We are glad to announce the first release candidate of a new maintenance release in our old 2.8.x series: Scala 2.8.2 RC1 is now available from our Download Page. This release addresses some issues present in Scala 2.8.1, and includes the changes needed to make it compatible with the new Scala IDE for Eclipse. This maintenance release is intended to be fully binary compatible with the existing version 2.8.1.

Please help us with the testing of this release candidate, and let us know of any binary incompatibility issues, or other problems. The list of improvements in Scala 2.8.2 RC1 is available below.

The Scala 2.8.2 distribution

This Release Candidate is made available for testing purposes only and is not intended for production environments. We will wait at least two weeks before issuing a final release, in order to allow developers and testers to send us their feedback.

What is new?

The 2.8.2 release of Scala includes many bug fixes and improvements, in particular:

• Added compatibility with the new presentation compiler, required by the new Scala IDE for Eclipse.
• Fixes for SI-1591, SI-4759, SI-3838, SI-4067, SI-3946
• Improvements and fixes related to signatures, nested objects, and actors
• Other fixes and improvements (see the complete commit list below)

The following changes have been included:

24385, 24466, 24689, 24691, 24916, 24918, 24955, 25173, 25174, 25175, 25176, 25177, 25178, 25179, 25180, 25181, 25182, 25183, 25184, 25185, 25186, 25187, 25188, 25189, 25190, 25191, 25192, 25193, 25194, 25195, 25196, 25197, 25198, 25199, 25200, 25201, 25211, 25252, 25291, 25378.

Note: at this time we are phasing out our old sbaz package manager in order to move to newer tools like Maven, sbt, etc. Sbaz is currently deprecated, and it will no longer be available as part of the Scala distribution in the future.