Git v1.8.2 Release Notes
========================

Backward compatibility notes
----------------------------

In the upcoming major release (tentatively called 1.8.2), we will
change the behavior of the "git push" command.

When "git push [$there]" does not say what to push, we have used the
traditional "matching" semantics so far (all your branches were sent
to the remote as long as there already are branches of the same name
over there).  We will use the "simple" semantics that pushes the
current branch to the branch with the same name, only when the current
branch is set to integrate with that remote branch.  There is a user
preference configuration variable "push.default" to change this.


Updates since v1.8.1
--------------------

UI, Workflows & Features

 * Initial ports to QNX and z/OS UNIX System Services have started.

 * Output from the tests is coloured using "green is okay, yellow is
   questionable, red is bad and blue is informative" scheme.

 * In bare repositories, "git shortlog" and other commands now read
   mailmap files from the tip of the history, to help running these
   tools in server settings.

 * Color specifiers, e.g. "%C(blue)Hello%C(reset)", used in the
   "--format=" option of "git log" and friends can be disabled when
   the output is not sent to a terminal by prefixing them with
   "auto,", e.g. "%C(auto,blue)Hello%C(auto,reset)".

 * Scripts can ask Git that wildcard patterns in pathspecs they give do
   not have any significance, i.e. take them as literal strings.

 * The pathspec code learned to grok "foo/**/bar" as a pattern that
   matches "bar" in 0-or-more levels of subdirectory in "foo".

 * "git cherry-pick" can be used to replay a root commit to an unborn
   branch.

 * "git fetch --mirror" and fetch that uses other forms of refspec
   with wildcard used to attempt to update a symbolic ref that match
   the wildcard on the receiving end, which made little sense (the
   real ref that is pointed at by the symbolic ref would be updated
   anyway).  Symbolic refs no longer are affected by such a fetch.

 * "git format-patch" now detects more cases in which a whole branch
   is being exported, and uses the description for the branch, when
   asked to write a cover letter for the series.

 * "git push" now requires "-f" to update a tag, even if it is a
   fast-forward, as tags are meant to be fixed points.

 * When "git rebase" fails to generate patches to be applied (e.g. due
   to oom), it failed to detect the failure and instead behaved as if
   there were nothing to do.  A workaround to use a temporary file has
   been applied, but we probably would want to revisit this later, as
   it hurts the common case of not failing at all.

 * "git submodule" started learning a new mode to integrate with the
   tip of the remote branch (as opposed to integrating with the commit
   recorded in the superproject's gitlink).


Foreign Interface

 * "git fast-export" has been updated for its use in the context of
   the remote helper interface.

 * A new remote helper to interact with bzr has been added to contrib/.


Performance, Internal Implementation, etc.

 * "git fsck" has been taught to be pickier about entries in tree
   objects that should not be there, e.g. ".", ".git", and "..".

 * Matching paths with common forms of pathspecs that contain wildcard
   characters has been optimized further.

 * The implementation of "imap-send" has been updated to reuse xml
   quoting code from http-push codepath.

 * There is a simple-minded checker for the test scripts in t/
   directory to catch most common mistakes (it is not enabled by
   default).


Also contains minor documentation updates and code clean-ups.


Fixes since v1.8.1
------------------

Unless otherwise noted, all the fixes since v1.8.1 in the maintenance
track are contained in this release (see release notes to them for
details).

 * An element on GIT_CEILING_DIRECTORIES list that does not name the
   real path to a directory (i.e. a symbolic link) could have caused
   the GIT_DIR discovery logic to escape the ceiling.
   (merge 059b379 mh/ceiling later to maint).

 * When attempting to read the XDG-style $HOME/.config/git/config and
   finding that $HOME/.config/git is a file, we gave a wrong error
   message, instead of treating the case as "a custom config file does
   not exist there" and moving on.
   (merge 8f2bbe4 jn/warn-on-inaccessible-loosen later to maint).

 * The behaviour visible to the end users was confusing, when they
   attempt to kill a process spawned in the editor that was in turn
   launched by Git with SIGINT (or SIGQUIT), as Git would catch that
   signal and die.  We ignore these signals now.
   (merge 1250857 pf/editor-ignore-sigint later to maint).

 * After failing to create a temporary file using mkstemp(), failing
   pathname was not reported correctly on some platforms.
   (merge f7be59b jc/mkstemp-more-careful-error-reporting later to maint).

 * The attribute mechanism didn't allow limiting attributes to be
   applied to only a single directory itself with "path/" like the
   exclude mechanism does.
   (merge 94bc671 ja/directory-attrs later to maint).

 * "git apply" misbehaved when fixing whitespace breakages by removing
   excess trailing blank lines.
   (merge 5de7166 jc/apply-trailing-blank-removal later to maint).

 * A tar archive created by "git archive" recorded a directory in a
   way that made NetBSD's implementation of "tar" sometimes unhappy.
   (merge 22f0dcd rs/leave-base-name-in-name-field-of-tar later to maint).

 * When "git clone --separate-git-dir=$over_there" is interrupted, it
   failed to remove the real location of the $GIT_DIR it created.
   This was most visible when interrupting a submodule update.
   (merge 9be1980 jl/interrupt-clone-remove-separate-git-dir later to maint).

 * The way "git svn" asked for password using SSH_ASKPASS and
   GIT_ASKPASS was not in line with the rest of the system.
   (merge e9263e4 ss/svn-prompt later to maint).

 * The --graph code fell into infinite loop when asked to do what the
   code did not expect.
   (merge 656197a mk/maint-graph-infinity-loop later to maint).

 * http transport was wrong to ask for the username when the
   authentication is done by certificate identity.
   (merge 75e9a40 rb/http-cert-cred-no-username-prompt later to maint).

 * "git pack-refs" that ran in parallel to another process that
   created new refs had a nasty race.
   (merge b3f1280 jk/repack-ref-racefix later to maint).

 * After "git add -N" and then writing a tree object out of the
   index, the cache-tree data structure got corrupted.
   (merge eec3e7e nd/invalidate-i-t-a-cache-tree later to maint).

 * "git merge --no-edit" computed who were involved in the work done
   on the side branch, even though that information is to be discarded
   without getting seen in the editor.
   (merge 9bcbb1c jc/maint-fmt-merge-msg-no-edit-lose-credit later to maint).

 * "git merge" started calling prepare-commit-msg hook like "git
   commit" does some time ago, but forgot to pay attention to the exit
   status of the hook.
   (merge 3e4141d ap/merge-stop-at-prepare-commit-msg-failure later to maint).

 * "gitweb", when sorting by age to show repositories with new
   activities first, used to sort repositories with absolutely
   nothing in it early, which was not very useful.
   (merge 28dae18 md/gitweb-sort-by-age later to maint).

 * "gitweb"'s code to sanitize control characters before passing it to
   "highlight" filter lost known-to-be-safe control characters by
   mistake.
   (merge 0e901d2 os/gitweb-highlight-uncaptured later to maint).

 * When a line to be wrapped has a solid run of non space characters
   whose length exactly is the wrap width, "git shortlog -w" failed
   to add a newline after such a line.
   (merge e0db176 sp/shortlog-missing-lf later to maint).

 * Some shells do not behave correctly when IFS is unset; work it
   around by explicitly setting it to the default value.
   (merge 393050c jc/maint-fbsd-sh-ifs-workaround later to maint).

 * Some scripted programs written in Python did not get updated when
   PYTHON_PATH changed.
   (cherry-pick 96a4647fca54031974cd6ad1 later to maint).

 * When autoconf is used, any build on a different commit always ran
   "config.status --recheck" even when unnecessary.
   (merge 1226504 jn/less-reconfigure later to maint).

 * We have been carrying a translated and long-unmaintained copy of an
   old version of the tutorial; removed.
   (merge 0a85441 ta/remove-stale-translated-tut later to maint).

 * t4014, t9502 and t0200 tests had various portability issues that
   broke on OpenBSD.
   (merge 27f6342 jc/maint-test-portability later to maint).

 * t9020 and t3600 tests had various portability issues.
   (merge 5a02966 jc/test-portability later to maint).

 * t9200 runs "cvs init" on a directory that already exists, but a
   platform can configure this fail for the current user (e.g. you
   need to be in the cvsadmin group on NetBSD 6.0).
   (merge 8666df0 jc/test-cvs-no-init-in-existing-dir later to maint).

 * t9020 and t9810 had a few non-portable shell script construct.
   (merge 2797914 tb/test-t9020-no-which later to maint).
   (merge 6f4e505 tb/test-t9810-no-sed-i later to maint).