1GIT v1.5.3 Release Notes 2======================== 3 4Updates since v1.5.2 5-------------------- 6 7* The commit walkers other than http are officially deprecated, 8 but still supported for now. 9 10* The submodule support has Porcelain layer. 11 12 Note that the current submodule support is minimal and this is 13 deliberately so. A design decision we made is that operations 14 at the supermodule level do not recurse into submodules by 15 default. The expectation is that later we would add a 16 mechanism to tell git which submodules the user is interested 17 in, and this information might be used to determine the 18 recursive behaviour of certain commands (e.g. "git checkout" 19 and "git diff"), but currently we haven't agreed on what that 20 mechanism should look like. Therefore, if you use submodules, 21 you would probably need "git submodule update" on the 22 submodules you care about after running a "git checkout" at 23 the supermodule level. 24 25* There are a handful pack-objects changes to help you cope better 26 with repositories with pathologically large blobs in them. 27 28* For people who need to import from Perforce, a front-end for 29 fast-import is in contrib/fast-import/. 30 31* Comes with git-gui 0.8.2. 32 33* Comes with updated gitk. 34 35* New commands and options. 36 37 - "git log --date=<format>" can use more formats: iso8601, rfc2822. 38 39 - The hunk header output from "git diff" family can be customized 40 with the attributes mechanism. See gitattributes(5) for details. 41 42 - "git stash" allows you to quickly save away your work in 43 progress and replay it later on an updated state. 44 45 - "git rebase" learned an "interactive" mode that let you 46 pick and reorder which commits to rebuild. 47 48 - "git fsck" can save its findings in $GIT_DIR/lost-found, without a 49 separate invocation of "git lost-found" command. The blobs stored by 50 lost-found are stored in plain format to allow you to grep in them. 51 52 - $GIT_WORK_TREE environment variable can be used together with 53 $GIT_DIR to work in a subdirectory of a working tree that is 54 not located at "$GIT_DIR/..". 55 56 - Giving "--file=<file>" option to "git config" is the same as 57 running the command with GIT_CONFIG=<file> environment. 58 59 - "git log" learned a new option "--follow", to follow 60 renaming history of a single file. 61 62 - "git filter-branch" lets you rewrite the revision history of 63 specified branches. You can specify a number of filters to 64 modify the commits, files and trees. 65 66 - "git cvsserver" learned new options (--base-path, --export-all, 67 --strict-paths) inspired by "git daemon". 68 69 - "git daemon --base-path-relaxed" can help migrating a repository URL 70 that did not use to use --base-path to use --base-path. 71 72 - "git commit" can use "-t templatefile" option and commit.template 73 configuration variable to prime the commit message given to you in the 74 editor. 75 76 - "git submodule" command helps you manage the projects from 77 the superproject that contain them. 78 79 - In addition to core.compression configuration option, 80 core.loosecompression and pack.compression options can 81 independently tweak zlib compression levels used for loose 82 and packed objects. 83 84 - "git ls-tree -l" shows size of blobs pointed at by the 85 tree entries, similar to "/bin/ls -l". 86 87 - "git rev-list" learned --regexp-ignore-case and 88 --extended-regexp options to tweak its matching logic used 89 for --grep fitering. 90 91 - "git describe --contains" is a handier way to call more 92 obscure command "git name-rev --tags". 93 94 - "git gc --aggressive" tells the command to spend more cycles 95 to optimize the repository harder. 96 97 - "git repack" learned a "window-memory" limit which 98 dynamically reduces the window size to stay within the 99 specified memory usage. 100 101 - "git repack" can be told to split resulting packs to avoid 102 exceeding limit specified with "--max-pack-size". 103 104 - "git fsck" gained --verbose option. This is really really 105 verbose but it might help you identify exact commit that is 106 corrupt in your repository. 107 108 - "git format-patch" learned --numbered-files option. This 109 may be useful for MH users. 110 111 - "git format-patch" learned format.subjectprefix configuration 112 variable, which serves the same purpose as "--subject-prefix" 113 option. 114 115 - "git tag -n -l" shows tag annotations while listing tags. 116 117 - "git cvsimport" can optionally use the separate-remote layout. 118 119 - "git blame" can be told to see through commits that change 120 whitespaces and indentation levels with "-w" option. 121 122 - "git send-email" can be told not to thread the messages when 123 sending out more than one patches. 124 125 - "git send-email" can also be told how to find whom to cc the 126 message to for each message via --cc-cmd. 127 128 - "git config" learned NUL terminated output format via -z to 129 help scripts. 130 131 - "git add" learned "--refresh <paths>..." option to selectively refresh 132 the cached stat information. 133 134 - "git init -q" makes the command quieter. 135 136 - "git -p command" now has a cousin of opposite sex, "git --no-pager 137 command". 138 139* Updated behavior of existing commands. 140 141 - "gitweb" can offer multiple snapshot formats. 142 143 ***NOTE*** Unfortunately, this changes the format of the 144 $feature{snapshot}{default} entry in the per-site 145 configuration file 'gitweb_config.perl'. It used to be a 146 three-element tuple that describe a single format; with the 147 new configuration item format, you only have to say the name 148 of the format ('tgz', 'tbz2' or 'zip'). Please update the 149 your configuration file accordingly. 150 151 - "git clone" uses -l (hardlink files under .git) by default when 152 cloning locally. 153 154 - URL used for "git clone" and friends can specify nonstandard SSH port 155 by using ssh://host:port/path/to/repo syntax. 156 157 - "git bundle create" can now create a bundle without negative refs, 158 i.e. "everything since the beginning up to certain points". 159 160 - "git diff" (but not the plumbing level "git diff-tree") now 161 recursively descends into trees by default. 162 163 - "git diff" does not show differences that come only from 164 stat-dirtiness in the form of "diff --git" header anymore. 165 It runs "update-index --refresh" silently as needed. 166 167 - "git tag -l" used to match tags by globbing its parameter as if it 168 has wildcard '*' on both ends, which made "git tag -l gui" to match 169 tag 'gitgui-0.7.0'; this was very annoying. You now have to add 170 asterisk on the sides you want to wildcard yourself. 171 172 - The editor to use with many interactive commands can be 173 overridden with GIT_EDITOR environment variable, or if it 174 does not exist, with core.editor configuration variable. As 175 before, if you have neither, environment variables VISUAL 176 and EDITOR are consulted in this order, and then finally we 177 fall back on "vi". 178 179 - "git rm --cached" does not complain when removing a newly 180 added file from the index anymore. 181 182 - Options to "git log" to affect how --grep/--author options look for 183 given strings now have shorter abbreviations. -i is for ignore case, 184 and -E is for extended regexp. 185 186 - "git log" learned --log-size to show the number of bytes in 187 the log message part of the output to help qgit. 188 189 - "git log --name-status" does not require you to give "-r" anymore. 190 As a general rule, Porcelain commands should recurse when showing 191 diff. 192 193 - "git format-patch --root A" can be used to format everything 194 since the beginning up to A. This was supported with 195 "git format-patch --root A A" for a long time, but was not 196 properly documented. 197 198 - "git svn dcommit" retains local merge information. 199 200 - "git svnimport" allows an empty string to be specified as the 201 trunk/ directory. This is necessary to suck data from a SVN 202 repository that doe not have trunk/ branches/ and tags/ organization 203 at all. 204 205 - "git config" to set values also honors type flags like --bool 206 and --int. 207 208 - core.quotepath configuration can be used to make textual git 209 output to emit most of the characters in the path literally. 210 211 - "git mergetool" chooses its backend more wisely, taking 212 notice of its environment such as use of X, Gnome/KDE, etc. 213 214 - "gitweb" shows merge commits a lot nicer than before. The 215 default view uses more compact --cc format, while the UI 216 allows to choose normal diff with any parent. 217 218 - snapshot files "gitweb" creates from a repository at 219 $path/$project/.git are more useful. We use $project part 220 in the filename, which we used to discard. 221 222 - "git cvsimport" creates lightweight tags; there is no 223 interesting information we can record in an annotated tag, 224 and the handcrafted ones the old code created was not 225 properly formed anyway. 226 227 - "git push" pretends that you immediately fetched back from 228 the remote by updating corresponding remote tracking 229 branches if you have any. 230 231 - The diffstat given after a merge (or a pull) honors the 232 color.diff configuration. 233 234 - "git commit --amend" is now compatible with various message source 235 options such as -m/-C/-c/-F. 236 237 - "git apply --whitespace=strip" removes blank lines added at 238 the end of the file. 239 240 - "git fetch" over git native protocols with "-v" option shows 241 connection status, and the IP address of the other end, to 242 help diagnosing problems. 243 244 - We used to have core.legacyheaders configuration, when 245 set to false, allowed git to write loose objects in a format 246 that mimicks the format used by objects stored in packs. It 247 turns out that this was not so useful. Although we will 248 continue to read objects written in that format, we do not 249 honor that configuration anymore and create loose objects in 250 the legacy/traditional format. 251 252 - "--find-copies-harder" option to diff family can now be 253 spelled as "-C -C" for brevity. 254 255 - "git mailsplit" (hence "git am") can read from Maildir 256 formatted mailboxes. 257 258 - "git cvsserver" does not barf upon seeing "cvs login" 259 request. 260 261 - "pack-objects" honors "delta" attribute set in 262 .gitattributes. It does not attempt to deltify blobs that 263 come from paths with delta attribute set to false. 264 265 - "new-workdir" script (in contrib) can now be used with a 266 bare repository. 267 268 - "git mergetool" learned to use gvimdiff. 269 270 - "gitview" (in contrib) has a better blame interface. 271 272 - "git log" and friends did not handle a commit log message 273 that is larger than 16kB; they do now. 274 275 - "--pretty=oneline" output format for "git log" and friends 276 deals with "malformed" commit log messages that have more 277 than one lines in the first paragraph better. We used to 278 show the first line, cutting the title at mid-sentence; we 279 concatenate them into a single line and treat the result as 280 "oneline". 281 282 - "git p4import" has been demoted to contrib status. For 283 a superior option, checkout the "git p4" front end to 284 "git fast-import" (also in contrib). The man page and p4 285 rpm have been removed as well. 286 287 - "git mailinfo" (hence "am") now tries to see if the message 288 is in utf-8 first, instead of assuming iso-8859-1, if 289 incoming e-mail does not say what encoding it is in. 290 291* Builds 292 293 - old-style function definitions (most notably, a function 294 without parameter defined with "func()", not "func(void)") 295 have been eradicated. 296 297 - "git tag" and "git verify-tag" have been rewritten in C. 298 299* Performance Tweaks 300 301 - "git pack-objects" avoids re-deltification cost by caching 302 small enough delta results it creates while looking for the 303 best delta candidates. 304 305 - "git pack-objects" learned a new heuristcs to prefer delta 306 that is shallower in depth over the smallest delta 307 possible. This improves both overall packfile access 308 performance and packfile density. 309 310 - diff-delta code that is used for packing has been improved 311 to work better on big files. 312 313 - when there are more than one pack files in the repository, 314 the runtime used to try finding an object always from the 315 newest packfile; it now tries the same packfile as we found 316 the object requested the last time, which exploits the 317 locality of references. 318 319 - verifying pack contents done by "git fsck --full" got boost 320 by carefully choosing the order to verify objects in them. 321 322 - "git read-tree -m" to read into an already populated index 323 has been optimized vastly. The effect of this can be seen 324 when switching branches that have differences in only a 325 handful paths. 326 327 - "git add paths..." and "git commit paths..." has also been 328 heavily optimized. 329 330Fixes since v1.5.2 331------------------ 332 333All of the fixes in v1.5.2 maintenance series are included in 334this release, unless otherwise noted. 335 336* Bugfixes 337 338 - "gitweb" had trouble handling non UTF-8 text with older 339 Encode.pm Perl module. 340 341 - "git svn" misparsed the data from the commits in the repository when 342 the user had "color.diff = true" in the configuration. This has been 343 fixed. 344 345 - There was a case where "git svn dcommit" clobbered changes made on the 346 SVN side while committing multiple changes. 347 348 - "git-write-tree" had a bad interaction with racy-git avoidance and 349 gitattributes mechanisms. 350 351 - "git --bare command" overrode existing GIT_DIR setting and always 352 made it treat the current working directory as GIT_DIR. 353 354 - "git ls-files --error-unmatch" does not complain if you give the 355 same path pattern twice by mistake. 356 357 - "git init" autodetected core.filemode but not core.symlinks, which 358 made a new directory created automatically by "git clone" cumbersome 359 to use on filesystems that require these configurations to be set. 360 361 - "git log" family of commands behaved differently when run as "git 362 log" (no pathspec) and as "git log --" (again, no pathspec). This 363 inconsistency was introduced somewhere in v1.3.0 series but now has 364 been corrected. 365 366 - "git rebase -m" incorrectly displayed commits that were skipped.