SAGE 2.8.5:

This is a *MAJOR* new Sage release, which includes many bugfixes (some
quite important to usability), and substantial new features and
functionality.  Sage 2.8.5 includes Mike Hansen's massive new
combinatorics packages along with the Symmetrica C library, much new
multivariate polynomial code by Martin Albrecht along with bug fixes
and sparse mod-p linear algebra via Linobx, new algebraic number
fields code by William Stein and Robert Bradshaw, a major refactoring
of NTL by Joel Mohler, Craig Citro, David Harvey and Robert Bradshaw,
Bill Hart and David Harvey's the long-awaited FLINT library for
super-fast polynomial arithmetic is now included standard in SAGE
(though currently it is not used by anything by default, and can only
multiply polynomials), a very nice new global proof option by David
Roe, Robert Bradshaw's complete and fully optimized implementation of
sequence notation [1..5], (2..7), [1,3,5,..19], and updates to MPFR,
IML, and Linbox thanks to Michael Abshoff and Martin Albrecht.  PPC32
Linux should now also be officially supported (thanks to Michael
Abshoff).  John Cremona also updated mwrank. Finally, Gonzalo Tornaria
and William Stein fixed a major bug in the Sage signal handling
system, so control-c, should now be much more robust.

We closed 43 tickets, which are listed here:

  http://trac.sagemath.org/sage_trac/query?status=closed&milestone=sage-2.8.5&order=id

or, by category, here:

  http://trac.sagemath.org/sage_trac/milestone/sage-2.8.5

Thanks to the many people who contributed to this release, and anybody
I forgot to mention above.  There were dozens of people not listed
above who made important contributions.