Git v1.7.12 Release Notes
=========================

Updates since v1.7.11
---------------------

UI, Workflows & Features

 * Git can be told to normalize pathnames it read from readdir(3) and
   all arguments it got from the command line into precomposed UTF-8
   (assuming that they come as decomposed UTF-8), in order to work
   around issues on Mac OS.

   I think there still are other places that need conversion
   (e.g. paths that are read from stdin for some commands), but this
   should be a good first step in the right direction.

 * Per-user $HOME/.gitconfig file can optionally be stored in
   $HOME/.config/git/config instead, which is in line with XDG.

 * The value of core.attributesfile and core.excludesfile default to
   $HOME/.config/attributes and $HOME/.config/ignore respectively when
   these files exist.

 * "git apply" learned to wiggle the base version and perform three-way
   merge when a patch does not exactly apply to the version you have.

 * Scripted Porcelain writers now have access to the credential API via
   the "git credential" plumbing command.

 * "git help" used to always default to "man" format even on platforms
   where "man" viewer is not widely available.

 * "git clone --local $path" started its life as an experiment to
   optionally use link/copy when cloning a repository on the disk, but
   we didn't deprecate it after we made the option a no-op to always
   use the optimization.  The command learned "--no-local" option to
   turn this off, as a more explicit alternative over use of file://
   URL.

 * "git fetch" and friends used to say "remote side hung up
   unexpectedly" when they failed to get response they expect from the
   other side, but one common reason why they don't get expected
   response is that the remote repository does not exist or cannot be
   read. The error message in this case was updated to give better
   hints to the user.

 * git native protocol agents learned to show software version over
   the wire, so that the server log can be examined to see the vintage
   distribution of clients.

 * "git help -w $cmd" can show HTML version of documentation for
   "git-$cmd" by setting help.htmlpath to somewhere other than the
   default location where the build procedure installs them locally;
   the variable can even point at a http:// URL.

 * "git rebase [-i] --root $tip" can now be used to rewrite all the
   history leading to "$tip" down to the root commit.

 * "git rebase -i" learned "-x <cmd>" to insert "exec <cmd>" after
   each commit in the resulting history.

 * "git status" gives finer classification to various states of paths
   in conflicted state and offer advice messages in its output.

 * "git submodule" learned to deal with nested submodule structure
   where a module is contained within a module whose origin is
   specified as a relative URL to its superproject's origin.

 * A rather heavy-ish "git completion" script has been split to create
   a separate "git prompting" script, to help lazy-autoloading of the
   completion part while making prompting part always available.


Foreign Interface

 * "mediawiki" remote helper (in contrib/) learned to handle file
   attachments.

 * "git p4" now uses "Jobs:" and "p4 move" when appropriate.

 * vcs-svn has been updated to clean-up compilation, lift 32-bit
   limitations, etc.


Performance, Internal Implementation, etc. (please report possible regressions)

 * Some tests showed false failures caused by a bug in ecryptofs.

 * We no longer use AsciiDoc7 syntax in our documentation and favor a
   more modern style.

 * "git am --rebasing" codepath was taught to grab authorship, log
   message and the patch text directly out of existing commits.  This
   will help rebasing commits that have confusing "diff" output in
   their log messages.

 * "git index-pack" and "git pack-objects" use streaming API to read
   from the object store to avoid having to hold a large blob object
   in-core while they are doing their thing.

 * Code to match paths with exclude patterns learned to avoid calling
   fnmatch() by comparing fixed leading substring literally when
   possible.


Also contains minor documentation updates and code clean-ups.


Fixes since v1.7.11
-------------------

Unless otherwise noted, all the fixes since v1.7.11 in the maintenance
releases are contained in this release (see release notes to them for
details).

 * The error message from "git push $there :bogo" (and its equivalent
   "git push $there --delete bogo") mentioned that we tried and failed
   to guess what ref is being deleted based on the LHS of the refspec,
   which we don't.
   (merge 5742c82 jk/push-delete-ref-error-message later to maint).

 * A handful of files and directories we create had tighter than
   necessary permission bits when the user wanted to have group
   writability (e.g. by setting "umask 002").
   (merge 6ff2b72 ar/clone-honor-umask-at-top later to maint).

 * "commit --amend" used to refuse amending a commit with an empty log
   message, with or without "--allow-empty-message".
   (merge d9a9357 cw/amend-commit-without-message later to maint).

 * "git commit --amend --only --" was meant to allow "Clever" people to
   rewrite the commit message without making any change even when they
   have already changes for the next commit added to their index, but
   it never worked as advertised since it was introduced in 1.3.0 era.
   (merge ea2d4ed jk/maint-commit-amend-only-no-paths later to maint).

 * Even though the index can record pathnames longer than 1<<12 bytes,
   in some places we were not comparing them in full, potentially
   replacing index entries instead of adding.
   (merge d5f5333 tg/maint-cache-name-compare later to maint).

 * "git show"'s auto-walking behaviour was an unreliable and
   unpredictable hack; it now behaves just like "git log" does when it
   walks.
   (merge c5941f1 tr/maint-show-walk later to maint).

 * "git diff", "git status" and anything that internally uses the
   comparison machinery was utterly broken when the difference
   involved a file with "-" as its name.  This was due to the way "git
   diff --no-index" was incorrectly bolted on to the system, making
   any comparison that involves a file "-" at the root level
   incorrectly read from the standard input.
   (merge 4682d85 jc/refactor-diff-stdin later to maint).

 * We did not have test to make sure "git rebase" without extra options
   filters out an empty commit in the original history.
   (merge 2b5ba7b mz/empty-rebase-test later to maint).

 * "git fast-export" produced an input stream for fast-import without
   properly quoting pathnames when they contain SPs in them.
   (merge ff59f6d js/fast-export-paths-with-spaces later to maint).

 * "git checkout --detach", when you are still on an unborn branch,
   should be forbidden, but it wasn't.
   (merge 8ced1aa cw/no-detaching-an-unborn later to maint).

 * Some implementations of Perl terminates "lines" with CRLF even when
   the script is operating on just a sequence of bytes.  Make sure to
   use "$PERL_PATH", the version of Perl the user told Git to use, in
   our tests to avoid unnecessary breakages in tests.
   (merge ad78585 vr/use-our-perl-in-tests later to maint).