Documentation / RelNotes / 1.8.5.txton commit Update draft release notes to 1.8.5 for the first half of the fourth batch (8d83871)
   1Git v1.8.5 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 v1.8.4
  47--------------------
  48
  49Foreign interfaces, subsystems and ports.
  50
  51 * On MacOS X, we detected if the filesystem needs the "pre-composed
  52   unicode strings" workaround, but did not automatically enable it.
  53   Now we do.
  54
  55 * remote-hg remote helper misbehaved when interacting with a local Hg
  56   repository relative to the home directory, e.g. "clone hg::~/there".
  57
  58 * imap-send ported to OS X uses Apple's security framework instead of
  59   OpenSSL one.
  60
  61 * Subversion 1.8.0 that was recently released breaks older subversion
  62   clients coming over http/https in various ways.
  63
  64 * "git fast-import" treats an empty path given to "ls" as the root of
  65   the tree.
  66
  67
  68UI, Workflows & Features
  69
  70 * Earlier we started rejecting an attempt to add 0{40} object name to
  71   the index and to tree objects, but it sometimes is necessary to
  72   allow so to be able to use tools like filter-branch to correct such
  73   broken tree objects.  "filter-branch" can again be used to to do
  74   so.
  75
  76 * "git config" did not provide a way to set or access numbers larger
  77   than a native "int" on the platform; it now provides 64-bit signed
  78   integers on all platforms.
  79
  80 * "git pull --rebase" always chose to do the bog-standard flattening
  81   rebase.  You can tell it to run "rebase --preserve-merges" by
  82   setting "pull.rebase" configuration to "preserve".
  83
  84 * "git push --no-thin" actually disables the "thin pack transfer"
  85   optimization.
  86
  87 * Magic pathspecs like ":(icase)makefile" that matches both
  88   Makefile and makefile can be used in more places.
  89
  90 * The "http.*" variables can now be specified per URL that the
  91   configuration applies.  For example,
  92
  93   [http]
  94       sslVerify = true
  95   [http "https://weak.example.com/"]
  96       sslVerify = false
  97
  98   would flip http.sslVerify off only when talking to that specified
  99   site.
 100
 101 * "git mv A B" when moving a submodule A has been taught to
 102   relocate its working tree and to adjust the paths in the
 103   .gitmodules file.
 104
 105 * "git blame" can now take more than one -L option to discover the
 106   origin of multiple blocks of the lines.
 107
 108 * The http transport clients can optionally ask to save cookies
 109   with http.savecookies configuration variable.
 110
 111 * "git push" learned a more fine grained control over a blunt
 112   "--force" when requesting a non-fast-forward update with the
 113   "--force-with-lease=<refname>:<expected object name>" option.
 114
 115 * "git diff --diff-filter=<classes of changes>" can now take
 116   lowercase letters (e.g. "--diff-filter=d") to mean "show
 117   everything but these classes".  "git diff-files -q" is now a
 118   deprecated synonym for "git diff-files --diff-filter=d".
 119
 120 * "git fetch" (hence "git pull" as well) learned to check
 121   "fetch.prune" and "remote.*.prune" configuration variables and
 122   to behave as if the "--prune" command line option was given.
 123
 124 * "git check-ignore -z" applied the NUL termination to both its input
 125   (with --stdin) and its output, but "git check-attr -z" ignored the
 126   option on the output side. Make both honor -z on the input and
 127   output side the same way.
 128
 129 * "git whatchanged" may still be used by old timers, but mention of
 130   it in documents meant for new users will only waste readers' time
 131   wonderig what the difference is between it and "git log".  Make it
 132   less prominent in the general part of the documentation and explain
 133   that it is merely a "git log" with different default behaviour in
 134   its own document.
 135
 136
 137Performance, Internal Implementation, etc.
 138
 139 * Many commands use --dashed-option as a operation mode selector
 140   (e.g. "git tag --delete") that the user can use at most one
 141   (e.g. "git tag --delete --verify" is a nonsense) and you cannot
 142   negate (e.g. "git tag --no-delete" is a nonsense).  parse-options
 143   API learned a new OPT_CMDMODE macro to make it easier to implement
 144   such a set of options.
 145
 146 * OPT_BOOLEAN() in parse-options API was misdesigned to be "counting
 147   up" but many subcommands expect it to behave as "on/off". Update
 148   them to use OPT_BOOL() which is a proper boolean.
 149
 150 * "git gc" exits early without doing a double-work when it detects
 151   that another instance of itself is already running.
 152
 153 * Under memory pressure and/or file descriptor pressure, we used to
 154   close pack windows that are not used and also closed filehandle to
 155   an open but unused packfiles. These are now controlled separately
 156   to better cope with the load.
 157
 158Also contains various documentation updates and code clean-ups.
 159
 160
 161Fixes since v1.8.4
 162------------------
 163
 164Unless otherwise noted, all the fixes since v1.8.4 in the maintenance
 165track are contained in this release (see release notes to them for
 166details).
 167
 168 * When an object is not found after checking the packfiles and then
 169   loose object directory, read_sha1_file() re-checks the packfiles to
 170   prevent racing with a concurrent repacker; teach the same logic to
 171   has_sha1_file().
 172   (merge 45e8a74 jk/has-sha1-file-retry-packed later to maint).
 173
 174 * "git commit --author=$name", when $name is not in the canonical
 175   "A. U. Thor <au.thor@example.xz>" format, looks for a matching name
 176   from existing history, but did not consult mailmap to grab the
 177   preferred author name.
 178   (merge ea16794 ap/commit-author-mailmap later to maint).
 179
 180 * "git ls-files -k" needs to crawl only the part of the working tree
 181   that may overlap the paths in the index to find killed files, but
 182   shared code with the logic to find all the untracked files, which
 183   made it unnecessarily inefficient.
 184   (merge 680be04 jc/ls-files-killed-optim later to maint).
 185
 186 * The commit object names in the insn sheet that was prepared at the
 187   beginning of "rebase -i" session can become ambiguous as the
 188   rebasing progresses and the repository gains more commits. Make
 189   sure the internal record is kept with full 40-hex object names.
 190   (merge 75c6976 es/rebase-i-no-abbrev later to maint).
 191
 192 * "git rebase --preserve-merges" internally used the merge machinery
 193   and as a side effect, left merge summary message in the log, but
 194   when rebasing, there should not be a need for merge summary.
 195   (merge a9f739c rt/rebase-p-no-merge-summary later to maint).
 196
 197 * A call to xread() was used without a loop around to cope with short
 198   read in the codepath to stream new contents to a pack.
 199   (merge e92527c js/xread-in-full later to maint).
 200
 201 * "git rebase -i" forgot that the comment character can be
 202   configurable while reading its insn sheet.
 203   (merge 7bca7af es/rebase-i-respect-core-commentchar later to maint).
 204
 205 * The mailmap support code read past the allocated buffer when the
 206   mailmap file ended with an incomplete line.
 207   (merge f972a16 jk/mailmap-incomplete-line later to maint).
 208
 209 * We used to send a large request to read(2)/write(2) as a single
 210   system call, which was bad from the latency point of view when
 211   the operation needs to be killed, and also triggered an error on
 212   broken 64-bit systems that refuse to take more than 2GB read or
 213   write in one go.
 214   (merge a487916 sp/clip-read-write-to-8mb later to maint).
 215
 216 * "git fetch" that auto-followed tags incorrectly reused the
 217   connection with Git-aware transport helper (like the sample "ext::"
 218   helper shipped with Git).
 219   (merge 0f73f8b jc/transport-do-not-use-connect-twice-in-fetch later to maint).
 220
 221 * "git log --full-diff -- <pathspec>" showed a huge diff for paths
 222   outside the given <pathspec> for each commit, instead of showing
 223   the change relative to the parent of the commit.  "git reflog -p"
 224   had a similar problem.
 225   (merge 838f9a1 tr/log-full-diff-keep-true-parents later to maint).
 226
 227 * Setting submodule.*.path configuration variable to true (without
 228   giving "= value") caused Git to segfault.
 229   (merge 4b05440 jl/some-submodule-config-are-not-boolean later to maint).
 230
 231 * "git rebase -i" (there could be others, as the root cause is pretty
 232   generic) fed a random, data dependeant string to 'echo' and
 233   expects it to come out literally, corrupting its error message.
 234   (merge 89b0230 mm/no-shell-escape-in-die-message later to maint).
 235
 236 * Some people still use rather old versions of bash, which cannot
 237   grok some constructs like 'printf -v varname' the prompt and
 238   completion code started to use recently.
 239   (merge a44aa69 bc/completion-for-bash-3.0 later to maint).
 240
 241 * Code to read configuration from a blob object did not compile on
 242   platforms with fgetc() etc. implemented as macros.
 243   (merge 49d6cfa hv/config-from-blob later to maint-1.8.3).
 244
 245 * The recent "short-cut clone connectivity check" topic broke a
 246   shallow repository when a fetch operation tries to auto-follow tags.
 247   (merge 6da8bdc nd/fetch-pack-shallow-fix later to maint-1.8.3).