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 the current branch to the branch with the same name, only when the current branch is set to integrate with that remote branch. There is a 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 it 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", that does not specify what paths to add on the command line is run from inside a subdirectory, these commands will operate on the entire tree in Git 2.0 for consistency with "git commit -a" and other commands. Because there will be no mechanism to make "git add -u" behave as if "git add -u .", it is important for those who are used to "git add -u" (without pathspec) updating the index only for paths in the current subdirectory to start training their fingers to explicitly say "git add -u ." when they mean it 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. Updates since v1.8.2 -------------------- Foreign interface * remote-hg helper (in contrib/) has been updated. UI, Workflows & Features * "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 to help the end users who connect to the service by issuing custom messages to refuse such an access has been added. * 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 to "git status" 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 other backend expects. * "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, one of the changes has to be lost in such a case, but it tells the user what happened and refrains from overwriting the copy in the working tree. * 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 to traverse 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 an 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 have been simplified. * A few codepaths knew how much data they need to put in the hashtables they use upfront, but still started from a small table repeatedly growing and rehashing. * 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. * 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 to 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). * When receive-pack detects 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 hang sideband thread. (merge 49ecfa1 jk/receive-pack-deadlocks-with-early-failure later to maint). * Zsh completion forgot that '%' character used to signal untracked files needs to be escaped with another '%'. (merge 24b6132 fc/untracked-zsh-prompt later to maint). * A commit object whose author or committer ident are malformed crashed some code that trusted that a name, an email and an timestamp can always be found in it. (merge de5abe9 jk/chopped-ident later to maint). * When "upload-pack" fails while generating a pack in response to "git fetch" (or "git clone"), the receiving side mistakenly said there was a programming error to trigger the die handler recursively. (merge 1ece66b jk/a-thread-only-dies-once later to maint). * "rev-list --stdin" and friends kept bogus pointers into input buffer around as human readble object names. This was not a huge problem but was exposed by a new change that uses these names in error output. (merge 70d26c6 tr/copy-revisions-from-stdin later to maint). * Smart-capable HTTP servers were not restricted via the GIT_NAMESPACE mechanism when talking with commit-walker clients, like they do 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 "our" side in certain cases. (merge aacecc3 jk/merge-tree-added-identically later to maint). * Perl scripts like "git-svn" closed (not redirecting to /dev/null) the standard error stream, which is not a very smart thing to do. Later open may return file descriptor #2 for unrelated purpose, and error reporting code may write into them. (merge a749c0b tr/perl-keep-stderr-open later to maint). * "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. (merge aaa07e3 jk/show-branch-strbuf later to maint). * "git diff --diff-algorithm algo" is also understood as "git diff --diff-algorithm=algo". (merge 0895c6d jk/diff-algo-finishing-touches later to maint). * The new core.commentchar configuration was not applied to a few places. (merge 89c3bbd rt/commentchar-fmt-merge-msg later to maint). * "git bundle" did not like a bundle created using a commit without any message as its one of the prerequistes. (merge 5446e33 lf/bundle-with-tip-wo-message later to maint). * "git log -S/-G" started paying attention to textconv filter, but there was no way to disable this. Make it honor --no-textconv option. (merge 61690bf sr/log-SG-no-textconv later to maint). * When used with "-d temporary-directory" option, "git filter-branch" failed to come back to the original working tree to perform the final clean-up procedure. (merge 9727601 jk/filter-branch-come-back-to-original later to maint). * "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 merging of tags. (merge a38d3d7 jc/merge-tag-object later to maint). * Fix 1.8.1.x regression that stopped matching "dir" (without trailing slash) to a directory "dir". (merge efa5f82 jc/directory-attrs-regression-fix later to maint-1.8.1). * "git apply --whitespace=fix" was not prepared to see a line getting longer after fixing whitespaces (e.g. tab-in-indent aka Python). (merge 329b26e jc/apply-ws-fix-tab-in-indent later to maint-1.8.1). * The prompt string generator (in contrib/completion/) did not notice when we are in a middle of a "git revert" session. (merge 3ee4452 rr/prompt-revert-head later to maint). * "submodule summary --summary-limit" option did not support "--option=value" form. (merge 862ae6c rs/submodule-summary-limit later to maint). * "index-pack --fix-thin" used an uninitialized value to compute delta depths of objects it appends to the resulting pack. (merge 57165db jk/index-pack-correct-depth-fix later to maint). * "index-pack --verify-stat" used a few counters outside protection of mutex, possibly showing incorrect numbers. (merge 8f82aad nd/index-pack-threaded-fixes later to maint). * The code to keep track of what directory names are known to Git on platforms with case insensitive filesystems can get confused upon a hash collision between these pathnames and looped forever. * Annotated tags outside refs/tags/ hierarchy were not advertised correctly to the ls-remote and fetch with recent version of Git. * Recent optimization broke shallow clones. (merge f59de5d jk/peel-ref later to maint). * "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. not 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" reports a failure when asked to create an archive out of an empty tree. It would be more intuitive to give an empty archive back in such a case. * When "format-patch" quoted a non-ascii strings on the header files, it incorrectly applied rfc2047 and chopped a single character in the middle of it. * An aliased command spawned from a bare repository that does not say it is bare with "core.bare = yes" is treated as non-bare by mistake. * In "git reflog expire", 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 used as a base of description, did not restrict the output from the command to those 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 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 from 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 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 and issue errors in many cases. * Verification of signed tags were 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 are the common alternative spellings of UTF-8. * When export-subst is used, "zip" output recorded 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 messages in the order the writing MUA meant to, by sorting numeric segment in numeric order and non-numeric segment in alphabetical order. * "git submodule update", when recursed into sub-submodules, did not accumulate the prefix paths.