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 mergetool" and "git difftool" learned to list the available 119 tool backends in a more consistent manner. 120 121 * "git mergetool" is aware of TortoiseGitMerge now and uses it over 122 TortoiseMerge when available. 123 124 * "git push" now requires "-f" to update a tag, even if it is a 125 fast-forward, as tags are meant to be fixed points. 126 127 * Error messages from "git push" when it stops to prevent remote refs 128 from getting overwritten by mistake have been improved to explain 129 various situations separately. 130 131 * "git push" will stop without doing anything if the new "pre-push" 132 hook exists and exits with a failure. 133 134 * When "git rebase" fails to generate patches to be applied (e.g. due 135 to oom), it failed to detect the failure and instead behaved as if 136 there were nothing to do. A workaround to use a temporary file has 137 been applied, but we probably would want to revisit this later, as 138 it hurts the common case of not failing at all. 139 140 * Input and preconditions to "git reset" has been loosened where 141 appropriate. "git reset $fromtree Makefile" requires $fromtree to 142 be any tree (it used to require it to be a commit), for example. 143 "git reset" (without options or parameters) used to error out when 144 you do not have any commits in your history, but it now gives you 145 an empty index (to match non-existent commit you are not even on). 146 147 * "git submodule" started learning a new mode to integrate with the 148 tip of the remote branch (as opposed to integrating with the commit 149 recorded in the superproject's gitlink). 150 151 152Foreign Interface 153 154 * "git fast-export" has been updated for its use in the context of 155 the remote helper interface. 156 157 * A new remote helper to interact with bzr has been added to contrib/. 158 159 * "git p4" got various bugfixes around its branch handling. It is 160 also made usable with Python 2.4/2.5. In addition, its various 161 portability issues for Cygwin have been addressed. 162 163 * The remote helper to interact with Hg in contrib/ has seen a few 164 fixes. 165 166 167Performance, Internal Implementation, etc. 168 169 * "git fsck" has been taught to be pickier about entries in tree 170 objects that should not be there, e.g. ".", ".git", and "..". 171 172 * Matching paths with common forms of pathspecs that contain wildcard 173 characters has been optimized further. 174 175 * We stopped paying attention to $GIT_CONFIG environment that points 176 at a single configuration file from any command other than "git config" 177 quite a while ago, but "git clone" internally set, exported, and 178 then unexported the variable during its operation unnecessarily. 179 180 * "git reset" internals has been reworked and should be faster in 181 general. We tried to be careful not to break any behaviour but 182 there could be corner cases, especially when running the command 183 from a conflicted state, that we may have missed. 184 185 * The implementation of "imap-send" has been updated to reuse xml 186 quoting code from http-push codepath, and lost a lot of unused 187 code. 188 189 * There is a simple-minded checker for the test scripts in t/ 190 directory to catch most common mistakes (it is not enabled by 191 default). 192 193 * You can build with USE_WILDMATCH=YesPlease to use a replacement 194 implementation of pattern matching logic used for pathname-like 195 things, e.g. refnames and paths in the repository. This new 196 implementation is not expected change the existing behaviour of Git 197 in this release, except for "git for-each-ref" where you can now 198 say "refs/**/master" and match with both refs/heads/master and 199 refs/remotes/origin/master. We plan to use this new implementation 200 in wider places (e.g. "git ls-files '**/Makefile' may find Makefile 201 at the top-level, and "git log '**/t*.sh'" may find commits that 202 touch a shell script whose name begins with "t" at any level) in 203 future versions of Git, but we are not there yet. By building with 204 USE_WILDMATCH, using the resulting Git daily and reporting when you 205 find breakages, you can help us get closer to that goal. 206 207 * Some reimplementations of Git do not write all the stat info back 208 to the index due to their implementation limitations (e.g. jgit). 209 A configuration option can tell Git to ignore changes to most of 210 the stat fields and only pay attention to mtime and size, which 211 these implementations can reliably update. This can be used to 212 avoid excessive revalidation of contents. 213 214 215Also contains minor documentation updates and code clean-ups. 216 217 218Fixes since v1.8.1 219------------------ 220 221Unless otherwise noted, all the fixes since v1.8.1 in the maintenance 222track are contained in this release (see release notes to them for 223details). 224 225 * An element on GIT_CEILING_DIRECTORIES list that does not name the 226 real path to a directory (i.e. a symbolic link) could have caused 227 the GIT_DIR discovery logic to escape the ceiling. 228 229 * When attempting to read the XDG-style $HOME/.config/git/config and 230 finding that $HOME/.config/git is a file, we gave a wrong error 231 message, instead of treating the case as "a custom config file does 232 not exist there" and moving on. 233 234 * The behaviour visible to the end users was confusing, when they 235 attempt to kill a process spawned in the editor that was in turn 236 launched by Git with SIGINT (or SIGQUIT), as Git would catch that 237 signal and die. We ignore these signals now. 238 (merge 0398fc34 pf/editor-ignore-sigint later to maint). 239 240 * A child process that was killed by a signal (e.g. SIGINT) was 241 reported in an inconsistent way depending on how the process was 242 spawned by us, with or without a shell in between. 243 244 * After failing to create a temporary file using mkstemp(), failing 245 pathname was not reported correctly on some platforms. 246 247 * We used to stuff "user@" and then append what we read from 248 /etc/mailname to come up with a default e-mail ident, but a bug 249 lost the "user@" part. 250 251 * The attribute mechanism didn't allow limiting attributes to be 252 applied to only a single directory itself with "path/" like the 253 exclude mechanism does. The initial implementation of this that 254 was merged to 'maint' and 1.8.1.2 was with a severe performance 255 degradations and needs to merge a fix-up topic. 256 257 * The smart HTTP clients forgot to verify the content-type that comes 258 back from the server side to make sure that the request is being 259 handled properly. 260 (merge 3443db5 sp/smart-http-content-type-check later to maint). 261 262 * "git am" did not parse datestamp correctly from Hg generated patch, 263 when it is run in a locale outside C (or en). 264 265 * "git apply" misbehaved when fixing whitespace breakages by removing 266 excess trailing blank lines. 267 268 * "git apply --summary" has been taught to make sure the similarity 269 value shown in its output is sensible, even when the input had a 270 bogus value. 271 (merge afcb6ac jk/apply-similaritly-parsing later to maint). 272 273 * A tar archive created by "git archive" recorded a directory in a 274 way that made NetBSD's implementation of "tar" sometimes unhappy. 275 276 * "git archive" did not record uncompressed size in the header when 277 streaming a zip archive, which confused some implementations of unzip. 278 279 * "git archive" did not parse configuration values in tar.* namespace 280 correctly. 281 (merge b3873c3 jk/config-parsing-cleanup later to maint). 282 283 * Attempt to "branch --edit-description" an existing branch, while 284 being on a detached HEAD, errored out. 285 286 * "git clean" showed what it was going to do, but sometimes end up 287 finding that it was not allowed to do so, which resulted in a 288 confusing output (e.g. after saying that it will remove an 289 untracked directory, it found an embedded git repository there 290 which it is not allowed to remove). It now performs the actions 291 and then reports the outcome more faithfully. 292 (merge f538a91 zk/clean-report-failure later to maint). 293 294 * When "git clone --separate-git-dir=$over_there" is interrupted, it 295 failed to remove the real location of the $GIT_DIR it created. 296 This was most visible when interrupting a submodule update. 297 298 * We used to have an arbitrary 32 limit for combined diff input, 299 resulting in incorrect number of leading colons shown when showing 300 the "--raw --cc" output. 301 (merge edbc00e jc/combine-diff-many-parents later to maint). 302 303 * "git fetch --depth" was broken in at least three ways. The 304 resulting history was deeper than specified by one commit, it was 305 unclear how to wipe the shallowness of the repository with the 306 command, and documentation was misleading. 307 (merge cfb70e1 nd/fetch-depth-is-broken later to maint). 308 309 * "git log --all -p" that walked refs/notes/textconv/ ref can later 310 try to use the textconv data incorrectly after it gets freed. 311 (merge be5c9fb jk/read-commit-buffer-data-after-free later to maint). 312 313 * We forgot to close the file descriptor reading from "gpg" output, 314 killing "git log --show-signature" on a long history. 315 316 * The way "git svn" asked for password using SSH_ASKPASS and 317 GIT_ASKPASS was not in line with the rest of the system. 318 319 * The --graph code fell into infinite loop when asked to do what the 320 code did not expect. 321 322 * http transport was wrong to ask for the username when the 323 authentication is done by certificate identity. 324 325 * "git pack-refs" that ran in parallel to another process that 326 created new refs had a nasty race. 327 328 * Rebasing the history of superproject with change in the submodule 329 has been broken since v1.7.12. 330 331 * After "git add -N" and then writing a tree object out of the 332 index, the cache-tree data structure got corrupted. 333 334 * "git clone" used to allow --bare and --separate-git-dir=$there 335 options at the same time, which was nonsensical. 336 (merge 95b63f1 nd/clone-no-separate-git-dir-with-bare later to maint). 337 338 * "git rebase --preserve-merges" lost empty merges in recent versions 339 of Git. 340 341 * "git merge --no-edit" computed who were involved in the work done 342 on the side branch, even though that information is to be discarded 343 without getting seen in the editor. 344 345 * "git merge" started calling prepare-commit-msg hook like "git 346 commit" does some time ago, but forgot to pay attention to the exit 347 status of the hook. 348 349 * A failure to push due to non-ff while on an unborn branch 350 dereferenced a NULL pointer when showing an error message. 351 352 * When users spell "cc:" in lowercase in the fake "header" in the 353 trailer part, "git send-email" failed to pick up the addresses from 354 there. As e-mail headers field names are case insensitive, this 355 script should follow suit and treat "cc:" and "Cc:" the same way. 356 357 * Output from "git status --ignored" showed an unexpected interaction 358 with "--untracked". 359 360 * "gitweb", when sorting by age to show repositories with new 361 activities first, used to sort repositories with absolutely 362 nothing in it early, which was not very useful. 363 364 * "gitweb"'s code to sanitize control characters before passing it to 365 "highlight" filter lost known-to-be-safe control characters by 366 mistake. 367 368 * "gitweb" pages served over HTTPS, when configured to show picon or 369 gravatar, referred to these external resources to be fetched via 370 HTTP, resulting in mixed contents warning in browsers. 371 (merge 5748558 ab/gitweb-use-same-scheme later to maint). 372 373 * When a line to be wrapped has a solid run of non space characters 374 whose length exactly is the wrap width, "git shortlog -w" failed 375 to add a newline after such a line. 376 377 * Command line completion leaked an unnecessary error message while 378 looking for possible matches with paths in <tree-ish>. 379 380 * Command line completion for "tcsh" emitted an unwanted space 381 after completing a single directory name. 382 383 * Command line completion code was inadvertently made incompatible with 384 older versions of bash by using a newer array notation. 385 386 * Some shells do not behave correctly when IFS is unset; work it 387 around by explicitly setting it to the default value. 388 389 * Some scripted programs written in Python did not get updated when 390 PYTHON_PATH changed. 391 (cherry-pick 96a4647fca54031974cd6ad1 later to maint). 392 393 * When autoconf is used, any build on a different commit always ran 394 "config.status --recheck" even when unnecessary. 395 396 * A fix was added to the build procedure to work around buggy 397 versions of ccache broke the auto-generation of dependencies, which 398 unfortunately is still relevant because some people use ancient 399 distros. 400 401 * The autoconf subsystem passed --mandir down to generated 402 config.mak.autogen but forgot to do the same for --htmldir. 403 (merge fc1c541 ct/autoconf-htmldir later to maint). 404 405 * We have been carrying a translated and long-unmaintained copy of an 406 old version of the tutorial; removed. 407 408 * t0050 had tests expecting failures from a bug that was fixed some 409 time ago. 410 411 * t4014, t9502 and t0200 tests had various portability issues that 412 broke on OpenBSD. 413 414 * t9020 and t3600 tests had various portability issues. 415 416 * t9200 runs "cvs init" on a directory that already exists, but a 417 platform can configure this fail for the current user (e.g. you 418 need to be in the cvsadmin group on NetBSD 6.0). 419 420 * t9020 and t9810 had a few non-portable shell script construct. 421 422 * Scripts to test bash completion was inherently flaky as it was 423 affected by whatever random things the user may have on $PATH.