1Git v1.8.4 Release Notes 2======================== 3 4Backward compatibility notes (for Git 2.0) 5------------------------------------------ 6 7When "git push [$there]" does not say what to push, we have used the 8traditional "matching" semantics so far (all your branches were sent 9to the remote as long as there already are branches of the same name 10over there). In Git 2.0, the default will change to the "simple" 11semantics that pushes: 12 13 - only the current branch to the branch with the same name, and only 14 when the current branch is set to integrate with that remote 15 branch, if you are pushing to the same remote as you fetch from; or 16 17 - only the current branch to the branch with the same name, if you 18 are pushing to a remote that is not where you usually fetch from. 19 20Use the user preference configuration variable "push.default" to 21change this. If you are an old-timer who is used to the "matching" 22semantics, you can set the variable to "matching" to keep the 23traditional behaviour. If you want to live in the future early, you 24can set it to "simple" today without waiting for Git 2.0. 25 26When "git add -u" (and "git add -A") is run inside a subdirectory and 27does not specify which paths to add on the command line, it 28will operate on the entire tree in Git 2.0 for consistency 29with "git commit -a" and other commands. There will be no 30mechanism to make plain "git add -u" behave like "git add -u .". 31Current users of "git add -u" (without a pathspec) should start 32training their fingers to explicitly say "git add -u ." 33before Git 2.0 comes. A warning is issued when these commands are 34run without a pathspec and when you have local changes outside the 35current directory, because the behaviour in Git 2.0 will be different 36from today's version in such a situation. 37 38In Git 2.0, "git add <path>" will behave as "git add -A <path>", so 39that "git add dir/" will notice paths you removed from the directory 40and record the removal. Versions before Git 2.0, including this 41release, will keep ignoring removals, but the users who rely on this 42behaviour are encouraged to start using "git add --ignore-removal <path>" 43now before 2.0 is released. 44 45 46Updates since v1.8.3 47-------------------- 48 49Foreign interfaces, subsystems and ports. 50 51 * "git rebase -i" now honors --strategy and -X options. 52 53 * Git-gui has been updated to its 0.18.0 version. 54 55 * MediaWiki remote helper (in contrib/) has been updated to use the 56 credential helper interface from Git.pm. 57 58 * Update build for Cygwin 1.[57]. Torsten Bögershausen reports that 59 this is fine with Cygwin 1.7 ($gmane/225824) so let's try moving it 60 ahead. 61 62 * The credential helper to talk to keychain on OS X (in contrib/) has 63 been updated to kick in not just when talking http/https but also 64 imap(s) and smtp. 65 66 * Remote transport helper has been updated to report errors and 67 maintain ref hierarchy used to keep track of its own state better. 68 69 * With "export" remote-helper protocol, (1) a push that tries to 70 update a remote ref whose name is different from the pushing side 71 does not work yet, and (2) the helper may not know how to do 72 --dry-run; these problematic cases are disabled for now. 73 74 * git-remote-hg/bzr (in contrib/) updates. 75 76 * git-remote-mw (in contrib/) hints users to check the certificate, 77 when https:// connection failed. 78 79 80UI, Workflows & Features 81 82 * In addition to the choice from "rebase, merge, or checkout-detach", 83 "submodule update" can allow a custom command to be used in to 84 update the working tree of submodules via the "submodule.*.update" 85 configuration variable. 86 87 * "git submodule update" can optionally clone the submodule 88 repositories shallowly. 89 90 * "git format-patch" learned "--from[=whom]" option, which sets the 91 "From: " header to the specified person (or the person who runs the 92 command, if "=whom" part is missing) and move the original author 93 information to an in-body From: header as necessary. 94 95 * The configuration variable "merge.ff" was cleary a tri-state to 96 choose one from "favor fast-forward when possible", "always create 97 a merge even when the history could fast-forward" and "do not 98 create any merge, only update when the history fast-forwards", but 99 the command line parser did not implement the usual convention of 100 "last one wins, and command line overrides the configuration" 101 correctly. 102 103 * "gitweb" learned to optionally place extra links that point at the 104 levels higher than the Gitweb pages themselves in the breadcrumbs, 105 so that it can be used as part of a larger installation. 106 107 * "git log --format=" now honors i18n.logoutputencoding configuration 108 variable. 109 110 * The "push.default=simple" mode of "git push" has been updated to 111 behave like "current" without requiring a remote tracking 112 information, when you push to a remote that is different from where 113 you fetch from (i.e. a triangular workflow). 114 115 * Having multiple "fixup!" on a line in the rebase instruction sheet 116 did not work very well with "git rebase -i --autosquash". 117 118 * "git log" learned the "--author-date-order" option, with which the 119 output is topologically sorted and commits in parallel histories 120 are shown intermixed together based on the author timestamp. 121 122 * Various subcommands of "git submodule" refused to run from anywhere 123 other than the top of the working tree of the superproject, but 124 they have been taught to let you run from a subdirectory. 125 126 * "git diff" learned a mode that ignores hunks whose change consists 127 only of additions and removals of blank lines, which is the same as 128 "diff -B" (ignore blank lines) of GNU diff. 129 130 * "git rm" gives a single message followed by list of paths to report 131 multiple paths that cannot be removed. 132 133 * "git rebase" can be told with ":/look for this string" syntax commits 134 to replay the changes onto and where the work to be replayed begins. 135 136 * Many tutorials teach users to set "color.ui" to "auto" as the first 137 thing after you set "user.name/email" to introduce yourselves to 138 Git. Now the variable defaults to "auto". 139 140 * On Cygwin, "cygstart" is now recognised as a possible way to start 141 a web browser (used in "help -w" and "instaweb" among others). 142 143 * "git status" learned status.branch and status.short configuration 144 variables to use --branch and --short options by default (override 145 with --no-branch and --no-short options from the command line). 146 147 * "git cmd <name>", when <name> happens to be a 40-hex string, 148 directly uses the 40-hex string as an object name, even if a ref 149 "refs/<some hierarchy>/<name>" exists. This disambiguation order 150 is unlikely to change, but we should warn about the ambiguity just 151 like we warn when more than one refs/ hierachies share the same 152 name. 153 154 * "git rebase" learned "--[no-]autostash" option to save local 155 changes instead of refusing to run (to which people's normal 156 response was to stash them and re-run). This introduced a corner 157 case breakage to "git am --abort" but it has been fixed. 158 159 * Instead of typing four capital letters "HEAD", you can say "@" now, 160 e.g. "git log @". 161 162 * "check-ignore" (new feature since 1.8.2) has been updated to work 163 more like "check-attr" over bidi-pipes. 164 165 * "git describe" learned "--first-parent" option to limit its closest 166 tagged commit search to the first-parent chain. 167 168 * "git merge foo" that might have meant "git merge origin/foo" is 169 diagnosed with a more informative error message. 170 171 * "git log -L<line>,<range>:<filename>" has been added. This may 172 still have leaks and rough edges, though. 173 174 * We used the approxidate() parser for "--expire=<timestamp>" options 175 of various commands, but it is better to treat --expire=all and 176 --expire=now a bit more specially than using the current timestamp. 177 "git gc" and "git reflog" have been updated with a new parsing 178 function for expiry dates. 179 180 * Updates to completion (both bash and zsh) helpers. 181 182 * The behaviour of the "--chain-reply-to" option of "git send-email" 183 have changed at 1.7.0, and we added a warning/advice message to 184 help users adjust to the new behaviour back then, but we kept it 185 around for too long. The message has finally been removed. 186 187 * "git fetch origin master" unlike "git fetch origin" or "git fetch" 188 did not update "refs/remotes/origin/master"; this was an early 189 design decision to keep the update of remote tracking branches 190 predictable, but in practice it turns out that people find it more 191 convenient to opportunistically update them whenever we have a 192 chance, and we have been updating them when we run "git push" which 193 already breaks the original "predictability" anyway. 194 195 * The configuration variable core.checkstat was advertised in the 196 documentation but the code expected core.statinfo instead. 197 For now, we accept both core.checkstat and core.statinfo, but the 198 latter will be removed in the longer term. 199 200 201Performance, Internal Implementation, etc. 202 203 * Fetching between repositories with many refs employed O(n^2) 204 algorithm to match up the common objects, which has been corrected. 205 206 * The original way to specify remote repository using .git/branches/ 207 used to have a nifty feature. The code to support the feature was 208 still in a function but the caller was changed not to call it 5 209 years ago, breaking that feature and leaving the supporting code 210 unreachable. The dead code has been removed. 211 212 * "git pack-refs" that races with new ref creation or deletion have 213 been susceptible to lossage of refs under right conditions, which 214 has been tightened up. 215 216 * We read loose and packed rerferences in two steps, but after 217 deciding to read a loose ref but before actually opening it to read 218 it, another process racing with us can unlink it, which would cause 219 us to barf. The codepath has been updated to retry when such a 220 race is detected, instead of outright failing. 221 222 * Uses of the platform fnmatch(3) function (many places in the code, 223 matching pathspec, .gitignore and .gitattributes to name a few) 224 have been replaced with wildmatch, allowing "foo/**/bar" that would 225 match foo/bar, foo/a/bar, foo/a/b/bar, etc. 226 227 * Memory ownership and lifetime rules for what for-each-ref feeds to 228 its callbacks have been clarified (in short, "you do not own it, so 229 make a copy if you want to keep it"). 230 231 * The revision traversal logic to improve culling of irrelevant 232 parents while traversing a mergy history has been updated. 233 234 * Some leaks in unpack-trees (used in merge, cherry-pick and other 235 codepaths) have been plugged. 236 237 * The codepath to read from marks files in fast-import/export did not 238 have to accept anything but 40-hex representation of the object 239 name. Further, fast-export did not need full in-core object 240 representation to have parsed wen reading from them. These 241 codepaths have been optimized by taking advantage of these access 242 patterns. 243 244 * Object lookup logic, when the object hashtable starts to become 245 crowded, has been optimized. 246 247 * When TEST_OUTPUT_DIRECTORY setting is used, it was handled somewhat 248 inconsistently between the test framework and t/Makefile, and logic 249 to summarize the results looked at a wrong place. 250 251 * "git clone" uses a lighter-weight implementation when making sure 252 that the history behind refs are complete. 253 254 * Many warnings from sparse source checker in compat/ area has been 255 squelched. 256 257 * The code to reading and updating packed-refs file has been updated, 258 correcting corner case bugs. 259 260 261Also contains various documentation updates and code clean-ups. 262 263 264Fixes since v1.8.3 265------------------ 266 267Unless otherwise noted, all the fixes since v1.8.3 in the maintenance 268track are contained in this release (see release notes to them for 269details). 270 271 * Pass port number as a separate argument when "send-email" initializes 272 Net::SMTP, instead of as a part of the hostname, i.e. host:port. 273 This allows GSSAPI codepath to match with the hostname given. 274 (merge 1a741bf bc/send-email-use-port-as-separate-param later to maint). 275 276 * "git diff" refused to even show difference when core.safecrlf is 277 set to true (i.e. error out) and there are offending lines in the 278 working tree files. 279 (merge 5430bb2 jc/maint-diff-core-safecrlf later to maint). 280 281 * A test that should have failed but didn't revealed a bug that needs 282 to be corrected. 283 (merge 94d75d1 jc/t1512-fix later to maint). 284 285 * An overlong path to a .git directory may have overflown the 286 temporary path buffer used to create a name for lockfiles. 287 (merge 2fbd4f9 mh/maint-lockfile-overflow later to maint). 288 289 * Invocations of "git checkout" used internally by "git rebase" were 290 counted as "checkout", and affected later "git checkout -" to the 291 the user to an unexpected place. 292 (merge 3bed291 rr/rebase-checkout-reflog later to maint). 293 294 * "git stash save", when your local change turns a tracked file into 295 a directory, has to remove files in that directory in order to 296 revert your working tree to a pristine state. This will lose 297 untracked files in such a directory, and the command now requires 298 you to "--force" it. 299 300 * The configuration variable column.ui was poorly documented. 301 (merge 5e62cc1 rr/column-doc later to maint). 302 303 * "git name-rev --refs=tags/v*" were forbidden, which was a bit 304 inconvenient (you had to give a pattern to match refs fully, like 305 --refs=refs/tags/v*). 306 (merge 98c5c4a nk/name-rev-abbreviated-refs later to maint). 307 308 * "git apply" parsed patches that add new files, generated by 309 programs other than Git, incorrectly. This is an old breakage in 310 v1.7.11 and will need to be merged down to the maintanance tracks. 311 312 * Older cURL wanted piece of memory we call it with to be stable, but 313 we updated the auth material after handing it to a call. 314 315 * "git pull" into nothing trashed "local changes" that were in the 316 index, and this avoids it. 317 318 * Many "git submodule" operations do not work on a submodule at a 319 path whose name is not in ASCII. 320 321 * "cherry-pick" had a small leak in an error codepath. 322 323 * Logic used by git-send-email to suppress cc mishandled names like 324 "A U. Thor" <author@example.xz>, where the human readable part 325 needs to be quoted (the user input may not have the double quotes 326 around the name, and comparison was done between quoted and 327 unquoted strings). It also mishandled names that need RFC2047 328 quoting. 329 330 * Call to discard_cache/discard_index (used when we use different 331 contents of the index in-core, in many operations like commit, 332 apply, and merge) used to leak memory that held the array of index 333 entries, which has been plugged. 334 (merge a0fc4db rs/discard-index-discard-array later to maint). 335 336 * "gitweb" forgot to clear a global variable $search_regexp upon each 337 request, mistakenly carrying over the previous search to a new one 338 when used as a persistent CGI. 339 340 * The wildmatch engine did not honor WM_CASEFOLD option correctly. 341 342 * "git log -c --follow $path" segfaulted upon hitting the commit that 343 renamed the $path being followed. 344 345 * When a reflog notation is used for implicit "current branch", we 346 did not say which branch and worse said "branch ''". 347 348 * "difftool --dir-diff" did not copy back changes made by the 349 end-user in the diff tool backend to the working tree in some 350 cases. 351 352 * "git push $there HEAD:branch" did not resolve HEAD early enough, so 353 it was easy to flip it around while push is still going on and push 354 out a branch that the user did not originally intended when the 355 command was started. 356 357 * The bash prompt code (in contrib/) displayed the name of the branch 358 being rebased when "rebase -i/-m/-p" modes are in use, but not the 359 plain vanilla "rebase". 360 361 * Handling of negative exclude pattern for directories "!dir" was 362 broken in the update to v1.8.3. 363 364 * zsh prompt script that borrowed from bash prompt script did not 365 work due to slight differences in array variable notation between 366 these two shells. 367 368 * An entry for "file://" scheme in the enumeration of URL types Git 369 can take in the HTML documentation was made into a clickable link 370 by mistake. 371 372 * "git push --[no-]verify" was not documented. 373 374 * Stop installing the git-remote-testpy script that is only used for 375 testing. 376 377 * "git commit --allow-empty-message -m ''" should not start an 378 editor. 379 380 * "git merge @{-1}~22" was rewritten to "git merge frotz@{1}~22" 381 incorrectly when your previous branch was "frotz" (it should be 382 rewritten to "git merge frotz~22" instead). 383 384 * "git diff -c -p" was not showing a deleted line from a hunk when 385 another hunk immediately begins where the earlier one ends. 386 387 * "git log --ancestry-path A...B" did not work as expected, as it did 388 not pay attention to the fact that the merge base between A and B 389 was the bottom of the range being specified. 390 391 * Mac OS X does not like to write(2) more than INT_MAX number of 392 bytes; work it around by chopping write(2) into smaller pieces. 393 394 * Newer MacOS X encourages the programs to compile and link with 395 their CommonCrypto, not with OpenSSL. 396 397 * "git clone foo/bar:baz" cannot be a request to clone from a remote 398 over git-over-ssh specified in the scp style. This case is now 399 detected and clones from a local repository at "foo/bar:baz". 400 401 * When $HOME is misconfigured to point at an unreadable directory, we 402 used to complain and die. Loosen the check. 403 404 * "git subtree" (in contrib/) had one codepath with loose error 405 checks to lose data at the remote side. 406 407 * "git fetch" into a shallow repository from a repository that does 408 not know about the shallow boundary commits (e.g. a different fork 409 from the repository the current shallow repository was cloned from) 410 did not work correctly. 411 412 * "git checkout foo" DWIMs the intended "upstream" and turns it into 413 "git checkout -t -b foo remotes/origin/foo". This codepath has been 414 updated to correctly take existing remote definitions into account.