1Git v1.8.2 Release Notes 2======================== 3 4Backward compatibility notes (this release) 5------------------------------------------- 6 7"git push $there tag v1.2.3" used to allow replacing a tag v1.2.3 8that already exists in the repository $there, if the rewritten tag 9you are pushing points at a commit that is a descendant of a commit 10that the old tag v1.2.3 points at. This was found to be error prone 11and starting with this release, any attempt to update an existing 12ref under refs/tags/ hierarchy will fail, without "--force". 13 14When "git add -u" and "git add -A" that does not specify what paths 15to add on the command line is run from inside a subdirectory, the 16scope of the operation has always been limited to the subdirectory. 17Many users found this counter-intuitive, given that "git commit -a" 18and other commands operate on the entire tree regardless of where you 19are. In this release, these commands give a warning message that 20suggests the users to use "git add -u/-A ." when they want to limit 21the scope to the current directory; doing so will squelch the message, 22while training their fingers. 23 24 25Backward compatibility notes (for Git 2.0) 26------------------------------------------ 27 28When "git push [$there]" does not say what to push, we have used the 29traditional "matching" semantics so far (all your branches were sent 30to the remote as long as there already are branches of the same name 31over there). In Git 2.0, the default will change to the "simple" 32semantics that pushes the current branch to the branch with the same 33name, only when the current branch is set to integrate with that 34remote branch. There is a user preference configuration variable 35"push.default" to change this. If you are an old-timer who is used 36to the "matching" semantics, you can set it to "matching" to keep the 37traditional behaviour. If you want to live in the future early, 38you can set it to "simple" today without waiting for Git 2.0. 39 40When "git add -u" and "git add -A", that does not specify what paths 41to add on the command line is run from inside a subdirectory, these 42commands will operate on the entire tree in Git 2.0 for consistency 43with "git commit -a" and other commands. Because there will be no 44mechanism to make "git add -u" behave as if "git add -u .", it is 45important for those who are used to "git add -u" (without pathspec) 46updating the index only for paths in the current subdirectory to start 47training their fingers to explicitly say "git add -u ." when they mean 48it before Git 2.0 comes. 49 50 51Updates since v1.8.1 52-------------------- 53 54UI, Workflows & Features 55 56 * Initial ports to QNX and z/OS UNIX System Services have started. 57 58 * Output from the tests is coloured using "green is okay, yellow is 59 questionable, red is bad and blue is informative" scheme. 60 61 * Mention of "GIT/Git/git" in the documentation have been updated to 62 be more uniform and consistent. The name of the system and the 63 concept it embodies is "Git"; the command the users type is "git". 64 All-caps "GIT" was merely a way to imitate "Git" typeset in small 65 caps in our ASCII text only documentation and to be avoided. 66 67 * The completion script (in contrib/completion) used to let the 68 default completer to suggest pathnames, which gave too many 69 irrelevant choices (e.g. "git add" would not want to add an 70 unmodified path). It learnt to use a more git-aware logic to 71 enumerate only relevant ones. 72 73 * In bare repositories, "git shortlog" and other commands now read 74 mailmap files from the tip of the history, to help running these 75 tools in server settings. 76 77 * Color specifiers, e.g. "%C(blue)Hello%C(reset)", used in the 78 "--format=" option of "git log" and friends can be disabled when 79 the output is not sent to a terminal by prefixing them with 80 "auto,", e.g. "%C(auto,blue)Hello%C(auto,reset)". 81 82 * Scripts can ask Git that wildcard patterns in pathspecs they give do 83 not have any significance, i.e. take them as literal strings. 84 85 * The patterns in .gitignore and .gitattributes files can have **/, 86 as a pattern that matches 0 or more levels of subdirectory. 87 E.g. "foo/**/bar" matches "bar" in "foo" itself or in a 88 subdirectory of "foo". 89 90 * When giving arguments without "--" disambiguation, object names 91 that come earlier on the command line must not be interpretable as 92 pathspecs and pathspecs that come later on the command line must 93 not be interpretable as object names. This disambiguation rule has 94 been tweaked so that ":/" (no other string before or after) is 95 always interpreted as a pathspec; "git cmd -- :/" is no longer 96 needed, you can just say "git cmd :/". 97 98 * Various "hint" lines Git gives when it asks the user to edit 99 messages in the editor are commented out with '#' by default. The 100 core.commentchar configuration variable can be used to customize 101 this '#' to a different character. 102 103 * "git add -u" and "git add -A" without pathspec issues warning to 104 make users aware that they are only operating on paths inside the 105 subdirectory they are in. Use ":/" (everything from the top) or 106 "." (everything from the $cwd) to disambiguate. 107 108 * "git blame" (and "git diff") learned the "--no-follow" option. 109 110 * "git branch" now rejects some nonsense combinations of command line 111 arguments (e.g. giving more than one branch name to rename) with 112 more case-specific error messages. 113 114 * "git check-ignore" command to help debugging .gitignore files has 115 been added. 116 117 * "git cherry-pick" can be used to replay a root commit to an unborn 118 branch. 119 120 * "git commit" can be told to use --cleanup=whitespace by setting the 121 configuration variable commit.cleanup to 'whitespace'. 122 123 * "git diff" and other Porcelain commands can be told to use a 124 non-standard algorithm by setting diff.algorithm configuration 125 variable. 126 127 * "git fetch --mirror" and fetch that uses other forms of refspec 128 with wildcard used to attempt to update a symbolic ref that match 129 the wildcard on the receiving end, which made little sense (the 130 real ref that is pointed at by the symbolic ref would be updated 131 anyway). Symbolic refs no longer are affected by such a fetch. 132 133 * "git format-patch" now detects more cases in which a whole branch 134 is being exported, and uses the description for the branch, when 135 asked to write a cover letter for the series. 136 137 * "git format-patch" learned "-v $count" option, and prepends a 138 string "v$count-" to the names of its output files, and also 139 automatically sets the subject prefix to "PATCH v$count". This 140 allows patches from rerolled series to be stored under different 141 names and makes it easier to reuse cover letter messages. 142 143 * "git log" and friends can be told with --use-mailmap option to 144 rewrite the names and email addresses of people using the mailmap 145 mechanism. 146 147 * "git log --cc --graph" now shows the combined diff output with the 148 ancestry graph. 149 150 * "git log --grep=<pattern>" honors i18n.logoutputencoding to look 151 for the pattern after fixing the log message to the specified 152 encoding. 153 154 * "git mergetool" and "git difftool" learned to list the available 155 tool backends in a more consistent manner. 156 157 * "git mergetool" is aware of TortoiseGitMerge now and uses it over 158 TortoiseMerge when available. 159 160 * "git push" now requires "-f" to update a tag, even if it is a 161 fast-forward, as tags are meant to be fixed points. 162 163 * Error messages from "git push" when it stops to prevent remote refs 164 from getting overwritten by mistake have been improved to explain 165 various situations separately. 166 167 * "git push" will stop without doing anything if the new "pre-push" 168 hook exists and exits with a failure. 169 170 * When "git rebase" fails to generate patches to be applied (e.g. due 171 to oom), it failed to detect the failure and instead behaved as if 172 there were nothing to do. A workaround to use a temporary file has 173 been applied, but we probably would want to revisit this later, as 174 it hurts the common case of not failing at all. 175 176 * Input and preconditions to "git reset" has been loosened where 177 appropriate. "git reset $fromtree Makefile" requires $fromtree to 178 be any tree (it used to require it to be a commit), for example. 179 "git reset" (without options or parameters) used to error out when 180 you do not have any commits in your history, but it now gives you 181 an empty index (to match non-existent commit you are not even on). 182 183 * "git status" says what branch is being bisected or rebased when 184 able, not just "bisecting" or "rebasing". 185 186 * "git submodule" started learning a new mode to integrate with the 187 tip of the remote branch (as opposed to integrating with the commit 188 recorded in the superproject's gitlink). 189 190 * "git upload-pack" which implements the service "ls-remote" and 191 "fetch" talk to can be told to hide ref hierarchies the server 192 side internally uses (and that clients have no business learning 193 about) with transfer.hiderefs configuration. 194 195 196Foreign Interface 197 198 * "git fast-export" has been updated for its use in the context of 199 the remote helper interface. 200 201 * A new remote helper to interact with bzr has been added to contrib/. 202 203 * "git p4" got various bugfixes around its branch handling. It is 204 also made usable with Python 2.4/2.5. In addition, its various 205 portability issues for Cygwin have been addressed. 206 207 * The remote helper to interact with Hg in contrib/ has seen a few 208 fixes. 209 210 211Performance, Internal Implementation, etc. 212 213 * "git fsck" has been taught to be pickier about entries in tree 214 objects that should not be there, e.g. ".", ".git", and "..". 215 216 * Matching paths with common forms of pathspecs that contain wildcard 217 characters has been optimized further. 218 219 * We stopped paying attention to $GIT_CONFIG environment that points 220 at a single configuration file from any command other than "git config" 221 quite a while ago, but "git clone" internally set, exported, and 222 then unexported the variable during its operation unnecessarily. 223 224 * "git reset" internals has been reworked and should be faster in 225 general. We tried to be careful not to break any behaviour but 226 there could be corner cases, especially when running the command 227 from a conflicted state, that we may have missed. 228 229 * The implementation of "imap-send" has been updated to reuse xml 230 quoting code from http-push codepath, and lost a lot of unused 231 code. 232 233 * There is a simple-minded checker for the test scripts in t/ 234 directory to catch most common mistakes (it is not enabled by 235 default). 236 237 * You can build with USE_WILDMATCH=YesPlease to use a replacement 238 implementation of pattern matching logic used for pathname-like 239 things, e.g. refnames and paths in the repository. This new 240 implementation is not expected change the existing behaviour of Git 241 in this release, except for "git for-each-ref" where you can now 242 say "refs/**/master" and match with both refs/heads/master and 243 refs/remotes/origin/master. We plan to use this new implementation 244 in wider places (e.g. "git ls-files '**/Makefile' may find Makefile 245 at the top-level, and "git log '**/t*.sh'" may find commits that 246 touch a shell script whose name begins with "t" at any level) in 247 future versions of Git, but we are not there yet. By building with 248 USE_WILDMATCH, using the resulting Git daily and reporting when you 249 find breakages, you can help us get closer to that goal. 250 251 * Some reimplementations of Git do not write all the stat info back 252 to the index due to their implementation limitations (e.g. jgit). 253 A configuration option can tell Git to ignore changes to most of 254 the stat fields and only pay attention to mtime and size, which 255 these implementations can reliably update. This can be used to 256 avoid excessive revalidation of contents. 257 258 * Some platforms ship with old version of expat where xmlparse.h 259 needs to be included instead of expat.h; the build procedure has 260 been taught about this. 261 262 * "make clean" on platforms that cannot compute header dependencies 263 on the fly did not work with implementations of "rm" that do not 264 like an empty argument list. 265 266Also contains minor documentation updates and code clean-ups. 267 268 269Fixes since v1.8.1 270------------------ 271 272Unless otherwise noted, all the fixes since v1.8.1 in the maintenance 273track are contained in this release (see release notes to them for 274details). 275 276 * An element on GIT_CEILING_DIRECTORIES list that does not name the 277 real path to a directory (i.e. a symbolic link) could have caused 278 the GIT_DIR discovery logic to escape the ceiling. 279 280 * When attempting to read the XDG-style $HOME/.config/git/config and 281 finding that $HOME/.config/git is a file, we gave a wrong error 282 message, instead of treating the case as "a custom config file does 283 not exist there" and moving on. 284 285 * The behaviour visible to the end users was confusing, when they 286 attempt to kill a process spawned in the editor that was in turn 287 launched by Git with SIGINT (or SIGQUIT), as Git would catch that 288 signal and die. We ignore these signals now. 289 (merge 0398fc34 pf/editor-ignore-sigint later to maint). 290 291 * A child process that was killed by a signal (e.g. SIGINT) was 292 reported in an inconsistent way depending on how the process was 293 spawned by us, with or without a shell in between. 294 295 * After failing to create a temporary file using mkstemp(), failing 296 pathname was not reported correctly on some platforms. 297 298 * We used to stuff "user@" and then append what we read from 299 /etc/mailname to come up with a default e-mail ident, but a bug 300 lost the "user@" part. 301 302 * The attribute mechanism didn't allow limiting attributes to be 303 applied to only a single directory itself with "path/" like the 304 exclude mechanism does. The initial implementation of this that 305 was merged to 'maint' and 1.8.1.2 was with a severe performance 306 degradations and needs to merge a fix-up topic. 307 308 * The smart HTTP clients forgot to verify the content-type that comes 309 back from the server side to make sure that the request is being 310 handled properly. 311 312 * "git am" did not parse datestamp correctly from Hg generated patch, 313 when it is run in a locale outside C (or en). 314 315 * "git apply" misbehaved when fixing whitespace breakages by removing 316 excess trailing blank lines. 317 318 * "git apply --summary" has been taught to make sure the similarity 319 value shown in its output is sensible, even when the input had a 320 bogus value. 321 322 * A tar archive created by "git archive" recorded a directory in a 323 way that made NetBSD's implementation of "tar" sometimes unhappy. 324 325 * "git archive" did not record uncompressed size in the header when 326 streaming a zip archive, which confused some implementations of unzip. 327 328 * "git archive" did not parse configuration values in tar.* namespace 329 correctly. 330 (merge b3873c3 jk/config-parsing-cleanup later to maint). 331 332 * Attempt to "branch --edit-description" an existing branch, while 333 being on a detached HEAD, errored out. 334 335 * "git clean" showed what it was going to do, but sometimes end up 336 finding that it was not allowed to do so, which resulted in a 337 confusing output (e.g. after saying that it will remove an 338 untracked directory, it found an embedded git repository there 339 which it is not allowed to remove). It now performs the actions 340 and then reports the outcome more faithfully. 341 342 * When "git clone --separate-git-dir=$over_there" is interrupted, it 343 failed to remove the real location of the $GIT_DIR it created. 344 This was most visible when interrupting a submodule update. 345 346 * "git cvsimport" mishandled timestamps at DST boundary. 347 348 * We used to have an arbitrary 32 limit for combined diff input, 349 resulting in incorrect number of leading colons shown when showing 350 the "--raw --cc" output. 351 352 * "git fetch --depth" was broken in at least three ways. The 353 resulting history was deeper than specified by one commit, it was 354 unclear how to wipe the shallowness of the repository with the 355 command, and documentation was misleading. 356 (merge cfb70e1 nd/fetch-depth-is-broken later to maint). 357 358 * "git log --all -p" that walked refs/notes/textconv/ ref can later 359 try to use the textconv data incorrectly after it gets freed. 360 361 * We forgot to close the file descriptor reading from "gpg" output, 362 killing "git log --show-signature" on a long history. 363 364 * The way "git svn" asked for password using SSH_ASKPASS and 365 GIT_ASKPASS was not in line with the rest of the system. 366 367 * The --graph code fell into infinite loop when asked to do what the 368 code did not expect. 369 370 * http transport was wrong to ask for the username when the 371 authentication is done by certificate identity. 372 373 * "git pack-refs" that ran in parallel to another process that 374 created new refs had a nasty race. 375 376 * Rebasing the history of superproject with change in the submodule 377 has been broken since v1.7.12. 378 379 * After "git add -N" and then writing a tree object out of the 380 index, the cache-tree data structure got corrupted. 381 382 * "git clone" used to allow --bare and --separate-git-dir=$there 383 options at the same time, which was nonsensical. 384 385 * "git rebase --preserve-merges" lost empty merges in recent versions 386 of Git. 387 388 * "git merge --no-edit" computed who were involved in the work done 389 on the side branch, even though that information is to be discarded 390 without getting seen in the editor. 391 392 * "git merge" started calling prepare-commit-msg hook like "git 393 commit" does some time ago, but forgot to pay attention to the exit 394 status of the hook. 395 396 * A failure to push due to non-ff while on an unborn branch 397 dereferenced a NULL pointer when showing an error message. 398 399 * When users spell "cc:" in lowercase in the fake "header" in the 400 trailer part, "git send-email" failed to pick up the addresses from 401 there. As e-mail headers field names are case insensitive, this 402 script should follow suit and treat "cc:" and "Cc:" the same way. 403 404 * Output from "git status --ignored" showed an unexpected interaction 405 with "--untracked". 406 407 * "gitweb", when sorting by age to show repositories with new 408 activities first, used to sort repositories with absolutely 409 nothing in it early, which was not very useful. 410 411 * "gitweb"'s code to sanitize control characters before passing it to 412 "highlight" filter lost known-to-be-safe control characters by 413 mistake. 414 415 * "gitweb" pages served over HTTPS, when configured to show picon or 416 gravatar, referred to these external resources to be fetched via 417 HTTP, resulting in mixed contents warning in browsers. 418 419 * When a line to be wrapped has a solid run of non space characters 420 whose length exactly is the wrap width, "git shortlog -w" failed 421 to add a newline after such a line. 422 423 * Command line completion leaked an unnecessary error message while 424 looking for possible matches with paths in <tree-ish>. 425 426 * Command line completion for "tcsh" emitted an unwanted space 427 after completing a single directory name. 428 429 * Command line completion code was inadvertently made incompatible with 430 older versions of bash by using a newer array notation. 431 432 * "git push" was taught to refuse updating the branch that is 433 currently checked out long time ago, but the user manual was left 434 stale. 435 (merge 50995ed wk/man-deny-current-branch-is-default-these-days later to maint). 436 437 * Some shells do not behave correctly when IFS is unset; work it 438 around by explicitly setting it to the default value. 439 440 * Some scripted programs written in Python did not get updated when 441 PYTHON_PATH changed. 442 (cherry-pick 96a4647fca54031974cd6ad1 later to maint). 443 444 * When autoconf is used, any build on a different commit always ran 445 "config.status --recheck" even when unnecessary. 446 447 * A fix was added to the build procedure to work around buggy 448 versions of ccache broke the auto-generation of dependencies, which 449 unfortunately is still relevant because some people use ancient 450 distros. 451 452 * The autoconf subsystem passed --mandir down to generated 453 config.mak.autogen but forgot to do the same for --htmldir. 454 (merge 55d9bf0 ct/autoconf-htmldir later to maint). 455 456 * A change made on v1.8.1.x maintenance track had a nasty regression 457 to break the build when autoconf is used. 458 (merge 7f1b697 jn/less-reconfigure later to maint). 459 460 * We have been carrying a translated and long-unmaintained copy of an 461 old version of the tutorial; removed. 462 463 * t0050 had tests expecting failures from a bug that was fixed some 464 time ago. 465 466 * t4014, t9502 and t0200 tests had various portability issues that 467 broke on OpenBSD. 468 469 * t9020 and t3600 tests had various portability issues. 470 471 * t9200 runs "cvs init" on a directory that already exists, but a 472 platform can configure this fail for the current user (e.g. you 473 need to be in the cvsadmin group on NetBSD 6.0). 474 475 * t9020 and t9810 had a few non-portable shell script construct. 476 477 * Scripts to test bash completion was inherently flaky as it was 478 affected by whatever random things the user may have on $PATH. 479 480 * An element on GIT_CEILING_DIRECTORIES could be a "logical" pathname 481 that uses a symbolic link to point at somewhere else (e.g. /home/me 482 that points at /net/host/export/home/me, and the latter directory 483 is automounted). Earlier when Git saw such a pathname e.g. /home/me 484 on this environment variable, the "ceiling" mechanism did not take 485 effect. With this release (the fix has also been merged to the 486 v1.8.1.x maintenance series), elements on GIT_CEILING_DIRECTORIES 487 are by default checked for such aliasing coming from symbolic 488 links. As this needs to actually resolve symbolic links for each 489 element on the GIT_CEILING_DIRECTORIES, you can disable this 490 mechanism for some elements by listing them after an empty element 491 on the GIT_CEILING_DIRECTORIES. e.g. Setting /home/me::/home/him to 492 GIT_CEILING_DIRECTORIES makes Git resolve symbolic links in 493 /home/me when checking if the current directory is under /home/me, 494 but does not do so for /home/him. 495 (merge 7ec30aa mh/maint-ceil-absolute later to maint).