[Monotone-announce] [ANNOUNCE] monotone 0.26 released

[Nathaniel Smith]

The monotone team is pleased to announce the release of monotone 0.26,
now available at the usual place:
  http://venge.net/monotone
Also as usual, packages and binaries will become available there as
we receive them.

This release includes major enhancements relative to 0.25.2, including
completely rewritten versioning and merging code, a change in the name
of the main binary, and many many smaller changes.  Due to the
magnitude of these changes, migration is more elaborate than usual;
when you are ready to upgrade, please see the UPGRADE file for
detailed instructions:
  http://venge.net/monotone/UPGRADE

For a more detailed description of user-visible changes in this
release, please see the release notes.  A complete history of these
notes is available in the file NEWS in the distribution:
  http://venge.net/monotone/NEWS
and the 0.26 notes are, for convenience, included here:

Sat Apr  8 19:33:35 PDT 2006

        0.26 release.  Major enhancements and internal rewrites.
        Please read these notes carefully, as significant changes are
        described.  In particular, you _cannot_ upgrade to 0.26
        without some attention to the migration, especially if you are
        working on a project with other people.  See UPGRADE for
        details of this procedure.

        The changes are large enough that there were 3 pre-releases of
        this code; the changes that occurred in each can be seen
        below.  However, for the convenience of those following
        releases, all changes since 0.25 will be summarized in these
        release notes.  There is no need to read the pre-release notes
        individually.

        Major changes since 0.25:
        
        - The most user-visible change is that the default name of the
          monotone binary has changed to 'mtn'.  So, for example, you
          would now run 'mtn checkout', 'mtn diff', 'mtn commit',
          etc., instead of 'monotone checkout', 'monotone diff',
          'monotone commit'.
          - Similarly, the name of the workspace bookkeeping directory
            has changed from "MT" to "_MTN".  As workspaces will
            generally be recreated when migrating to this release,
            this should not cause any problems.
          - Similarly, built-in attrs like 'execute' have had 'mtn:'
            prepended to their names.  For example, executable files
            should now have the attr 'mtn:execute' set to 'true' on
            them.  The migration code will automatically add this
            prefix; no user intervention is needed.
          - Similarly, the name of the ignore file has changed from
            '.mt-ignore' to '.mtn-ignore'.  The migration code will
            automatically rename this file; no user intervention is
            needed.
          - Similarly, the recommended suffix for monotone db files is
            now '.mtn'.
          These changes are all purely cosmetic, and have no affect on
          functionality.

        - The most developer-visible change is that the data
          structure for representing trees has been completely
          replaced, and all related code rewritten.  The new data
          structure is called a 'roster'.  You don't really need to
          know this name; unless you are hacking on monotone or using
          various debug operations, you will never see a roster.
          It's mostly useful to know that when someone says something
          about 'roster-enabled monotone' or the like, they're
          referring to this body of new code.
          
          This change has a number of consequences:
          - The textual format for revisions and manifests changed.
            There is no conceptual change, they still contain the same
            information and work the same way.  The formats were
            merely cleaned up to correct various problems experience
            showed us, and allow various enhancements now and in the
            future.  However, this change means that a flag-day
            migration is required.  See UPGRADE for details.
          - Directories are now first-class objects.  You can add an
            empty directory, must drop a directory if you want it to
            go away, etc.
          - Attrs are now first-class objects.  '.mt-attrs' no longer
            exists; attrs are now described directly in the manifest,
            and changes to them appear directly in revisions.  The
            migration code will automatically convert existing
            .mt-attrs files to the new first-class attrs.  If you have
            custom attrs, those may require special handling -- if
            this is the case, then the upgrader will tell you.
          - The merge code has been rewritten completely.  The
            interface is currently the same (though this rewrite makes
            it easier to improve the interface going forward); if you
            have found merging in monotone to be easy in the past,
            then you will not notice anything different.  If you have
            run into problems, then the new merger should make your
            life substantially simpler.  It has full support for
            renames (of both directories and files), intelligent
            merging of attrs, improved handling of file content
            merges.  Is the first known merger implementation based on
            a provably correct algorithm (the "multi-*-merge"
            algorithm), has exhaustive automated tests, and generally
            should give accurate, conservative merges.
          - The new code is generally faster, though not yet as
            fast as it could be.

        Netsync changes:

        - The default netsync port has changed 5253 to 4691.  4691 is
          our official IANA-assigned port.  Please adjust firewalls
          appropriately.

        - Netsync code has also been largely reworked; new code should
          provide better opportunities for 

        - The protocol is incompatible with earlier versions of
          monotone.  This should not be a surprise, since the data it
          carries is also incompatible (see above)...

        New features:

        - New option --brief to 'annotate', gives somewhat more
          friendly output.

        - Several enhancements to log:
          - New option --next, to display descendent revisions
            (rather than ancestor revisions).
          - When 'log -r' is given an ambiguous selector, it now just
            logs all matching revisions, instead of requiring the
            selector be disambiguated.
          - New option --no-files.

        - New command 'show_conflicts', performs a dry run merge.

        - New command 'ls changed'.

        - 'rename' (and its alias 'mv') now accept a broader range of
          syntax:
            mtn rename foo some_dir
              -> renames foo to some_dir/foo
            mtn rename foo bar baz some_dir
              -> moves foo, bar, and baz to some_dir/foo,
              some_dir/bar, and some_dir/baz

        - New hook 'validate_commit_message', which may be used to
          verify that all commit messages meet arbitrary user-defined
          rules.

        - New option --log, to log monotone's output to a file.

        - New option 'drop --recursive', to remove a directory and its
          contents in one swoop.

        - The root dir may now be renamed.  This is a somewhat exotic
          feature, but has some interesting uses related to splitting
          up or joining together projects; see new commands
          'pivot_root', 'merge_into_dir'.

        Minor bug fixes:

        - 'serve' with no --bind argument should now work on systems
          where the C library has IPv6 support, but the kernel does
          not.

        - Stricter checking on the internal version of filenames to
          ensure that they are valid UTF-8.

        - If the database is in the workspace, then it is always
          ignored.

        - Monotone no longer errors out when using a French (fr)
          locale with a non-Unicode codeset.

        Other changes:

        - Packet commands ('rdata', 'fdata', etc.) have been moved to
          'automate'.

        - Database storage now uses sqlite's blob support; database
          files should be ~1/4 smaller as a result.

        - Monotone now uses sqlite 3.3; this means that older versions
          of the command line client (e.g., an 'sqlite3' command built
          against sqlite version 3.2) cannot be used to poke at a
          monotone 0.26 database.  Solution is to upgrade your sqlite3
          program.  Hopefully this is irrelevant to most users...

        - Translations updated, and 3 new translations added (de, it,
          sv).
          
        Reliability considerations:

        - This new codebase has received much less testing under real
          world conditions than the codebase used in 0.25, simply
          because it is newer.  It has been in active use for monotone
          development since 8 January 2006, and only a small number of
          bugs have been found; all bugs found so far have been very
          minor, and none stood any danger of corrupting data.
          Furthermore, we are much more confident in the theoretical
          underpinnings of the new approach than the old, and the test
          suite attempts to exhaustively exercise all new code paths.

          However, none of this is or can be a substitute for real
          world experience.  We advise caution in upgrading to this
          version of monotone, and suggest that (especially) those who
          upgrade aggressively should pay extra attention to the
          monotone mailing list before and after doing so.

Share and enjoy,
-- Nathaniel

-- 
Details are all that matters; God dwells there, and you never get to
see Him if you don't struggle to get them right. -- Stephen Jay Gould