2016-03-08, Version 4.4.0 'Argon' (LTS)

2016-03-08, Version 4.4.0 'Argon' (LTS)

In December we announced that we would be doing a minor release in order to
get a number of voted on SEMVER-MINOR changes into LTS. Our ability to release this
was delayed due to the unforeseen security release v4.3. We are quickly bumping to
v4.4 in order to bring you the features that we had committed to releasing.

This release also includes over 70 fixes to our docs and over 50 fixes to tests.

The SEMVER-MINOR changes include:
  * deps:
    - An update to v8 that introduces a new flag --perf_basic_prof_only_functions (Ali Ijaz Sheikh) https://github.com/nodejs/node/pull/3609
  * http:
    - A new feature in http(s) agent that catches errors on *keep alived* connections (José F. Romaniello) https://github.com/nodejs/node/pull/4482
  * src:
    - Better support for Big-Endian systems (Bryon Leung) https://github.com/nodejs/node/pull/3410
  * tls:
    - A new feature that allows you to pass common SSL options to `tls.createSecurePair` (Коренберг Марк) https://github.com/nodejs/node/pull/2441
  * tools
    - a new flag `--prof-process` which will execute the tick processor on the provided isolate files (Matt Loring) https://github.com/nodejs/node/pull/4021

Notable semver patch changes include:

  * buld:
    - Support python path that includes spaces. This should be of particular interest to our Windows users who may have python living in `c:/Program Files` (Felix Becker) https://github.com/nodejs/node/pull/4841
  * https:
    - A potential fix for https://github.com/nodejs/node/issues/3692 HTTP/HTTPS client requests throwing EPROTO (Fedor Indutny) https://github.com/nodejs/node/pull/4982
  * installer:
    - More readable profiling information from isolate tick logs (Matt Loring) https://github.com/nodejs/node/pull/3032
  * *npm:
    - upgrade to npm 2.14.20 (Kat Marchán) https://github.com/nodejs/node/pull/5510
  * process:
    - Add support for symbols in event emitters. Symbols didn't exist when it was written ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ (cjihrig) https://github.com/nodejs/node/pull/4798
  * querystring:
    - querystring.parse() is now 13-22% faster! (Brian White) https://github.com/nodejs/node/pull/4675
  * streams:
    - performance improvements for moving small buffers that shows a 5% throughput gain. IoT projects have been seen to be as much as 10% faster with this change! (Matteo Collina) https://github.com/nodejs/node/pull/4354
  * tools:
    - eslint has been updated to version 2.1.0 (Rich Trott) https://github.com/nodejs/node/pull/5214

PR-URL: https://github.com/nodejs/node/pull/5301