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.