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