Taskwarrior 2.5.0 beta1 Released

After an intense four-month effort, which focused mainly on a more capable command-line parser, more extension-friendly behavior, and significant improvements to testing, Taskwarrior 2.5.0 beta1 is now released.

We are asking you to please build and test this release in your environment.

This is a major release, with about 1100 code changes and a hundred or so bug fixes, but still resulting in a smaller codebase.

There have been a lot of changes. Here are the highlights:

  • Improved command line parser: terminator -- handling, UUID recognition, DOM recognition, red-herring pairs (foo:bar), escaped slashes in patterns (/one\/two/), substitutions (/one\/two/one-two/), Unicode U+NNNN and \uNNNN, escaped entities (\n, \t, etc.) for use in descriptions/annotations, abbreviated day and month names, ISO-8601 durations (PT4H, P1Y etc).
  • New virtual tags UDA, ORPHAN, PROJECT, PRIORITY, and LATEST.
  • Improved support for DOM references in filters task 'due.year = 2015 and due.week > 20' list.
  • New configuration settings urgency.inherit, rule.color.merge, urgency.user.tag.next.coefficient, color.uda.<name>.none, sugar, report.<name>.sort:none, json.depends.array.
  • Improved urgency: the urgency.inherit setting propagates urgency along dependency chains.
  • Improved searching: more powerful regular expressions.
  • Improved attribute modifiers: is/isnt are now consistent exact match operator equivalents to ==/!==.
  • New command _unique, for generating unique lists of values, and will ultimately replace several helper commands.
  • New command commands, which lists commands and details about how they affect filters, GC, context, and syntax.
  • New verbosity tokens recur (feedback when a recurring task instance is created), unwait (for when a waiting task becomes visible).
  • Improved extensions: zsh completion, Fish shell completion, add-on scripts now online.
  • Improved documentation: help command, man pages, more online docs, negation ! operator, sample hook scripts.
  • Improved sync: GnuTLS now mandatory, so everyone has the sync command.
  • Improved JSON import/export support: free-format JSON, task arrays assumed (which makes import/export work with out-of-the-box parsers), dependencies optionally modeled as an array, UUIDs validated, tasks added/updated without duplication, import from STDIN using -.
  • Improved performance: less data is read from disk depending on the filter.
  • Improved diagnostics: duplicate dependency warnings, multi-task edit failures, changes to tasks without IDs, certificate file sizes.
  • Improved testing: migrated all Perl tests to Python, parallelized test suite, colorized output, detection of newly passing tests, Python 2.7 and 3 support, better debug output, Bash test library, stress test tool, no more disabled tests - everything runs, test coverage is now 87.8%.
  • Widespread code cleanup, removal of dead code, C++11 enhancements, improved portability, merged ISO-8601 and legacy durations, less code, happier developers.

For full details, see the ChangeLog file included in the release. The release is immediately available as a source tarball.

This is a beta release, and is not recommended for stable environments.