

* The default sort order for the ``bzr tags`` command now uses a natural sort

  where numeric substrings are sorted numerically.  The previous default was

  "asciibetical" where tags were sorted by the characters they contained.  To

  get the old behavior, one can use ``bzr tags --sort=alpha``.

  (Neil Martinsen-Burrell, #640760)

* On platforms other than Windows and Mac OS X, Bazaar will use configuration

  files that live in $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/bazaar if that directory exists.  This

  allows interested individuals to conform to the XDG Base Directory

  specification.  The plugin location has not changed and is still

  ~/.bazaar/plugins.  To use a different directory for plugins, use the

  environment variable BZR_PLUGIN_PATH.  (Neil Martinsen-Burrell, #195397)

* ``bzr upgrade`` now operates recursively when run on a shared

  repository, automatically upgrading the branches within it, and has

  grown additional options for showing what it will do and cleaning up

  after itself.  (Ian Clatworthy, Matthew Fuller, #89830, #374734, #422450)

Launchpad integration

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* The ``lp:`` prefix will now use your known username (from

  ``bzr launchpad-login``) to expand ``~`` to your username.  For example:

  ``bzr launchpad-login user && bzr push lp:~/project/branch`` will now

  push to ``lp:~user/project/branch``.  (John Arbash Meinel)

* Launchpad has announced that the ``edge.launchpad.net`` instance is

  deprecated and may be shut down in the future

  <http://blog.launchpad.net/general/edge-is-deprecated>.  Bazaar has therefore

  been updated in this release to talk to the main (``launchpad.net``) servers,

  rather than the ``edge`` ones.

Performance improvements

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* ``bzr revert`` and ``bzr status`` are up to 15% faster on large trees

  with many changes by not repeatedly building a list of all file-ids.

  (Andrew Bennetts)

* ``bzr send`` uses less memory.

  (John Arbash Meinel, #614576)

* Fetches involving stacked branches and branches with tags now do slightly less

  I/O, and so does branching from an existing branch.  This also improves the

  network performance of these operations.  (Andrew Bennetts)

* Inventory entries now consume less memory (on 32-bit Ubuntu file entries

  have dropped from 68 bytes to 40, and directory entries from 120 bytes

  to 48).  This affects most operations, and depending on the size of the

  tree may substantially improve the speed of operations like ``bzr

  commit``.  (Andrew Bennetts)

* Lower memory consumption when reading many chk index pages. Helpful for

  things like ``bzr co`` or ``bzr ls -R`` on large trees.

  (John Arbash Meinel)

* When building new working trees, default to reading from the repository

  rather than the source tree unless explicitly requested. (via

  ``--files-from`` and ``--hardlink`` for ``bzr branch`` and

  ``bzr checkout``. Generally, 2a format repositories extract

  content faster than seeking and reading content from another tree,

  especially in cold-cache situations. (John Arbash Meinel, #607298)

New revision specifiers

***********************

* The ``mainline`` revision specifier has been added.  It takes another revision

  spec as its input, and selects the revision which merged that revision into

  the mainline.

  For example, ``bzr log -vp -r mainline:1.2.3`` will show the log of the

  revision that merged revision 1.2.3 into mainline, along with its status

  output and diff.  (Aaron Bentley)

* The ``annotate`` revision specifier has been added.  It takes a path and a

  line as its input (in the form ``path:line``), and selects the revision which

  introduced that line of that file.

  For example: ``bzr log -vp -r annotate:bzrlib/transform.py:500`` will select

  the revision that introduced line 500 of transform.py, and display its log,

  status output and diff.

  It can be combined with ``mainline`` to select the revision that landed this

  line into trunk, like so: 

  ``bzr log -vp -r mainline:annotate:bzrlib/transform.py:500``

  (Aaron Bentley)

Testing/Bug reporting

*********************

* Shell-like scripts can now be run directly from the command line without

  writing a python test. This should help users adding reproducing recipes

  to bug reports. (Vincent Ladeuil)

Improved conflict handling

**************************

* ``pull``, ``merge`` or ``switch`` can lead to conflicts when deleting a

  versioned directory contains unversioned files. The cause of the conflict

  is that deleting the directory will orphan the unversioned files so the

  user needs to instruct ``bzr`` what do to do about these orpahns. This is

  controlled by setting the ``bzr.transform.orphan_policy`` configuration

  variable with a value of ``move``. In this case the unversioned files are

  moved to a ``bzr-orphans`` directory at the root of the working tree. The

  default behaviour is specified (if needed) by setting the variable to

  ``conflict``.  (Vincent Ladeuil, #323111)

* ``bzr resolve --take-this`` and ``bzr resolve --take-other`` can now be

  used for text conflicts. This will ignore the differences that were merged

  cleanly and replace the file with its content in the current branch

  (``--take-this``) or with its content in the merged branch

  (``--take-other``). (Vincent Ladeuil, #638451)

* ``bzr resolve`` now provides more feedback about the conflicts just

  resolved and the remaining ones. (Vincent Ladeuil)

Documentation

*************

* A beta version of the documentation is now available in GNU TexInfo

  format, used by emacs and the standalone ``info`` reader.

  (Vincent Ladeuil, #219334)

Configuration

*************

``bzr`` can be configured via environment variables, command-line options

and configurations files. We've started working on unifying this and give

access to more options. The first step is a new ``bzr config`` command that

can be used to display the active configuration options in the current

working tree or branch as well as the ability to set or remove an

option. Scripts can also use it to get only the value for a given option.

Further information

*******************

For more detailed information on the changes made, see the

the :doc:`../release-notes/index` for:

* the interim bzr `milestones <https://launchpad.net/bzr/2.3>`_

* the plugins you use.

For a summary of changes made in earlier releases, see:

* :doc:`whats-new-in-2.1`

* :doc:`whats-new-in-2.2`

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