Git v1.7.11 Release Notes
=========================

Updates since v1.7.10
---------------------

UI, Workflows & Features

 * A new mode for push, "simple", which is a cross between "current"
   and "upstream", has been introduced. "git push" without any refspec
   will push the current branch out to the same name at the remote
   repository only when it is set to track the branch with the same
   name over there.  The plan is to make this mode the new default
   value when push.default is not configured.

 * A couple of commands learned the "--column" option to produce
   columnar output.

 * A third-party tool "git subtree" is distributed in contrib/

 * Error messages given when @{u} is used for a branch without its
   upstream configured have been clatified.

 * Even with "-q"uiet option, "checkout" used to report setting up
   tracking.  Also "branch" learned the "-q"uiet option to squelch
   informational message.

 * Your build platform may support hardlinks but you may prefer not to
   use them, e.g. when installing to DESTDIR to make a tarball and
   untarring on a filesystem that has poor support for hardlinks.
   There is a Makefile option NO_INSTALL_HARDLINKS for you.

 * The smart-http backend used to always override GIT_COMMITTER_*
   variables with REMOTE_USER and REMOTE_ADDR, but these variables are
   now preserved when set.

 * "git am" learned the "--include" option, which is an opposite of
   existing the "--exclude" option.

 * When "git am -3" needs to fall back to an application to a
   synthesized preimage followed by a 3-way merge, the paths that
   needed such treatment are now reported to the end user, so that the
   result in them can be eyeballed with extra care.

 * The output from "diff/log --stat" used to always allocate 4 columns
   to show the number of modified lines, but not anymore.

 * "git difftool" learned the "--dir-diff" option to spawn external
   diff tools that can compare two directory hierarchies at a time
   after populating two temporary directories, instead of running an
   instance of the external tool once per a file pair.

 * The "fmt-merge-msg" command learns to list the primary contributors
   involved in the side topic you are merging.

 * "git rebase" learned to optionally keep commits that do not
   introduce any change in the original history.

 * "git push --recurse-submodules" learned to optionally look into the
   histories of submodules bound to the superproject and push them
   out.

 * A 'snapshot' request to "gitweb" honors If-Modified-Since: header,
   based on the commit date.

 * "gitweb" learned to highlight the patch it outputs even more.

Foreign Interface

 * "git svn" used to die with unwanted SIGPIPE when talking with HTTP
   server that uses keep-alive.

 * "git svn" learned to use platform specific authentication
   providers, e.g. gnome-keyring, kwallet, etc.

 * "git p4" has been moved out of contrib/ area and has seen more work
   on importing labels as tags from (and exporting tags as labels to)
   p4.

Performance and Internal Implementation (please report possible regressions)

 * An experimental "version 4" format of the index file has been
   introduced to reduce on-disk footprint and I/O overhead.

 * "git archive" learned to produce its output without reading the
   blob object it writes out in memory in its entirety.

 * "git index-pack" that runs when fetching or pushing objects to
   complete the packfile on the receiving end learned to use multiple
   threads to do its job when available.

 * The code to compute hash values for lines used by the internal diff
   engine was optimized on little-endian machines, using the same
   trick the kernel folks came up with.

 * "git apply" had some memory leaks plugged.

 * Setting up a revision traversal with many starting points was
   inefficient as these were placed in a date-order priority queue
   one-by-one.  Now they are collected in the queue unordered first,
   and sorted immediately before getting used.

 * More lower-level commands learned to use the streaming API to read
   from the object store without keeping everything in core.

 * Because "sh" on the user's PATH may be utterly broken on some
   systems, run-command API now uses SHELL_PATH, not /bin/sh, when
   spawning an external command (not applicable to Windows port).

 * The API to iterate over refs/ hierarchy has been tweaked to allow
   walking only a subset of it more efficiently.

Also contains minor documentation updates and code clean-ups.


Fixes since v1.7.10
-------------------

Unless otherwise noted, all the fixes since v1.7.10 in the maintenance
releases are contained in this release (see release notes to them for
details).

 * "git status --porcelain" ignored "--branch" option by mistake.  The
   output for "git status --branch -z" was also incorrect and did not
   terminate the record for the current branch name with NUL as asked.
   (merge d4a6bf1 jk/maint-status-porcelain-z-b later to maint).

 * "git diff --stat" used to fully count a binary file with modified
   execution bits whose contents is unmodified, which was not quite
   right.