~bzr-pqm/bzr/bzr.dev

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What's New in Bazaar 2.5?

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Bazaar 2.5 has been released on the 24th of February 2012 and marks the

start of a new long-term-stable series. From here, we will only make bugfix

releases on the 2.5 series (2.5.1, etc, and support it until April 2017),

while 2.6 will become our new development series.

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 2.5 vs Bazaar 2.4. 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 2.5.0 is fully compatible both locally and on the network with 2.0,

2.1, 2.2, 2.3 and 2.4, and can read and write repositories generated by all

previous versions.

Bazaar 2.5.1 includes all the fixes in the un-released 2.0.7, 2.1.5, 2.2.6,

2.3.5 and 2.4.3 versions that weren't included in 2.5.0 and fixes some bugs

on its own.

Overriding configuration options from the command line

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

The ``-O`` parameter available for all bzr commands allows a user to

override a configuration option from the command line. For example::

  bzr pull -v -Olog_format=line

will change the way the pulled revisions are displayed (the default log

format is ``long``). This a work in progress and only some options are

supported so far.

Working on a posix system without a locale

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

Previously bzr needed a valid locale set to work with branches containing

non-ascii filenames. It will now use utf-8 rather than ascii as a fallback

encoding for interacting with the filesystem. This makes creating a working

tree and commiting to it possible for such branches in most environments.

SSL Certificate Verification Support in urllib HTTPS backend

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

In previous versions of Bazaar, only one of the two supported HTTPS

backends, pycurl, supported verification of SSL certificates. This version

also introduces this support for the urllib backend.

Along with this support two new options have been introduced to control

which CA's are trusted and to what degree server certificates should be

verified. See ``bzr help ssl.ca_certs`` and ``bzr help ssl.cert_reqs``

for more information

Users who have previously used the urllib HTTPS backend with servers

with invalid or untrusted certificates can continue to do so by

adding the required certificates to the trusted CA certificate file

(recommended) or by setting the ``ssl.cert_reqs`` option to ``none``.

Faster smart server

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

A large number of new methods have been added to the smart server, making

raw file access through the VFS unnecessary in almost all situations, with

the major exception of operations involving stacked branches.

Commands that have become significantly faster when using a remote branch

over ``bzr://``, ``bzr+ssh://`` or ``bzr+http://`` include:

 * ``bzr checkout --lightweight``

 * ``bzr export``

 * ``bzr cat``

 * ``bzr ls``

 * ``bzr send``

Several commands which used to make multiple connections to the server now

make only a single one. Connection setup has a fairly high overhead,

especially to Launchpad, so this can save several seconds for some

commands.

To benefit from the improved smart server, both the server and the

client need to be running bzr 2.5.

Basic colocated branch support

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

The UI now has basic support for colocated branches. In full URLs,

a specific colocated branch can be specified using URL path segment

parameters. For example a branch named ``stronk`` could be addressed using

``http://example.com/path/to/dir,branch=stronk``.

The new ``bzr branches`` command can be used to list all present branches

in a directory, and indicates what the currently active branch is.

Several commands also accept co-located branch names directly, such as

``bzr switch``.

Feature flags

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

All Bazaar formats now allow setting ``feature flags``. These can be used

by plugins to extend Bazaar formats and require the presence of particular

plugins or versions of Bazaar to open them, without having to introduce

completely new formats.

See ``doc/developers/feature-flags.txt`` for details.

Branch history access

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

Several commands or options that previously required access to the full

branch history now only access those parts of the history they actually

need. This significantly improves their performance for branches

with large histories.

GPG signatures

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

A new command ``bzr verify-signatures`` can be used to verify GPG

signatures made with ``bzr commit`` or the ``bzr sign-my-commits``

command.

Translations

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

Most error messages, help topics and other user-visible text can now be

translated. Initial translations for Russian, Japanese and Spanish exist.

PO merge plugin

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

The ``po_merge`` plugin has been added.  It provides a merge hook

to automate merging of changes to gettext template files. Refer to

``bzr help po_merge`` for documentation on how to

enable it and what it can do.

Documentation in texinfo format

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

Sphinx (>= 1.1.2) provides a better texinfo builder than the alpha-quality

one provided with bzr sources. Most of the bzr documentation can be

processed and produce valid ``.info`` files.

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/2.5>`_

* 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`

* :doc:`whats-new-in-2.3`

* :doc:`whats-new-in-2.4`

..

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