1Git v1.8.2 Release Notes 2======================== 3 4Backward compatibility notes 5---------------------------- 6 7In the upcoming major release (tentatively called 1.8.2), we will 8change the behavior of the "git push" command. 9 10When "git push [$there]" does not say what to push, we have used the 11traditional "matching" semantics so far (all your branches were sent 12to the remote as long as there already are branches of the same name 13over there). We will use the "simple" semantics that pushes the 14current branch to the branch with the same name, only when the current 15branch is set to integrate with that remote branch. There is a user 16preference configuration variable "push.default" to change this. 17 18"git push $there tag v1.2.3" used to allow replacing a tag v1.2.3 19that already exists in the repository $there, if the rewritten tag 20you are pushing points at a commit that is a decendant of a commit 21that the old tag v1.2.3 points at. This was found to be error prone 22and starting with this release, any attempt to update an existing 23ref under refs/tags/ hierarchy will fail, without "--force". 24 25 26Updates since v1.8.1 27-------------------- 28 29UI, Workflows & Features 30 31 * Initial ports to QNX and z/OS UNIX System Services have started. 32 33 * Output from the tests is coloured using "green is okay, yellow is 34 questionable, red is bad and blue is informative" scheme. 35 36 * Mention of "GIT/Git/git" in the documentation have been updated to 37 be more uniform and consistent. The name of the system and the 38 concept it embodies is "Git"; the command the users type is "git". 39 All-caps "GIT" was merely a way to imitate "Git" typeset in small 40 caps in our ASCII text only documentation and to be avoided. 41 42 * The completion script (in contrib/completion) used to let the 43 default completer to suggest pathnames, which gave too many 44 irrelevant choices (e.g. "git add" would not want to add an 45 unmodified path). It learnt to use a more git-aware logic to 46 enumerate only relevant ones. 47 48 * In bare repositories, "git shortlog" and other commands now read 49 mailmap files from the tip of the history, to help running these 50 tools in server settings. 51 52 * Color specifiers, e.g. "%C(blue)Hello%C(reset)", used in the 53 "--format=" option of "git log" and friends can be disabled when 54 the output is not sent to a terminal by prefixing them with 55 "auto,", e.g. "%C(auto,blue)Hello%C(auto,reset)". 56 57 * Scripts can ask Git that wildcard patterns in pathspecs they give do 58 not have any significance, i.e. take them as literal strings. 59 60 * The patterns in .gitignore and .gitattributes files can have **/, 61 as a pattern that matches 0 or more levels of subdirectory. 62 E.g. "foo/**/bar" matches "bar" in "foo" itself or in a 63 subdirectory of "foo". 64 65 * When giving arguments without "--" disambiguation, object names 66 that come earlier on the command line must not be interpretable as 67 pathspecs and pathspecs that come later on the command line must 68 not be interpretable as object names. This disambiguation rule has 69 been tweaked so that ":/" (no other string before or after) is 70 always interpreted as a pathspec; "git cmd -- :/" is no longer 71 needed, you can just say "git cmd :/". 72 73 * Various "hint" lines Git gives when it asks the user to edit 74 messages in the editor are commented out with '#' by default. The 75 core.commentchar configuration variable can be used to customize 76 this '#' to a different character. 77 78 * "git add -u" and "git add -A" without pathspec issues warning to 79 make users aware that they are only operating on paths inside the 80 subdirectory they are in. Use ":/" (everything from the top) or 81 "." (everything from the $cwd) to disambiguate. 82 83 * "git blame" (and "git diff") learned the "--no-follow" option. 84 85 * "git branch" now rejects some nonsense combinations of command line 86 arguments (e.g. giving more than one branch name to rename) with 87 more case-specific error messages. 88 89 * "git check-ignore" command to help debugging .gitignore files has 90 been added. 91 92 * "git cherry-pick" can be used to replay a root commit to an unborn 93 branch. 94 95 * "git commit" can be told to use --cleanup=whitespace by setting the 96 configuration variable commit.cleanup to 'whitespace'. 97 98 * "git fetch --mirror" and fetch that uses other forms of refspec 99 with wildcard used to attempt to update a symbolic ref that match 100 the wildcard on the receiving end, which made little sense (the 101 real ref that is pointed at by the symbolic ref would be updated 102 anyway). Symbolic refs no longer are affected by such a fetch. 103 104 * "git format-patch" now detects more cases in which a whole branch 105 is being exported, and uses the description for the branch, when 106 asked to write a cover letter for the series. 107 108 * "git format-patch" learned "-v $count" option, and prepends a 109 string "v$count-" to the names of its output files, and also 110 automatically sets the subject prefix to "PATCH v$count". This 111 allows patches from rerolled series to be stored under different 112 names and makes it easier to reuse cover letter messsages. 113 114 * "git log" and friends can be told with --use-mailmap option to 115 rewrite the names and email addresses of people using the mailmap 116 mechanism. 117 118 * "git log --cc --graph" now shows the combined diff output with the 119 ancestry graph. 120 121 * "git mergetool" and "git difftool" learned to list the available 122 tool backends in a more consistent manner. 123 124 * "git mergetool" is aware of TortoiseGitMerge now and uses it over 125 TortoiseMerge when available. 126 127 * "git push" now requires "-f" to update a tag, even if it is a 128 fast-forward, as tags are meant to be fixed points. 129 130 * Error messages from "git push" when it stops to prevent remote refs 131 from getting overwritten by mistake have been improved to explain 132 various situations separately. 133 134 * "git push" will stop without doing anything if the new "pre-push" 135 hook exists and exits with a failure. 136 137 * When "git rebase" fails to generate patches to be applied (e.g. due 138 to oom), it failed to detect the failure and instead behaved as if 139 there were nothing to do. A workaround to use a temporary file has 140 been applied, but we probably would want to revisit this later, as 141 it hurts the common case of not failing at all. 142 143 * Input and preconditions to "git reset" has been loosened where 144 appropriate. "git reset $fromtree Makefile" requires $fromtree to 145 be any tree (it used to require it to be a commit), for example. 146 "git reset" (without options or parameters) used to error out when 147 you do not have any commits in your history, but it now gives you 148 an empty index (to match non-existent commit you are not even on). 149 150 * "git status" says what branch is being bisected or rebased when 151 able, not just "bisecting" or "rebasing". 152 153 * "git submodule" started learning a new mode to integrate with the 154 tip of the remote branch (as opposed to integrating with the commit 155 recorded in the superproject's gitlink). 156 157 158Foreign Interface 159 160 * "git fast-export" has been updated for its use in the context of 161 the remote helper interface. 162 163 * A new remote helper to interact with bzr has been added to contrib/. 164 165 * "git p4" got various bugfixes around its branch handling. It is 166 also made usable with Python 2.4/2.5. In addition, its various 167 portability issues for Cygwin have been addressed. 168 169 * The remote helper to interact with Hg in contrib/ has seen a few 170 fixes. 171 172 173Performance, Internal Implementation, etc. 174 175 * "git fsck" has been taught to be pickier about entries in tree 176 objects that should not be there, e.g. ".", ".git", and "..". 177 178 * Matching paths with common forms of pathspecs that contain wildcard 179 characters has been optimized further. 180 181 * We stopped paying attention to $GIT_CONFIG environment that points 182 at a single configuration file from any command other than "git config" 183 quite a while ago, but "git clone" internally set, exported, and 184 then unexported the variable during its operation unnecessarily. 185 186 * "git reset" internals has been reworked and should be faster in 187 general. We tried to be careful not to break any behaviour but 188 there could be corner cases, especially when running the command 189 from a conflicted state, that we may have missed. 190 191 * The implementation of "imap-send" has been updated to reuse xml 192 quoting code from http-push codepath, and lost a lot of unused 193 code. 194 195 * There is a simple-minded checker for the test scripts in t/ 196 directory to catch most common mistakes (it is not enabled by 197 default). 198 199 * You can build with USE_WILDMATCH=YesPlease to use a replacement 200 implementation of pattern matching logic used for pathname-like 201 things, e.g. refnames and paths in the repository. This new 202 implementation is not expected change the existing behaviour of Git 203 in this release, except for "git for-each-ref" where you can now 204 say "refs/**/master" and match with both refs/heads/master and 205 refs/remotes/origin/master. We plan to use this new implementation 206 in wider places (e.g. "git ls-files '**/Makefile' may find Makefile 207 at the top-level, and "git log '**/t*.sh'" may find commits that 208 touch a shell script whose name begins with "t" at any level) in 209 future versions of Git, but we are not there yet. By building with 210 USE_WILDMATCH, using the resulting Git daily and reporting when you 211 find breakages, you can help us get closer to that goal. 212 213 * Some reimplementations of Git do not write all the stat info back 214 to the index due to their implementation limitations (e.g. jgit). 215 A configuration option can tell Git to ignore changes to most of 216 the stat fields and only pay attention to mtime and size, which 217 these implementations can reliably update. This can be used to 218 avoid excessive revalidation of contents. 219 220 221Also contains minor documentation updates and code clean-ups. 222 223 224Fixes since v1.8.1 225------------------ 226 227Unless otherwise noted, all the fixes since v1.8.1 in the maintenance 228track are contained in this release (see release notes to them for 229details). 230 231 * An element on GIT_CEILING_DIRECTORIES list that does not name the 232 real path to a directory (i.e. a symbolic link) could have caused 233 the GIT_DIR discovery logic to escape the ceiling. 234 235 * When attempting to read the XDG-style $HOME/.config/git/config and 236 finding that $HOME/.config/git is a file, we gave a wrong error 237 message, instead of treating the case as "a custom config file does 238 not exist there" and moving on. 239 240 * The behaviour visible to the end users was confusing, when they 241 attempt to kill a process spawned in the editor that was in turn 242 launched by Git with SIGINT (or SIGQUIT), as Git would catch that 243 signal and die. We ignore these signals now. 244 (merge 0398fc34 pf/editor-ignore-sigint later to maint). 245 246 * A child process that was killed by a signal (e.g. SIGINT) was 247 reported in an inconsistent way depending on how the process was 248 spawned by us, with or without a shell in between. 249 250 * After failing to create a temporary file using mkstemp(), failing 251 pathname was not reported correctly on some platforms. 252 253 * We used to stuff "user@" and then append what we read from 254 /etc/mailname to come up with a default e-mail ident, but a bug 255 lost the "user@" part. 256 257 * The attribute mechanism didn't allow limiting attributes to be 258 applied to only a single directory itself with "path/" like the 259 exclude mechanism does. The initial implementation of this that 260 was merged to 'maint' and 1.8.1.2 was with a severe performance 261 degradations and needs to merge a fix-up topic. 262 263 * The smart HTTP clients forgot to verify the content-type that comes 264 back from the server side to make sure that the request is being 265 handled properly. 266 (merge 3443db5 sp/smart-http-content-type-check later to maint). 267 268 * "git am" did not parse datestamp correctly from Hg generated patch, 269 when it is run in a locale outside C (or en). 270 271 * "git apply" misbehaved when fixing whitespace breakages by removing 272 excess trailing blank lines. 273 274 * "git apply --summary" has been taught to make sure the similarity 275 value shown in its output is sensible, even when the input had a 276 bogus value. 277 (merge afcb6ac jk/apply-similaritly-parsing later to maint). 278 279 * A tar archive created by "git archive" recorded a directory in a 280 way that made NetBSD's implementation of "tar" sometimes unhappy. 281 282 * "git archive" did not record uncompressed size in the header when 283 streaming a zip archive, which confused some implementations of unzip. 284 285 * "git archive" did not parse configuration values in tar.* namespace 286 correctly. 287 (merge b3873c3 jk/config-parsing-cleanup later to maint). 288 289 * Attempt to "branch --edit-description" an existing branch, while 290 being on a detached HEAD, errored out. 291 292 * "git clean" showed what it was going to do, but sometimes end up 293 finding that it was not allowed to do so, which resulted in a 294 confusing output (e.g. after saying that it will remove an 295 untracked directory, it found an embedded git repository there 296 which it is not allowed to remove). It now performs the actions 297 and then reports the outcome more faithfully. 298 (merge f538a91 zk/clean-report-failure later to maint). 299 300 * When "git clone --separate-git-dir=$over_there" is interrupted, it 301 failed to remove the real location of the $GIT_DIR it created. 302 This was most visible when interrupting a submodule update. 303 304 * "git cvsimport" mishandled timestamps at DST boundary. 305 (merge 48c9162 bw/get-tz-offset-perl later to maint). 306 307 * We used to have an arbitrary 32 limit for combined diff input, 308 resulting in incorrect number of leading colons shown when showing 309 the "--raw --cc" output. 310 (merge edbc00e jc/combine-diff-many-parents later to maint). 311 312 * "git fetch --depth" was broken in at least three ways. The 313 resulting history was deeper than specified by one commit, it was 314 unclear how to wipe the shallowness of the repository with the 315 command, and documentation was misleading. 316 (merge cfb70e1 nd/fetch-depth-is-broken later to maint). 317 318 * "git log --all -p" that walked refs/notes/textconv/ ref can later 319 try to use the textconv data incorrectly after it gets freed. 320 (merge be5c9fb jk/read-commit-buffer-data-after-free later to maint). 321 322 * We forgot to close the file descriptor reading from "gpg" output, 323 killing "git log --show-signature" on a long history. 324 325 * The way "git svn" asked for password using SSH_ASKPASS and 326 GIT_ASKPASS was not in line with the rest of the system. 327 328 * The --graph code fell into infinite loop when asked to do what the 329 code did not expect. 330 331 * http transport was wrong to ask for the username when the 332 authentication is done by certificate identity. 333 334 * "git pack-refs" that ran in parallel to another process that 335 created new refs had a nasty race. 336 337 * Rebasing the history of superproject with change in the submodule 338 has been broken since v1.7.12. 339 340 * After "git add -N" and then writing a tree object out of the 341 index, the cache-tree data structure got corrupted. 342 343 * "git clone" used to allow --bare and --separate-git-dir=$there 344 options at the same time, which was nonsensical. 345 (merge 95b63f1 nd/clone-no-separate-git-dir-with-bare later to maint). 346 347 * "git rebase --preserve-merges" lost empty merges in recent versions 348 of Git. 349 350 * "git merge --no-edit" computed who were involved in the work done 351 on the side branch, even though that information is to be discarded 352 without getting seen in the editor. 353 354 * "git merge" started calling prepare-commit-msg hook like "git 355 commit" does some time ago, but forgot to pay attention to the exit 356 status of the hook. 357 358 * A failure to push due to non-ff while on an unborn branch 359 dereferenced a NULL pointer when showing an error message. 360 361 * When users spell "cc:" in lowercase in the fake "header" in the 362 trailer part, "git send-email" failed to pick up the addresses from 363 there. As e-mail headers field names are case insensitive, this 364 script should follow suit and treat "cc:" and "Cc:" the same way. 365 366 * Output from "git status --ignored" showed an unexpected interaction 367 with "--untracked". 368 369 * "gitweb", when sorting by age to show repositories with new 370 activities first, used to sort repositories with absolutely 371 nothing in it early, which was not very useful. 372 373 * "gitweb"'s code to sanitize control characters before passing it to 374 "highlight" filter lost known-to-be-safe control characters by 375 mistake. 376 377 * "gitweb" pages served over HTTPS, when configured to show picon or 378 gravatar, referred to these external resources to be fetched via 379 HTTP, resulting in mixed contents warning in browsers. 380 (merge 5748558 ab/gitweb-use-same-scheme later to maint). 381 382 * When a line to be wrapped has a solid run of non space characters 383 whose length exactly is the wrap width, "git shortlog -w" failed 384 to add a newline after such a line. 385 386 * Command line completion leaked an unnecessary error message while 387 looking for possible matches with paths in <tree-ish>. 388 389 * Command line completion for "tcsh" emitted an unwanted space 390 after completing a single directory name. 391 392 * Command line completion code was inadvertently made incompatible with 393 older versions of bash by using a newer array notation. 394 395 * Some shells do not behave correctly when IFS is unset; work it 396 around by explicitly setting it to the default value. 397 398 * Some scripted programs written in Python did not get updated when 399 PYTHON_PATH changed. 400 (cherry-pick 96a4647fca54031974cd6ad1 later to maint). 401 402 * When autoconf is used, any build on a different commit always ran 403 "config.status --recheck" even when unnecessary. 404 405 * A fix was added to the build procedure to work around buggy 406 versions of ccache broke the auto-generation of dependencies, which 407 unfortunately is still relevant because some people use ancient 408 distros. 409 410 * The autoconf subsystem passed --mandir down to generated 411 config.mak.autogen but forgot to do the same for --htmldir. 412 (merge fc1c541 ct/autoconf-htmldir later to maint). 413 414 * We have been carrying a translated and long-unmaintained copy of an 415 old version of the tutorial; removed. 416 417 * t0050 had tests expecting failures from a bug that was fixed some 418 time ago. 419 420 * t4014, t9502 and t0200 tests had various portability issues that 421 broke on OpenBSD. 422 423 * t9020 and t3600 tests had various portability issues. 424 425 * t9200 runs "cvs init" on a directory that already exists, but a 426 platform can configure this fail for the current user (e.g. you 427 need to be in the cvsadmin group on NetBSD 6.0). 428 429 * t9020 and t9810 had a few non-portable shell script construct. 430 431 * Scripts to test bash completion was inherently flaky as it was 432 affected by whatever random things the user may have on $PATH.