Git v1.8.3 Release Notes ======================== Backward compatibility notes (for Git 2.0) ------------------------------------------ When "git push [$there]" does not say what to push, we have used the traditional "matching" semantics so far (all your branches were sent to the remote as long as there already are branches of the same name over there). In Git 2.0, the default will change to the "simple" semantics that pushes only the current branch to the branch with the same name, and only when the current branch is set to integrate with that remote branch. Use the user preference configuration variable "push.default" to change this. If you are an old-timer who is used to the "matching" semantics, you can set the variable to "matching" to keep the traditional behaviour. If you want to live in the future early, you can set it to "simple" today without waiting for Git 2.0. When "git add -u" (and "git add -A") is run inside a subdirectory and does not specify which paths to add on the command line, it will operate on the entire tree in Git 2.0 for consistency with "git commit -a" and other commands. There will be no mechanism to make plain "git add -u" behave like "git add -u .". Current users of "git add -u" (without a pathspec) should start training their fingers to explicitly say "git add -u ." before Git 2.0 comes. A warning is issued when these commands are run without a pathspec and when you have local changes outside the current directory, because the behaviour in Git 2.0 will be different from today's version in such a situation. In Git 2.0, "git add " will behave as "git add -A ", so that "git add dir/" will notice paths you removed from the directory and record the removal. Versions before Git 2.0, including this release, will keep ignoring removals, but the users who rely on this behaviour are encouraged to start using "git add --ignore-removal " now before 2.0 is released. Updates since v1.8.2 -------------------- Foreign interface * remote-hg and remote-bzr helpers (in contrib/ since v1.8.2) have been updated; especially, the latter has been done in an accelerated schedule (read: we may not have merged to this release if we were following the usual "cook sufficiently in next before unleashing it to the world" workflow) in order to help Emacs folks, whose primary SCM seems to be stagnating. UI, Workflows & Features * A handful of updates applied to gitk, including an addition of "revert" action, showing dates in tags in a nicer way, making colors configurable, and support for -G'pickaxe' search. * The prompt string generator (in contrib/completion/) learned to show how many changes there are in total and how many have been replayed during a "git rebase" session. * "git branch --vv" learned to paint the name of the branch it integrates with in a different color (color.branch.upstream, which defaults to blue). * In a sparsely populated working tree, "git checkout " no longer unmarks paths that match the given pathspec that were originally ignored with "--sparse" (use --ignore-skip-worktree-bits option to resurrect these paths out of the index if you really want to). * "git log --format" specifier learned %C(auto) token that tells Git to use color when interpolating %d (decoration), %h (short commit object name), etc. for terminal output. * "git bisect" leaves the final outcome as a comment in its bisect log file. * "git clone --reference" can now refer to a gitfile "textual symlink" that points at the real location of the repository. * "git count-objects" learned "--human-readable" aka "-H" option to show various large numbers in Ki/Mi/GiB scaled as necessary. * "git cherry-pick $blob" and "git cherry-pick $tree" are nonsense, and a more readable error message e.g. "can't cherry-pick a tree" is given (we used to say "expected exactly one commit"). * The "--annotate" option to "git send-email" can be turned on (or off) by default with sendemail.annotate configuration variable (you can use --no-annotate from the command line to override it). * The "--cover-letter" option to "git format-patch" can be turned on (or off) by default with format.coverLetter configuration variable. By setting it to 'auto', you can turn it on only for a series with two or more patches. * The bash completion support (in contrib/) learned that cherry-pick takes a few more options than it already knew about. * "git help" learned "-g" option to show the list of guides just like list of commands are given with "-a". * A triangular "pull from one place, push to another place" workflow is supported better by new remote.pushdefault (overrides the "origin" thing) and branch.*.pushremote (overrides the branch.*.remote) configuration variables. * "git status" learned to report that you are in the middle of a revert session, just like it does for a cherry-pick and a bisect session. * The handling by "git branch --set-upstream-to" against various forms of erroneous inputs was suboptimal and has been improved. * When the interactive access to git-shell is not enabled, it issues a message meant to help the system administrator to enable it. An explicit way has been added to issue custom messages to refuse an access over the network to help the end users who connect to the service expecting an interactive shell. * In addition to the case where the user edits the log message with the "e)dit" option of "am -i", replace the "Applying: this patch" message with the final log message contents after applymsg hook munges it. * "git status" suggests users to look into using --untracked=no option when it takes too long. * "git status" shows a bit more information during a rebase/bisect session. * "git fetch" learned to fetch a commit at the tip of an unadvertised ref by specifying a raw object name from the command line when the server side supports this feature. * Output from "git log --graph" works better with submodule log output now. * "git count-objects -v" learned to report leftover temporary packfiles and other garbage in the object store. * A new read-only credential helper (in contrib/) to interact with the .netrc/.authinfo files has been added. * "git send-email" can be used with the credential helper system. * There was no Porcelain way to say "I no longer am interested in this submodule", once you express your interest in a submodule with "submodule init". "submodule deinit" is the way to do so. * "git pull --rebase" learned to pass "-v/-q" options to underlying "git rebase". * The new "--follow-tags" option tells "git push" to push relevant annotated tags when pushing branches out. * "git merge" and "git pull" can optionally be told to inspect and reject when merging a commit that does not carry a trusted GPG signature. * "git mergetool" now feeds files to the "p4merge" backend in the order that matches the p4 convention, where "theirs" is usually shown on the left side, which is the opposite from what other backends expect. * "show/log" now honors gpg.program configuration just like other parts of the code that use GnuPG. * "git log" that shows the difference between the parent and the child has been optimized somewhat. * "git difftool" allows the user to write into the temporary files being shown; if the user makes changes to the working tree at the same time, it now refrains from overwriting the copy in the working tree and leaves the temporary file so that changes can be merged manually. * There was no good way to ask "I have a random string that came from outside world. I want to turn it into a 40-hex object name while making sure such an object exists". A new peeling suffix ^{object} can be used for that purpose, together with "rev-parse --verify". Performance, Internal Implementation, etc. * Updates for building under msvc. * A handful of issues in the code that traverses the working tree to find untracked and/or ignored files have been fixed, and the general codepath involved in "status -u" and "clean" have been cleaned up and optimized. * The stack footprint of some codepaths that access an object from a pack has been shrunk. * The logic to coalesce the same lines removed from the parents in the output from "diff -c/--cc" has been updated, but with O(n^2) complexity, so this might turn out to be undesirable. * The code to enforce permission bits on files in $GIT_DIR/ for shared repositories has been simplified. * A few codepaths know how much data they need to put in the hashtables they use when they start, but still began with small tables and repeatedly grew and rehashed them. * The API to walk reflog entries from the latest to older, which was necessary for operations such as "git checkout -", was cumbersome to use correctly and also inefficient. * Codepaths that inspect log-message-to-be and decide when to add a new Signed-off-by line in various commands have been consolidated. * The pkt-line API, implementation and its callers have been cleaned up to make them more robust. * The Cygwin port has a faster-but-lying lstat(2) emulation whose incorrectness does not matter in practice except for a few codepaths, and setting permission bits on directories is a codepath that needs to use a more correct one. * "git checkout" had repeated pathspec matches on the same paths, which have been consolidated. Also a bug in "git checkout dir/" that is started from an unmerged index has been fixed. * A few bugfixes to "git rerere" working on corner case merge conflicts have been applied. Also contains various documentation updates and code clean-ups. Fixes since v1.8.2 ------------------ Unless otherwise noted, all the fixes since v1.8.2 in the maintenance track are contained in this release (see release notes to them for details). * Recent versions of File::Temp (used by "git svn") started blowing up when its tempfile sub is called as a class method; updated the callsite to call it as a plain vanilla function to fix it. (merge eafc2dd hb/git-pm-tempfile later to maint). * Various subcommands of "git remote" simply ignored extraneous command line arguments instead of diagnosing them as errors. * When receive-pack detects an error in the pack header it received in order to decide which of unpack-objects or index-pack to run, it returned without closing the error stream, which led to a hung sideband thread. * Zsh completion forgot that the '%' character used to signal untracked files needs to be escaped with another '%'. * A commit object whose author or committer ident are malformed crashed some code that trusted that a name, an email and a timestamp can always be found in it. * When "upload-pack" fails while generating a pack in response to "git fetch" (or "git clone"), the receiving side had a programming error that triggered the die handler recursively. * "rev-list --stdin" and friends kept bogus pointers into the input buffer around as human readable object names. This was not a huge problem but was exposed by a new change that uses these names in error output. * Smart-capable HTTP servers were not restricted via the GIT_NAMESPACE mechanism when talking with commit-walking clients, like they are when talking with smart HTTP clients. (merge 6130f86 jk/http-dumb-namespaces later to maint). * "git merge-tree" did not omit a merge result that is identical to the "our" side in certain cases. (merge aacecc3 jk/merge-tree-added-identically later to maint). * Perl scripts like "git-svn" closed (instead of redirecting to /dev/null) the standard error stream, which is not a very smart thing to do. A later open may return file descriptor #2 for an unrelated purpose, and error reporting code may write into it. * "git show-branch" was not prepared to show a very long run of ancestor operators e.g. foobar^2~2^2^2^2...^2~4 correctly. * "git diff --diff-algorithm algo" is also understood as "git diff --diff-algorithm=algo". * The new core.commentchar configuration was not applied in a few places. * "git bundle" erroneously bailed out when parsing a valid bundle containing a prerequisite commit without a commit message. * "git log -S/-G" started paying attention to textconv filter, but there was no way to disable this. Make it honor the --no-textconv option. * When used with the "-d temporary-directory" option, "git filter-branch" failed to come back to the original working tree to perform the final clean-up procedure. * "git merge $(git rev-parse v1.8.2)" behaved quite differently from "git merge v1.8.2", as if v1.8.2 were written as v1.8.2^0 and did not pay much attention to the annotated tag payload. Make the code notice the type of the tag object, in addition to the dwim_ref() based classification the current code uses (i.e. the name appears in refs/tags/) to decide when to special-case tag merging. * Fix a 1.8.1.x regression that stopped matching "dir" (without a trailing slash) to a directory "dir". * "git apply --whitespace=fix" was not prepared to see a line getting longer after fixing whitespaces (e.g. tab-in-indent aka Python). * The prompt string generator (in contrib/completion/) did not notice when we are in a middle of a "git revert" session. * "submodule summary --summary-limit" option did not support the "--option=value" form. * "index-pack --fix-thin" used an uninitialized value to compute the delta depths of objects it appends to the resulting pack. * "index-pack --verify-stat" used a few counters outside the protection of a mutex, possibly showing incorrect numbers. * The code to keep track of what directory names are known to Git on platforms with case insensitive filesystems could get confused upon a hash collision between these pathnames and would loop forever. * Annotated tags outside the refs/tags/ hierarchy were not advertised correctly to ls-remote and fetch with recent versions of Git. * Recent optimizations broke shallow clones. * "git cmd -- ':(top'" was not diagnosed as an invalid syntax, and instead the parser kept reading beyond the end of the string. * "git tag -f " always said "Updated tag ''" even when creating a new tag (i.e. neither overwriting nor updating). * "git p4" did not behave well when the path to the root of the P4 client was not its real path. (merge bbd8486 pw/p4-symlinked-root later to maint). * "git archive" reported a failure when asked to create an archive out of an empty tree. It is more intuitive to give an empty archive back in such a case. * When "format-patch" quoted a non-ascii string in header files, it incorrectly applied rfc2047 and chopped a single character in the middle of the string. * An aliased command spawned from a bare repository that does not say it is bare with "core.bare = yes" was treated as non-bare by mistake. * In "git reflog expire", the REACHABLE bit was not cleared from the correct objects. * The logic used by "git diff -M --stat" to shorten the names of files before and after a rename did not work correctly when the common prefix and suffix between the two filenames overlapped. * The "--match=" option of "git describe", when used with "--all" to allow refs that are not annotated tags to be a base of description, did not restrict the output from the command to those refs that match the given pattern. * Clarify in the documentation "what" gets pushed to "where" when the command line to "git push" does not say these explicitly. * The "--color=" argument to the commands in the diff family was described poorly. * The arguments given to the pre-rebase hook were not documented. * The v4 index format was not documented. * The "--match=" argument "git describe" takes uses glob pattern but it wasn't obvious from the documentation. * Some sources failed to compile on systems that lack NI_MAXHOST in their system header (e.g. z/OS). * Add an example use of "--env-filter" in "filter-branch" documentation. * "git bundle verify" did not say "records a complete history" for a bundle that does not have any prerequisites. * In the v1.8.0 era, we changed symbols that do not have to be global to file scope static, but a few functions in graph.c were used by CGit sideways, bypassing the entry points of the API the in-tree users use. * "git update-index -h" did not do the usual "-h(elp)" thing. * "git index-pack" had a buffer-overflow while preparing an informational message when the translated version of it was too long. * 'git commit -m "$msg"' used to add an extra newline even when $msg already ended with one. * The SSL peer verification done by "git imap-send" did not ask for Server Name Indication (RFC 4366), failing to connect to SSL/TLS sites that serve multiple hostnames on a single IP. * perl/Git.pm::cat_blob slurped everything in core only to write it out to a file descriptor, which was not a very smart thing to do. * "git branch" did not bother to check nonsense command line parameters. It now issues errors in many cases. * Verification of signed tags was not done correctly when not in C or en/US locale. * Some platforms and users spell UTF-8 differently; retry with the most official "UTF-8" when the system does not understand the user-supplied encoding name that is a common alternative spelling of UTF-8. * When export-subst is used, "zip" output recorded an incorrect size of the file. * "git am $maildir/" applied messages in an unexpected order; sort filenames read from the maildir/ in a way that is more likely to sort the messages in the order the writing MUA meant to, by sorting numeric segments in numeric order and non-numeric segments in alphabetical order. * "git submodule update", when recursed into sub-submodules, did not accumulate the prefix paths.