Git v1.8.4 Release Notes ======================== Updates since v1.8.3 -------------------- Foreign interface * Remote transport helper has been updated to report errors and maintain ref hierarchy used to keep track of its own state better. UI, Workflows & Features * "check-ignore" (new feature since 1.8.2) has been updated to work more like "check-attr" over bidi-pipes. * "git describe" learned "--first-parent" option to limit its closest tagged commmit search to the first-parent chain. * "git merge foo" that might have meant "git merge origin/foo" is diagnosed with a more informative error message. * "git log -L,:" has been added. This may still have leaks and rough edges, though. * We used the approxidate() parser for "--expire=" options of various commands, but it is better to treat --expire=all and --expire=now a bit more specially than using the current timestamp. "git gc" and "git reflog" have been updated with a new parsing function for expiry dates. * Updates to completion (both bash and zsh) helpers. * "git fetch origin master" unlike "git fetch origin" or "git fetch" did not update "refs/remotes/origin/master"; this was an early design decision to keep the update of remote tracking branches predictable, but in practice it turns out that people find it more convenient to opportunisticly update them whenever we have a chance, and we have been updating them when we run "git push" which already breaks the original "predictability" anyway. Performance, Internal Implementation, etc. * The codepath to read from marks files in fast-import/export did not have to accept anything but 40-hex representation of the object name. Further, fast-export did not need full in-core object representation to have parsed wen reading from them. These codepaths have been optimized by taking advantage of these access patterns. * Object lookup logic, when the object hashtable starts to become crowded, has been optimized. * When TEST_OUTPUT_DIRECTORY setting is used, it was handled somewhat inconsistently between the test framework and t/Makefile, and logic to summarize the results looked at a wrong place. * Many warnings from sparse source checker in compat/ area has been squelched. * The code to reading and updating packed-refs file has been updated, correcting corner case bugs. Also contains various documentation updates and code clean-ups. Fixes since v1.8.3 ------------------ Unless otherwise noted, all the fixes since v1.8.3 in the maintenance track are contained in this release (see release notes to them for details). * "git merge @{-1}~22" was rewritten to "git merge frotz@{1}~22" incorrectly when your previous branch was "frotz" (it should be rewritten to "git merge frotz~22" instead). (merge 84cf246 jc/strbuf-branchname-fix later to maint). * "git diff -c -p" was not showing a deleted line from a hunk when another hunk immediately begins where the earlier one ends. (merge aac3857 mk/combine-diff-context-horizon-fix later to maint). * "git log --ancestry-path A...B" did not work as expected, as it did not pay attention to the fact that the merge base between A and B was the bottom of the range being specified. (merge a765499 kb/ancestry-path-threedots later to maint). * Mac OS X does not like to write(2) more than INT_MAX number of bytes; work it around by chopping write(2) into smaller pieces. (merge 6c642a8 fc/macos-x-clipped-write later to maint). * Newer MacOS X encourages the programs to compile and link with their CommonCrypto, not with OpenSSL. (merge be4c828 da/darwin later to maint). * "git clone foo/bar:baz" cannot be a request to clone from a remote over git-over-ssh specified in the scp style. This case is now detected and clones from a local repository at "foo/bar:baz". (merge 6000334 nd/clone-local-with-colon later to maint). * When $HOME is misconfigured to point at an unreadable directory, we used to complain and die. Loosen the check. (merge 4698c8f jn/config-ignore-inaccessible later to maint). * "git subtree" (in contrib/) had one codepath with loose error checks to lose data at the remote side. (merge 3212d56 jk/subtree-do-not-push-if-split-fails later to maint). * "git fetch" into a shallow repository from a repository that does not know about the shallow boundary commits (e.g. a different fork from the repository the current shallow repository was cloned from) did not work correctly. (merge 71d5f93 mh/fetch-into-shallow later to maint). * "git checkout foo" DWIMs the intended "upstream" and turns it into "git checkout -t -b foo remotes/origin/foo". This codepath has been updated to correctly take existing remote definitions into account. (merge 229177a jh/checkout-auto-tracking later to maint).