Backward compatibility notes
----------------------------
-In the upcoming major release (tentatively called 1.8.2), we will
-change the behavior of the "git push" command.
+In the next major release Git 2.0 (not *this* one), we will change the
+behavior of the "git push" command.
When "git push [$there]" does not say what to push, we have used the
traditional "matching" semantics so far (all your branches were sent
and starting with this release, any attempt to update an existing
ref under refs/tags/ hierarchy will fail, without "--force".
+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, the
+scope of the operation has always been limited to the subirectory.
+Many users found this counter-intuitive, given that "git commit -a"
+and other commands operate on the entire tree regardless of where you
+are. In this release, these commands give warning in such a case and
+encourage the user to say "git add -u/-A ." instead when restricting
+the scope to the current directory. At Git 2.0 (not *this* one), we
+plan to change these commands without pathspec to operate on the
+entire tree, and training your fingers to type "." will protect you
+against the future change.
+
Updates since v1.8.1
--------------------
All-caps "GIT" was merely a way to imitate "Git" typeset in small
caps in our ASCII text only documentation and to be avoided.
+ * The completion script (in contrib/completion) used to let the
+ default completer to suggest pathnames, which gave too many
+ irrelevant choices (e.g. "git add" would not want to add an
+ unmodified path). It learnt to use a more git-aware logic to
+ enumerate only relevant ones.
+
* In bare repositories, "git shortlog" and other commands now read
mailmap files from the tip of the history, to help running these
tools in server settings.
* "git blame" (and "git diff") learned the "--no-follow" option.
+ * "git branch" now rejects some nonsense combinations of command line
+ arguments (e.g. giving more than one branch name to rename) with
+ more case-specific error messages.
+
* "git check-ignore" command to help debugging .gitignore files has
been added.
* "git commit" can be told to use --cleanup=whitespace by setting the
configuration variable commit.cleanup to 'whitespace'.
+ * "git diff" and other Porcelain commands can be told to use a
+ non-standard algorithm by setting diff.algorithm configuration
+ variable.
+
* "git fetch --mirror" and fetch that uses other forms of refspec
with wildcard used to attempt to update a symbolic ref that match
the wildcard on the receiving end, which made little sense (the
rewrite the names and email addresses of people using the mailmap
mechanism.
+ * "git log --cc --graph" now shows the combined diff output with the
+ ancestry graph.
+
+ * "git log --grep=<pattern>" honors i18n.logoutputencoding to look
+ for the pattern after fixing the log message to the specified
+ encoding.
+
+ * "git mergetool" and "git difftool" learned to list the available
+ tool backends in a more consistent manner.
+
+ * "git mergetool" is aware of TortoiseGitMerge now and uses it over
+ TortoiseMerge when available.
+
* "git push" now requires "-f" to update a tag, even if it is a
fast-forward, as tags are meant to be fixed points.
you do not have any commits in your history, but it now gives you
an empty index (to match non-existent commit you are not even on).
+ * "git status" says what branch is being bisected or rebased when
+ able, not just "bisecting" or "rebasing".
+
* "git submodule" started learning a new mode to integrate with the
tip of the remote branch (as opposed to integrating with the commit
recorded in the superproject's gitlink).
+ * "git upload-pack" which implements the service "ls-remote" and
+ "fetch" talk to can be told to hide ref hierarchies the server
+ side internally uses (and that clients have no business learning
+ about) with transfer.hiderefs configuration.
+
Foreign Interface
these implementations can reliably update. This can be used to
avoid excessive revalidation of contents.
+ * Some platforms ship with old version of expat where xmlparse.h
+ needs to be included instead of expat.h; the build procedure has
+ been taught about this.
+
+ * "make clean" on platforms that cannot compute header dependencies
+ on the fly did not work with implementations of "rm" that do not
+ like an empty argument list.
Also contains minor documentation updates and code clean-ups.
was merged to 'maint' and 1.8.1.2 was with a severe performance
degradations and needs to merge a fix-up topic.
+ * The smart HTTP clients forgot to verify the content-type that comes
+ back from the server side to make sure that the request is being
+ handled properly.
+ (merge 3443db5 sp/smart-http-content-type-check later to maint).
+
* "git am" did not parse datestamp correctly from Hg generated patch,
when it is run in a locale outside C (or en).
* "git apply" misbehaved when fixing whitespace breakages by removing
excess trailing blank lines.
+ * "git apply --summary" has been taught to make sure the similarity
+ value shown in its output is sensible, even when the input had a
+ bogus value.
+ (merge afcb6ac jk/apply-similaritly-parsing later to maint).
+
* A tar archive created by "git archive" recorded a directory in a
way that made NetBSD's implementation of "tar" sometimes unhappy.
failed to remove the real location of the $GIT_DIR it created.
This was most visible when interrupting a submodule update.
+ * "git cvsimport" mishandled timestamps at DST boundary.
+ (merge 48c9162 bw/get-tz-offset-perl later to maint).
+
+ * We used to have an arbitrary 32 limit for combined diff input,
+ resulting in incorrect number of leading colons shown when showing
+ the "--raw --cc" output.
+ (merge edbc00e jc/combine-diff-many-parents later to maint).
+
* "git fetch --depth" was broken in at least three ways. The
resulting history was deeper than specified by one commit, it was
unclear how to wipe the shallowness of the repository with the
* We forgot to close the file descriptor reading from "gpg" output,
killing "git log --show-signature" on a long history.
- (merge 7dac3f8 sb/gpg-plug-fd-leak later to maint).
* The way "git svn" asked for password using SSH_ASKPASS and
GIT_ASKPASS was not in line with the rest of the system.
* Rebasing the history of superproject with change in the submodule
has been broken since v1.7.12.
- (merge e28efb1 jc/fake-ancestor-with-non-blobs later to maint).
* After "git add -N" and then writing a tree object out of the
index, the cache-tree data structure got corrupted.
* A failure to push due to non-ff while on an unborn branch
dereferenced a NULL pointer when showing an error message.
- (merge 1d2c14d ft/transport-report-segv later to maint).
* When users spell "cc:" in lowercase in the fake "header" in the
trailer part, "git send-email" failed to pick up the addresses from
"highlight" filter lost known-to-be-safe control characters by
mistake.
+ * "gitweb" pages served over HTTPS, when configured to show picon or
+ gravatar, referred to these external resources to be fetched via
+ HTTP, resulting in mixed contents warning in browsers.
+ (merge 5748558 ab/gitweb-use-same-scheme later to maint).
+
* When a line to be wrapped has a solid run of non space characters
whose length exactly is the wrap width, "git shortlog -w" failed
to add a newline after such a line.
* Command line completion code was inadvertently made incompatible with
older versions of bash by using a newer array notation.
+ * "git push" was taught to refuse updating the branch that is
+ currently checked out long time ago, but the user manual was left
+ stale.
+ (merge d9be248 wk/man-deny-current-branch-is-default-these-days later to maint).
+
* Some shells do not behave correctly when IFS is unset; work it
around by explicitly setting it to the default value.
versions of ccache broke the auto-generation of dependencies, which
unfortunately is still relevant because some people use ancient
distros.
- (merge 6978934 jn/auto-depend-workaround-buggy-ccache later to maint).
+
+ * The autoconf subsystem passed --mandir down to generated
+ config.mak.autogen but forgot to do the same for --htmldir.
+ (merge fc1c541 ct/autoconf-htmldir later to maint).
* We have been carrying a translated and long-unmaintained copy of an
old version of the tutorial; removed.
* Scripts to test bash completion was inherently flaky as it was
affected by whatever random things the user may have on $PATH.
- (merge 5047822 jc/do-not-let-random-file-interfere-with-completion-tests later to maint).