Documentation / RelNotes / 1.7.12.txton commit Update draft release notes for 7th batch (31c7954)
   1Git v1.7.12 Release Notes
   2=========================
   3
   4Updates since v1.7.11
   5---------------------
   6
   7UI, Workflows & Features
   8
   9 * Git can be told to normalize pathnames it read from readdir(3) and
  10   all arguments it got from the command line into precomposed UTF-8
  11   (assuming that they come as decomposed UTF-8), in order to work
  12   around issues on Mac OS.
  13
  14   I think there still are other places that need conversion
  15   (e.g. paths that are read from stdin for some commands), but this
  16   should be a good first step in the right direction.
  17
  18 * Per-user $HOME/.gitconfig file can optionally be stored in
  19   $HOME/.config/git/config instead, which is in line with XDG.
  20
  21 * The value of core.attributesfile and core.excludesfile default to
  22   $HOME/.config/attributes and $HOME/.config/ignore respectively when
  23   these files exist.
  24
  25 * "git apply" learned to wiggle the base version and perform three-way
  26   merge when a patch does not exactly apply to the version you have.
  27
  28 * Scripted Porcelain writers now have access to the credential API via
  29   the "git credential" plumbing command.
  30
  31 * "git help" used to always default to "man" format even on platforms
  32   where "man" viewer is not widely available.
  33
  34 * "git clone --local $path" started its life as an experiment to
  35   optionally use link/copy when cloning a repository on the disk, but
  36   we didn't deprecate it after we made the option a no-op to always
  37   use the optimization.  The command learned "--no-local" option to
  38   turn this off, as a more explicit alternative over use of file://
  39   URL.
  40
  41 * "git fetch" and friends used to say "remote side hung up
  42   unexpectedly" when they failed to get response they expect from the
  43   other side, but one common reason why they don't get expected
  44   response is that the remote repository does not exist or cannot be
  45   read. The error message in this case was updated to give better
  46   hints to the user.
  47
  48 * git native protocol agents learned to show software version over
  49   the wire, so that the server log can be examined to see the vintage
  50   distribution of clients.
  51
  52 * "git help -w $cmd" can show HTML version of documentation for
  53   "git-$cmd" by setting help.htmlpath to somewhere other than the
  54   default location where the build procedure installs them locally;
  55   the variable can even point at a http:// URL.
  56
  57 * "git rebase [-i] --root $tip" can now be used to rewrite all the
  58   history leading to "$tip" down to the root commit.
  59
  60 * "git rebase -i" learned "-x <cmd>" to insert "exec <cmd>" after
  61   each commit in the resulting history.
  62
  63 * "git status" gives finer classification to various states of paths
  64   in conflicted state and offer advice messages in its output.
  65
  66 * "git submodule" learned to deal with nested submodule structure
  67   where a module is contained within a module whose origin is
  68   specified as a relative URL to its superproject's origin.
  69
  70 * A rather heavy-ish "git completion" script has been split to create
  71   a separate "git prompting" script, to help lazy-autoloading of the
  72   completion part while making prompting part always available.
  73
  74
  75Foreign Interface
  76
  77 * "mediawiki" remote helper (in contrib/) learned to handle file
  78   attachments.
  79
  80 * "git p4" now uses "Jobs:" and "p4 move" when appropriate.
  81
  82 * vcs-svn has been updated to clean-up compilation, lift 32-bit
  83   limitations, etc.
  84
  85
  86Performance, Internal Implementation, etc. (please report possible regressions)
  87
  88 * Some tests showed false failures caused by a bug in ecryptofs.
  89
  90 * We no longer use AsciiDoc7 syntax in our documentation and favor a
  91   more modern style.
  92
  93 * "git am --rebasing" codepath was taught to grab authorship, log
  94   message and the patch text directly out of existing commits.  This
  95   will help rebasing commits that have confusing "diff" output in
  96   their log messages.
  97
  98 * "git index-pack" and "git pack-objects" use streaming API to read
  99   from the object store to avoid having to hold a large blob object
 100   in-core while they are doing their thing.
 101
 102 * Code to match paths with exclude patterns learned to avoid calling
 103   fnmatch() by comparing fixed leading substring literally when
 104   possible.
 105
 106
 107Also contains minor documentation updates and code clean-ups.
 108
 109
 110Fixes since v1.7.11
 111-------------------
 112
 113Unless otherwise noted, all the fixes since v1.7.11 in the maintenance
 114releases are contained in this release (see release notes to them for
 115details).
 116
 117 * The error message from "git push $there :bogo" (and its equivalent
 118   "git push $there --delete bogo") mentioned that we tried and failed
 119   to guess what ref is being deleted based on the LHS of the refspec,
 120   which we don't.
 121   (merge 5742c82 jk/push-delete-ref-error-message later to maint).
 122
 123 * A handful of files and directories we create had tighter than
 124   necessary permission bits when the user wanted to have group
 125   writability (e.g. by setting "umask 002").
 126   (merge 6ff2b72 ar/clone-honor-umask-at-top later to maint).
 127
 128 * "commit --amend" used to refuse amending a commit with an empty log
 129   message, with or without "--allow-empty-message".
 130   (merge d9a9357 cw/amend-commit-without-message later to maint).
 131
 132 * "git commit --amend --only --" was meant to allow "Clever" people to
 133   rewrite the commit message without making any change even when they
 134   have already changes for the next commit added to their index, but
 135   it never worked as advertised since it was introduced in 1.3.0 era.
 136   (merge ea2d4ed jk/maint-commit-amend-only-no-paths later to maint).
 137
 138 * Even though the index can record pathnames longer than 1<<12 bytes,
 139   in some places we were not comparing them in full, potentially
 140   replacing index entries instead of adding.
 141   (merge d5f5333 tg/maint-cache-name-compare later to maint).
 142
 143 * "git show"'s auto-walking behaviour was an unreliable and
 144   unpredictable hack; it now behaves just like "git log" does when it
 145   walks.
 146   (merge c5941f1 tr/maint-show-walk later to maint).
 147
 148 * "git diff", "git status" and anything that internally uses the
 149   comparison machinery was utterly broken when the difference
 150   involved a file with "-" as its name.  This was due to the way "git
 151   diff --no-index" was incorrectly bolted on to the system, making
 152   any comparison that involves a file "-" at the root level
 153   incorrectly read from the standard input.
 154   (merge 4682d85 jc/refactor-diff-stdin later to maint).
 155
 156 * We did not have test to make sure "git rebase" without extra options
 157   filters out an empty commit in the original history.
 158   (merge 2b5ba7b mz/empty-rebase-test later to maint).
 159
 160 * "git fast-export" produced an input stream for fast-import without
 161   properly quoting pathnames when they contain SPs in them.
 162   (merge ff59f6d js/fast-export-paths-with-spaces later to maint).
 163
 164 * "git checkout --detach", when you are still on an unborn branch,
 165   should be forbidden, but it wasn't.
 166   (merge 8ced1aa cw/no-detaching-an-unborn later to maint).
 167
 168 * Some implementations of Perl terminates "lines" with CRLF even when
 169   the script is operating on just a sequence of bytes.  Make sure to
 170   use "$PERL_PATH", the version of Perl the user told Git to use, in
 171   our tests to avoid unnecessary breakages in tests.
 172   (merge ad78585 vr/use-our-perl-in-tests later to maint).