This release is another one which concentrates on fixing (older) bugs. There will also be added features.

The tagged bugs in detail:

basic arithmetic: #497, #499, #518, #543, #545, #550, #578, #579, #583

coding theory: #512

documentation: #482

memory leaks: #530, #531, #532, #533, #534, #535, #536, #537, #558, #559, #560, #561, #562, #563, #564, #565, #566

notebook: #354

number theory: #388

packages: #538, #540, #555, #572, #581

High level changelog:

This release is another one that concentrates on fixing bugs and increasing the doctests coverage. Many people contributed and a great number of tickets were closed.

• Craig Citro -- fixes to build process (involving c_lib)
• Craig Citro -- modular forms bugfix (for projection map); added some number fields functionality, many new doctests
• Pablo De Napoli (refereed by Martin Albrecht) -- added minpoly for finite field elements.
• Robert Bradshaw (and William Stein) -- created a separate java3d spkg
• Mike Hansen -- lots of Bug fixes all over the place
• Michael Abshoff -- bug fixes, improved valgrind support, Solaris port fixes
• William Stein -- bug fixes and lots more doctests, added coverage flag for doctests, improvements to the build process (SCons not rebuilding issue)
• William Stein, Michael Abshoff, Martin Albrecht, Robert Bradshaw, Burcin Erocal, Joel B. Mohler: memleak fixes
• Timothy Clemans -- bug fix for the notebook
• Tom Boothby -- bug fixes for the notebook, various other fixes
• David Harvey: bug fixes, integration of vastly improved gcd code from gmplib.org/devel, AMD64 specific assembly code:

sage: a = ZZ.random_element(2^10000000); b = ZZ.random_element(2^10000000);
sage: time t = XGCD(a, b)
CPU times: user 16.03 s, sys: 0.39 s, total: 16.42 s

With 2.8.3 and the old gmp package this took about 900 seconds