| Git v1.8.2 Release Notes |
| ======================== |
| |
| Backward compatibility notes |
| ---------------------------- |
| |
| In the next major release Git 2.0 (not *this* one), 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. |
| |
| "git push $there tag v1.2.3" used to allow replacing a tag v1.2.3 |
| that already exists in the repository $there, if the rewritten tag |
| you are pushing points at a commit that is a descendant of a commit |
| that the old tag v1.2.3 points at. This was found to be error prone |
| and starting with this release, any attempt to update an existing |
| ref under refs/tags/ hierarchy will fail, without "--force". |
| |
| When "git add -u" and "git add -A", that does not specify what paths |
| to add on the command line, is run from inside a subdirectory, the |
| scope of the operation has always been limited to the subdirectory. |
| Many users found this counter-intuitive, given that "git commit -a" |
| and other commands operate on the entire tree regardless of where you |
| are. In this release, these commands give warning in such a case and |
| encourage the user to say "git add -u/-A ." instead when restricting |
| the scope to the current directory. At Git 2.0 (not *this* one), we |
| plan to change these commands without pathspec to operate on the |
| entire tree, and training your fingers to type "." will protect you |
| against the future change. |
| |
| |
| 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. |
| |
| * Mention of "GIT/Git/git" in the documentation have been updated to |
| be more uniform and consistent. The name of the system and the |
| concept it embodies is "Git"; the command the users type is "git". |
| All-caps "GIT" was merely a way to imitate "Git" typeset in small |
| caps in our ASCII text only documentation and to be avoided. |
| |
| * The completion script (in contrib/completion) used to let the |
| default completer to suggest pathnames, which gave too many |
| irrelevant choices (e.g. "git add" would not want to add an |
| unmodified path). It learnt to use a more git-aware logic to |
| enumerate only relevant ones. |
| |
| * 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 patterns in .gitignore and .gitattributes files can have **/, |
| as a pattern that matches 0 or more levels of subdirectory. |
| E.g. "foo/**/bar" matches "bar" in "foo" itself or in a |
| subdirectory of "foo". |
| |
| * When giving arguments without "--" disambiguation, object names |
| that come earlier on the command line must not be interpretable as |
| pathspecs and pathspecs that come later on the command line must |
| not be interpretable as object names. This disambiguation rule has |
| been tweaked so that ":/" (no other string before or after) is |
| always interpreted as a pathspec; "git cmd -- :/" is no longer |
| needed, you can just say "git cmd :/". |
| |
| * Various "hint" lines Git gives when it asks the user to edit |
| messages in the editor are commented out with '#' by default. The |
| core.commentchar configuration variable can be used to customize |
| this '#' to a different character. |
| |
| * "git add -u" and "git add -A" without pathspec issues warning to |
| make users aware that they are only operating on paths inside the |
| subdirectory they are in. Use ":/" (everything from the top) or |
| "." (everything from the $cwd) to disambiguate. |
| |
| * "git blame" (and "git diff") learned the "--no-follow" option. |
| |
| * "git branch" now rejects some nonsense combinations of command line |
| arguments (e.g. giving more than one branch name to rename) with |
| more case-specific error messages. |
| |
| * "git check-ignore" command to help debugging .gitignore files has |
| been added. |
| |
| * "git cherry-pick" can be used to replay a root commit to an unborn |
| branch. |
| |
| * "git commit" can be told to use --cleanup=whitespace by setting the |
| configuration variable commit.cleanup to 'whitespace'. |
| |
| * "git diff" and other Porcelain commands can be told to use a |
| non-standard algorithm by setting diff.algorithm configuration |
| variable. |
| |
| * "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 format-patch" learned "-v $count" option, and prepends a |
| string "v$count-" to the names of its output files, and also |
| automatically sets the subject prefix to "PATCH v$count". This |
| allows patches from rerolled series to be stored under different |
| names and makes it easier to reuse cover letter messages. |
| |
| * "git log" and friends can be told with --use-mailmap option to |
| rewrite the names and email addresses of people using the mailmap |
| mechanism. |
| |
| * "git log --cc --graph" now shows the combined diff output with the |
| ancestry graph. |
| |
| * "git log --grep=<pattern>" honors i18n.logoutputencoding to look |
| for the pattern after fixing the log message to the specified |
| encoding. |
| |
| * "git mergetool" and "git difftool" learned to list the available |
| tool backends in a more consistent manner. |
| |
| * "git mergetool" is aware of TortoiseGitMerge now and uses it over |
| TortoiseMerge when available. |
| |
| * "git push" now requires "-f" to update a tag, even if it is a |
| fast-forward, as tags are meant to be fixed points. |
| |
| * Error messages from "git push" when it stops to prevent remote refs |
| from getting overwritten by mistake have been improved to explain |
| various situations separately. |
| |
| * "git push" will stop without doing anything if the new "pre-push" |
| hook exists and exits with a failure. |
| |
| * 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. |
| |
| * Input and preconditions to "git reset" has been loosened where |
| appropriate. "git reset $fromtree Makefile" requires $fromtree to |
| be any tree (it used to require it to be a commit), for example. |
| "git reset" (without options or parameters) used to error out when |
| you do not have any commits in your history, but it now gives you |
| an empty index (to match non-existent commit you are not even on). |
| |
| * "git status" says what branch is being bisected or rebased when |
| able, not just "bisecting" or "rebasing". |
| |
| * "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). |
| |
| * "git upload-pack" which implements the service "ls-remote" and |
| "fetch" talk to can be told to hide ref hierarchies the server |
| side internally uses (and that clients have no business learning |
| about) with transfer.hiderefs configuration. |
| |
| |
| 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/. |
| |
| * "git p4" got various bugfixes around its branch handling. It is |
| also made usable with Python 2.4/2.5. In addition, its various |
| portability issues for Cygwin have been addressed. |
| |
| * The remote helper to interact with Hg in contrib/ has seen a few |
| fixes. |
| |
| |
| 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. |
| |
| * We stopped paying attention to $GIT_CONFIG environment that points |
| at a single configuration file from any command other than "git config" |
| quite a while ago, but "git clone" internally set, exported, and |
| then unexported the variable during its operation unnecessarily. |
| |
| * "git reset" internals has been reworked and should be faster in |
| general. We tried to be careful not to break any behaviour but |
| there could be corner cases, especially when running the command |
| from a conflicted state, that we may have missed. |
| |
| * The implementation of "imap-send" has been updated to reuse xml |
| quoting code from http-push codepath, and lost a lot of unused |
| code. |
| |
| * There is a simple-minded checker for the test scripts in t/ |
| directory to catch most common mistakes (it is not enabled by |
| default). |
| |
| * You can build with USE_WILDMATCH=YesPlease to use a replacement |
| implementation of pattern matching logic used for pathname-like |
| things, e.g. refnames and paths in the repository. This new |
| implementation is not expected change the existing behaviour of Git |
| in this release, except for "git for-each-ref" where you can now |
| say "refs/**/master" and match with both refs/heads/master and |
| refs/remotes/origin/master. We plan to use this new implementation |
| in wider places (e.g. "git ls-files '**/Makefile' may find Makefile |
| at the top-level, and "git log '**/t*.sh'" may find commits that |
| touch a shell script whose name begins with "t" at any level) in |
| future versions of Git, but we are not there yet. By building with |
| USE_WILDMATCH, using the resulting Git daily and reporting when you |
| find breakages, you can help us get closer to that goal. |
| |
| * Some reimplementations of Git do not write all the stat info back |
| to the index due to their implementation limitations (e.g. jgit). |
| A configuration option can tell Git to ignore changes to most of |
| the stat fields and only pay attention to mtime and size, which |
| these implementations can reliably update. This can be used to |
| avoid excessive revalidation of contents. |
| |
| * Some platforms ship with old version of expat where xmlparse.h |
| needs to be included instead of expat.h; the build procedure has |
| been taught about this. |
| |
| * "make clean" on platforms that cannot compute header dependencies |
| on the fly did not work with implementations of "rm" that do not |
| like an empty argument list. |
| |
| 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. |
| |
| * 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. |
| |
| * 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 0398fc34 pf/editor-ignore-sigint later to maint). |
| |
| * A child process that was killed by a signal (e.g. SIGINT) was |
| reported in an inconsistent way depending on how the process was |
| spawned by us, with or without a shell in between. |
| |
| * After failing to create a temporary file using mkstemp(), failing |
| pathname was not reported correctly on some platforms. |
| |
| * We used to stuff "user@" and then append what we read from |
| /etc/mailname to come up with a default e-mail ident, but a bug |
| lost the "user@" part. |
| |
| * The attribute mechanism didn't allow limiting attributes to be |
| applied to only a single directory itself with "path/" like the |
| exclude mechanism does. The initial implementation of this that |
| was merged to 'maint' and 1.8.1.2 was with a severe performance |
| degradations and needs to merge a fix-up topic. |
| |
| * The smart HTTP clients forgot to verify the content-type that comes |
| back from the server side to make sure that the request is being |
| handled properly. |
| |
| * "git am" did not parse datestamp correctly from Hg generated patch, |
| when it is run in a locale outside C (or en). |
| |
| * "git apply" misbehaved when fixing whitespace breakages by removing |
| excess trailing blank lines. |
| |
| * "git apply --summary" has been taught to make sure the similarity |
| value shown in its output is sensible, even when the input had a |
| bogus value. |
| |
| * A tar archive created by "git archive" recorded a directory in a |
| way that made NetBSD's implementation of "tar" sometimes unhappy. |
| |
| * "git archive" did not record uncompressed size in the header when |
| streaming a zip archive, which confused some implementations of unzip. |
| |
| * "git archive" did not parse configuration values in tar.* namespace |
| correctly. |
| (merge b3873c3 jk/config-parsing-cleanup later to maint). |
| |
| * Attempt to "branch --edit-description" an existing branch, while |
| being on a detached HEAD, errored out. |
| |
| * "git clean" showed what it was going to do, but sometimes end up |
| finding that it was not allowed to do so, which resulted in a |
| confusing output (e.g. after saying that it will remove an |
| untracked directory, it found an embedded git repository there |
| which it is not allowed to remove). It now performs the actions |
| and then reports the outcome more faithfully. |
| |
| * When "git clone --separate-git-dir=$over_there" is interrupted, it |
| failed to remove the real location of the $GIT_DIR it created. |
| This was most visible when interrupting a submodule update. |
| |
| * "git cvsimport" mishandled timestamps at DST boundary. |
| |
| * We used to have an arbitrary 32 limit for combined diff input, |
| resulting in incorrect number of leading colons shown when showing |
| the "--raw --cc" output. |
| |
| * "git fetch --depth" was broken in at least three ways. The |
| resulting history was deeper than specified by one commit, it was |
| unclear how to wipe the shallowness of the repository with the |
| command, and documentation was misleading. |
| (merge cfb70e1 nd/fetch-depth-is-broken later to maint). |
| |
| * "git log --all -p" that walked refs/notes/textconv/ ref can later |
| try to use the textconv data incorrectly after it gets freed. |
| |
| * We forgot to close the file descriptor reading from "gpg" output, |
| killing "git log --show-signature" on a long history. |
| |
| * The way "git svn" asked for password using SSH_ASKPASS and |
| GIT_ASKPASS was not in line with the rest of the system. |
| |
| * The --graph code fell into infinite loop when asked to do what the |
| code did not expect. |
| |
| * http transport was wrong to ask for the username when the |
| authentication is done by certificate identity. |
| |
| * "git pack-refs" that ran in parallel to another process that |
| created new refs had a nasty race. |
| |
| * Rebasing the history of superproject with change in the submodule |
| has been broken since v1.7.12. |
| |
| * After "git add -N" and then writing a tree object out of the |
| index, the cache-tree data structure got corrupted. |
| |
| * "git clone" used to allow --bare and --separate-git-dir=$there |
| options at the same time, which was nonsensical. |
| |
| * "git rebase --preserve-merges" lost empty merges in recent versions |
| of Git. |
| |
| * "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. |
| |
| * "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. |
| |
| * A failure to push due to non-ff while on an unborn branch |
| dereferenced a NULL pointer when showing an error message. |
| |
| * When users spell "cc:" in lowercase in the fake "header" in the |
| trailer part, "git send-email" failed to pick up the addresses from |
| there. As e-mail headers field names are case insensitive, this |
| script should follow suit and treat "cc:" and "Cc:" the same way. |
| |
| * Output from "git status --ignored" showed an unexpected interaction |
| with "--untracked". |
| |
| * "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. |
| |
| * "gitweb"'s code to sanitize control characters before passing it to |
| "highlight" filter lost known-to-be-safe control characters by |
| mistake. |
| |
| * "gitweb" pages served over HTTPS, when configured to show picon or |
| gravatar, referred to these external resources to be fetched via |
| HTTP, resulting in mixed contents warning in browsers. |
| |
| * 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. |
| |
| * Command line completion leaked an unnecessary error message while |
| looking for possible matches with paths in <tree-ish>. |
| |
| * Command line completion for "tcsh" emitted an unwanted space |
| after completing a single directory name. |
| |
| * Command line completion code was inadvertently made incompatible with |
| older versions of bash by using a newer array notation. |
| |
| * "git push" was taught to refuse updating the branch that is |
| currently checked out long time ago, but the user manual was left |
| stale. |
| (merge 50995ed wk/man-deny-current-branch-is-default-these-days later to maint). |
| |
| * Some shells do not behave correctly when IFS is unset; work it |
| around by explicitly setting it to the default value. |
| |
| * 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. |
| |
| * A fix was added to the build procedure to work around buggy |
| versions of ccache broke the auto-generation of dependencies, which |
| unfortunately is still relevant because some people use ancient |
| distros. |
| |
| * The autoconf subsystem passed --mandir down to generated |
| config.mak.autogen but forgot to do the same for --htmldir. |
| (merge 55d9bf0 ct/autoconf-htmldir later to maint). |
| |
| * A change made on v1.8.1.x maintenance track had a nasty regression |
| to break the build when autoconf is used. |
| (merge 7f1b697 jn/less-reconfigure later to maint). |
| |
| * We have been carrying a translated and long-unmaintained copy of an |
| old version of the tutorial; removed. |
| |
| * t0050 had tests expecting failures from a bug that was fixed some |
| time ago. |
| |
| * t4014, t9502 and t0200 tests had various portability issues that |
| broke on OpenBSD. |
| |
| * t9020 and t3600 tests had various portability issues. |
| |
| * 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). |
| |
| * t9020 and t9810 had a few non-portable shell script construct. |
| |
| * Scripts to test bash completion was inherently flaky as it was |
| affected by whatever random things the user may have on $PATH. |