Documentation / RelNotes / 1.7.12.txton commit Merge gitk to pick up emergency build fix (8a3a681)
   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/git/attributes and $HOME/.config/git/ignore respectively
  23   when these files exist.
  24
  25 * Logic to disambiguate abbreviated object names have been taught to
  26   take advantage of object types that are expected in the context,
  27   e.g. XXXXXX in the "git describe" output v1.2.3-gXXXXXX must be a
  28   commit object, not a blob nor a tree.  This will help us prolong
  29   the lifetime of abbreviated object names.
  30
  31 * "git apply" learned to wiggle the base version and perform three-way
  32   merge when a patch does not exactly apply to the version you have.
  33
  34 * Scripted Porcelain writers now have access to the credential API via
  35   the "git credential" plumbing command.
  36
  37 * "git help" used to always default to "man" format even on platforms
  38   where "man" viewer is not widely available.
  39
  40 * "git clone --local $path" started its life as an experiment to
  41   optionally use link/copy when cloning a repository on the disk, but
  42   we didn't deprecate it after we made the option a no-op to always
  43   use the optimization.  The command learned "--no-local" option to
  44   turn this off, as a more explicit alternative over use of file://
  45   URL.
  46
  47 * "git fetch" and friends used to say "remote side hung up
  48   unexpectedly" when they failed to get response they expect from the
  49   other side, but one common reason why they don't get expected
  50   response is that the remote repository does not exist or cannot be
  51   read. The error message in this case was updated to give better
  52   hints to the user.
  53
  54 * "git help -w $cmd" can show HTML version of documentation for
  55   "git-$cmd" by setting help.htmlpath to somewhere other than the
  56   default location where the build procedure installs them locally;
  57   the variable can even point at a http:// URL.
  58
  59 * "git rebase [-i] --root $tip" can now be used to rewrite all the
  60   history leading to "$tip" down to the root commit.
  61
  62 * "git rebase -i" learned "-x <cmd>" to insert "exec <cmd>" after
  63   each commit in the resulting history.
  64
  65 * "git status" gives finer classification to various states of paths
  66   in conflicted state and offer advice messages in its output.
  67
  68 * "git submodule" learned to deal with nested submodule structure
  69   where a module is contained within a module whose origin is
  70   specified as a relative URL to its superproject's origin.
  71
  72 * A rather heavy-ish "git completion" script has been split to create
  73   a separate "git prompting" script, to help lazy-autoloading of the
  74   completion part while making prompting part always available.
  75
  76 * "gitweb" pays attention to various forms of credits that are
  77   similar to "Signed-off-by:" lines in the commit objects and
  78   highlights them accordingly.
  79
  80
  81Foreign Interface
  82
  83 * "mediawiki" remote helper (in contrib/) learned to handle file
  84   attachments.
  85
  86 * "git p4" now uses "Jobs:" and "p4 move" when appropriate.
  87
  88 * vcs-svn has been updated to clean-up compilation, lift 32-bit
  89   limitations, etc.
  90
  91
  92Performance, Internal Implementation, etc. (please report possible regressions)
  93
  94 * Some tests showed false failures caused by a bug in ecryptofs.
  95
  96 * We no longer use AsciiDoc7 syntax in our documentation and favor a
  97   more modern style.
  98
  99 * "git am --rebasing" codepath was taught to grab authorship, log
 100   message and the patch text directly out of existing commits.  This
 101   will help rebasing commits that have confusing "diff" output in
 102   their log messages.
 103
 104 * "git index-pack" and "git pack-objects" use streaming API to read
 105   from the object store to avoid having to hold a large blob object
 106   in-core while they are doing their thing.
 107
 108 * Code to match paths with exclude patterns learned to avoid calling
 109   fnmatch() by comparing fixed leading substring literally when
 110   possible.
 111
 112 * "git log -n 1 -- rarely-touched-path" was spending unnecessary
 113   cycles after showing the first change to find the next one, only to
 114   discard it.
 115
 116 * "git svn" got a large-looking code reorganization at the last
 117   minute before the code freeze.
 118
 119
 120Also contains minor documentation updates and code clean-ups.
 121
 122
 123Fixes since v1.7.11
 124-------------------
 125
 126Unless otherwise noted, all the fixes since v1.7.11 in the maintenance
 127releases are contained in this release (see release notes to them for
 128details).
 129
 130 * "git submodule add" was confused when the superproject did not have
 131   its repository in its usual place in the working tree and GIT_DIR
 132   and GIT_WORK_TREE was used to access it.
 133
 134 * "git commit --amend" let the user edit the log message and then died
 135   when the human-readable committer name was given insufficiently by
 136   getpwent(3).