v0.8.0

Added

• The big new thing in version 0.8.0 is support for divisible assets, i.e. assets like carrots or thumbtacks, where the initial CREATE transaction can register/create some amount (e.g. 542 carrots), the first TRANSFER transaction can split that amount across multiple owners, and so on. Pull Request #794
• Wrote a formal schema for the JSON structure of transactions. Pull Request #798
• New configuration parameter: backlog_reassign_delay. Pull Request #883

Changed

• CREATE transactions must now be signed by all owners_before (rather than by a federation node). Pull Request #794
• The user-provided timestamp was removed from the transaction data model (schema). Pull Request #817
• get_transaction() will now return a transaction from the backlog, even if there are copies of the transaction in invalid blocks. Pull Request #793
• Several pull requests to introduce a generalized database interface, to move RethinkDB calls into a separate implementation of that interface, and to work on a new MongoDB implementation of that interface. Pull Requests
  #754,
  #783,
  #799,
  #806,
  #809,
  #853
• Renamed "verifying key" to "public key". Renamed "signing key" to "private key". Renamed "vk" to "pk". Pull Request #807
• get_transaction_by_asset_id now ignores invalid transactions. Pull Request #810
• get_transaction_by_metadata_id now ignores invalid transactions. Pull Request #811
• Updates to the configs and scripts for deploying a test network on AWS. The example config file deploys virtual machines running Ubuntu 16.04 now. Pull Requests
  #771,
  #813
• Changed logging of transactions on block creation so now it just says the length of the list of transactions, rather than listing all the transactions. Pull Request #861

Fixed

• Equality checks with AssetLinks. Pull Request #825
• Bug in bigchaindb load. Pull Request #824
• Two issues found with timestamp indexes. Pull Request #816
• Hard-coded backlog_reassign_delay. Pull Request #854
• Race condition in test_stale_monitor.py. Pull Request #846
• When creating a signed vote, decode the vote signature to a str. Pull Request #869
• Bug in AWS deployment scripts. Setting BIND_HTTP_TO_LOCALHOST to False didn't actually work. It does now. Pull Request #870

External Contributors

• @najlachamseddine - Pull Request #528
• @ChristianGaertner - Pull Request #659
• @MinchinWeb - Pull Request #695
• @ckeyer - Pull Request #785

Notes

• @ChristianGaertner added a Python style checker (Flake8) to Travis CI, so external contributors should be aware that the Python code in their pull requests will be checked. See our Python Style Guide.
• Several additions and changes to the documentation, e.g. Pull Requests
  #690,
  #764,
  #766,
  #769,
  #777,
  #800,
  #801,
  #802,
  #803,
  #819,
  #827,
  #859,
  #872,
  #882,
  #883