object can now *also* be used as an object with attributes mapped to
the root-object keys.

  Python (2.5 and later) with statement::

db = ZODB.DB(...)
     with db.transaction() as conn:
          # ... do stuff with conn

This uses a private transaction manager for the connection.
  If control exists the block without an error, the transaction is
  committed, otherwise, it is aborted.

- Connections now have a public ``opened`` attribute that is true when
  the connection is open, and false otherwise.  When true, it is the
  seconds since the epoch (time.time()) when the connection was
  opened. This is a renaming of the previous ``_opened`` private
  variable.

convenient way to open a connection to a database.  They open a
database and return a connection to it. When the connection is
closed, the database is closed as well.

using hashlib.sha1 if available in order to avoid DeprecationWarning
under Python 2.6

The zeopack script has gotten a numner of improvements:

- Simplified command-line interface. (The old interface is still
    supported, except that support for ZEO version 1 servers has been
    dropped.)

- Multiple storages can be packed in sequence.

- This simplifies pack scheduling on servers serving multiple
      databases.

- All storages are packed to the same time.

- You can now specify a time of day to pack to.

- The script will now time out if it can't connect to s storage in
    60 seconds.

- It now has a test. :)

- Connections from old ZEO clients weren't discarded when they were
  closed causing memory to leak and invalidations to become
  increasingly expensive over time.

- The monitor server didn't correctly report the actual number of
  clients.

Moved a blob related logging message to debug level, for the case of everything working as intended.

Changed the url in the package metadata to point to PyPi, this avoids easy_install querying eight zope.org pages before finding the download. Also removed references to download.zope.org.

  Packing could return spurious errors due to errors notifying
  disconnected clients of new database size statistics.

  Packing a blob-enabled file storage in a ZEO server caused blob data
  to be lost.

connections unused after the given time interval should be garbage
colection.  This will provide a means of dealing with extra
connections that are created in rare circumstances and that would
consume an unreasonable amount of memory.

tended to cause the same connection(s) to be used over and over.
For example, the most used conection would typically be the onlyt
connection used.  In some rare situations, extra connections could
be opened and end up on the top of the stack, causing extreme memory
wastage.  Now, when connections are placed on the stack, they sink
below existing connections that have more active objects.

quick verification of ZEO clients less than a given age even if the
number of transactions the client hasn't seen exceeds the
invalidation queue size. This is only recommended if the storage
being served  supports effecient iteration from a point near the end
of the transaction history.

Also refactored ZEO/tests/zeoserver and ZEO/runzeo to have the test
server use, and this exercisem, the option-handling code from runzeo.

iteratng from a starting transaction near the end of the file, the
iterator will scan backward from the end of the file to find the
starting point.

collection, http://wiki.zope.org/ZODB/ExternalGC, has been defined
and implemented for FileStorage.

file storages.

Also fixed a bug in handling the create option with blob support.

efficient packing (and undo).

non-shared blob directories, you can set a target cache size and the
cache will periodically be reduced to the target size.

To enable blob cache management, a new IBlobStorage method,
openCommittedBlobFile has been added.

data for reading as an ordinary file, rather than as a blob file.
The ordinary file may be used outside the current transaction and
even after the blob's database connection has been closed.

return values.  This in turn simplified the client and server
software.

Added code to select different client and server stubs and input
handlers depening on whether the Z309 or earlier protocols are used.

ZODB 3.8 clients can now talk to ZODB 3.9 servers and the other way
around.

size of an existing cache file.)

using ZEO Client Storages.  Just call ZEO.DB with the same arguments
you would otherwise pass to ZEO.ClientStorage.ClientStorage::

import ZEO
  db = ZEO.DB(('some_host', 8200))

to avoid unnecessary calls to the persistent_id hook for objects that
we know can't be persistent.