branch is set to integrate with that remote branch. There is a user
preference configuration variable "push.default" to change this.
+"git push $there tag v1.2.3" used to allow replacing a tag v1.2.3
+that already exists in the repository $there, if the rewritten tag
+you are pushing points at a commit that is a decendant of a commit
+that the old tag v1.2.3 points at. This was found to be error prone
+and starting with this release, any attempt to update an existing
+ref under refs/tags/ hierarchy will fail, without "--force".
+
Updates since v1.8.1
--------------------
* Scripts can ask Git that wildcard patterns in pathspecs they give do
not have any significance, i.e. take them as literal strings.
+ * The patterns in .gitignore and .gitattributes files can have **/,
+ as a pattern that matches 0 or more levels of subdirectory.
+ E.g. "foo/**/bar" matches "bar" in "foo" itself or in a
+ subdirectory of "foo".
+
+ * "git blame" (and "git diff") learned the "--no-follow" option.
+
+ * "git check-ignore" command to help debugging .gitignore files has
+ been added.
+
+ * "git cherry-pick" can be used to replay a root commit to an unborn
+ branch.
+
+ * "git commit" can be told to use --cleanup=whitespace by setting the
+ configuration variable commit.cleanup to 'whitespace'.
+
* "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
real ref that is pointed at by the symbolic ref would be updated
anyway). Symbolic refs no longer are affected by such a fetch.
+ * "git format-patch" now detects more cases in which a whole branch
+ is being exported, and uses the description for the branch, when
+ asked to write a cover letter for the series.
+
+ * "git format-patch" learned "-v $count" option, and prepends a
+ string "v$count-" to the names of its output files, and also
+ automatically sets the subject prefix to "PATCH v$count". This
+ allows patches from rerolled series to be stored under different
+ names and makes it easier to reuse cover letter messsages.
+
+ * "git log" and friends can be told with --use-mailmap option to
+ rewrite the names and email addresses of people using the mailmap
+ mechanism.
+
* "git push" now requires "-f" to update a tag, even if it is a
fast-forward, as tags are meant to be fixed points.
+ * "git push" will stop without doing anything if the new "pre-push"
+ hook exists and exits with a failure.
+
+ * When "git rebase" fails to generate patches to be applied (e.g. due
+ to oom), it failed to detect the failure and instead behaved as if
+ there were nothing to do. A workaround to use a temporary file has
+ been applied, but we probably would want to revisit this later, as
+ it hurts the common case of not failing at all.
+
+ * Input and preconditions to "git reset" has been loosened where
+ appropriate. "git reset $fromtree Makefile" requires $fromtree to
+ be any tree (it used to require it to be a commit), for example.
+ "git reset" (without options or parameters) used to error out when
+ 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 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 fast-export" has been updated for its use in the context of
the remote helper interface.
+ * A new remote helper to interact with bzr has been added to contrib/.
+
+ * "git p4" got various bugfixes around its branch handling.
+
+ * The remote helper to interact with Hg in contrib/ has seen a few
+ fixes.
+
Performance, Internal Implementation, etc.
* Matching paths with common forms of pathspecs that contain wildcard
characters has been optimized further.
+ * "git reset" internals has been reworked and should be faster in
+ general. We tried to be careful not to break any behaviour but
+ there could be corner cases, especially when running the command
+ from a conflicted state, that we may have missed.
+
* The implementation of "imap-send" has been updated to reuse xml
- quoting code from http-push codepath.
+ quoting code from http-push codepath, and lost a lot of unused
+ code.
+
+ * There is a simple-minded checker for the test scripts in t/
+ directory to catch most common mistakes (it is not enabled by
+ default).
+
+ * You can build with USE_WILDMATCH=YesPlease to use a replacement
+ implementation of pattern matching logic used for pathname-like
+ things, e.g. refnames and paths in the repository. This new
+ implementation is not expected change the existing behaviour of Git
+ in this release, except for "git for-each-ref" where you can now
+ say "refs/**/master" and match with both refs/heads/master and
+ refs/remotes/origin/master. We plan to use this new implementation
+ in wider places (e.g. "git ls-files '**/Makefile' may find Makefile
+ at the top-level, and "git log '**/t*.sh'" may find commits that
+ touch a shell script whose name begins with "t" at any level) in
+ future versions of Git, but we are not there yet. By building with
+ USE_WILDMATCH, using the resulting Git daily and reporting when you
+ find breakages, you can help us get closer to that goal.
Also contains minor documentation updates and code clean-ups.
* An element on GIT_CEILING_DIRECTORIES list that does not name the
real path to a directory (i.e. a symbolic link) could have caused
the GIT_DIR discovery logic to escape the ceiling.
- (merge 059b379 mh/ceiling later to maint).
-
- * t4014, t9502 and t0200 tests had various portability issues that
- broke on OpenBSD.
- (merge 27f6342 jc/maint-test-portability later to maint).
-
- * t9020 and t3600 tests had various portability issues.
- (merge 5a02966 jc/test-portability later to maint).
- * t9200 runs "cvs init" on a directory that already exists, but a
- platform can configure this fail for the current user (e.g. you
- need to be in the cvsadmin group on NetBSD 6.0).
- (merge 8666df0 jc/test-cvs-no-init-in-existing-dir later to maint).
+ * When attempting to read the XDG-style $HOME/.config/git/config and
+ finding that $HOME/.config/git is a file, we gave a wrong error
+ message, instead of treating the case as "a custom config file does
+ not exist there" and moving on.
* The behaviour visible to the end users was confusing, when they
attempt to kill a process spawned in the editor that was in turn
signal and die. We ignore these signals now.
(merge 1250857 pf/editor-ignore-sigint later to maint).
+ * A child process that was killed by a signal (e.g. SIGINT) was
+ reported in an inconsistent way depending on how the process was
+ spawned by us, with or without a shell in between.
+
* After failing to create a temporary file using mkstemp(), failing
pathname was not reported correctly on some platforms.
- (merge f7be59b jc/mkstemp-more-careful-error-reporting later to maint).
* The attribute mechanism didn't allow limiting attributes to be
applied to only a single directory itself with "path/" like the
- exclude mechanism does.
- (merge 94bc671 ja/directory-attrs later to maint).
+ exclude mechanism does. The initial implementation of this that
+ was merged to 'maint' and 1.8.1.2 was with a severe performance
+ degradations and needs to merge a fix-up topic.
+ (merge 9db9eec nd/fix-directory-attrs-off-by-one 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).
+ (merge 5185b97 dl/am-hg-locale later to maint).
+
+ * "git apply" misbehaved when fixing whitespace breakages by removing
+ excess trailing blank lines.
+
+ * A tar archive created by "git archive" recorded a directory in a
+ way that made NetBSD's implementation of "tar" sometimes unhappy.
+
+ * "git archive" did not record uncompressed size in the header when
+ streaming a zip archive, which confused some implementations of unzip.
+
+ * "git clean" showed what it was going to do, but sometimes end up
+ finding that it was not allowed to do so, which resulted in a
+ confusing output (e.g. after saying that it will remove an
+ untracked directory, it found an embedded git repository there
+ which it is not allowed to remove). It now performs the actions
+ and then reports the outcome more faithfully.
+ (merge f538a91 zk/clean-report-failure later to maint).
+
+ * When "git clone --separate-git-dir=$over_there" is interrupted, it
+ failed to remove the real location of the $GIT_DIR it created.
+ This was most visible when interrupting a submodule update.
* The way "git svn" asked for password using SSH_ASKPASS and
GIT_ASKPASS was not in line with the rest of the system.
- (merge e9263e4 ss/svn-prompt later to maint).
* The --graph code fell into infinite loop when asked to do what the
code did not expect.
- (merge 656197a mk/maint-graph-infinity-loop later to maint).
* http transport was wrong to ask for the username when the
authentication is done by certificate identity.
- (merge 75e9a40 rb/http-cert-cred-no-username-prompt later to maint).
* "git pack-refs" that ran in parallel to another process that
created new refs had a nasty race.
- (merge b3f1280 jk/repack-ref-racefix later to maint).
* After "git add -N" and then writing a tree object out of the
index, the cache-tree data structure got corrupted.
- (merge eec3e7e nd/invalidate-i-t-a-cache-tree later to maint).
+
+ * "git clone" used to allow --bare and --separate-git-dir=$there
+ options at the same time, which was nonsensical.
+ (merge 95b63f1 nd/clone-no-separate-git-dir-with-bare later to maint).
+
+ * "git rebase --preserve-merges" lost empty merges in recent versions
+ of Git.
+ (merge 9869778 ph/rebase-preserve-all-merges later to maint).
+
+ * "git merge --no-edit" computed who were involved in the work done
+ on the side branch, even though that information is to be discarded
+ without getting seen in the editor.
+
+ * "git merge" started calling prepare-commit-msg hook like "git
+ commit" does some time ago, but forgot to pay attention to the exit
+ status of the hook.
+
+ * When users spell "cc:" in lowercase in the fake "header" in the
+ trailer part, "git send-email" failed to pick up the addresses from
+ there. As e-mail headers field names are case insensitive, this
+ script should follow suit and treat "cc:" and "Cc:" the same way.
+
+ * Output from "git status --ignored" showed an unexpected interaction
+ with "--untracked".
* "gitweb", when sorting by age to show repositories with new
activities first, used to sort repositories with absolutely
nothing in it early, which was not very useful.
- (merge 28dae18 md/gitweb-sort-by-age later to maint).
+
+ * "gitweb"'s code to sanitize control characters before passing it to
+ "highlight" filter lost known-to-be-safe control characters by
+ mistake.
* 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.
- (merge e0db176 sp/shortlog-missing-lf later to maint).
+
+ * Command line completion leaked an unnecessary error message while
+ looking for possible matches with paths in <tree-ish>.
+
+ * Command line completion for "tcsh" emitted an unwanted space
+ after completing a single directory name.
+
+ * Command line completion code was inadvertently made incompatible with
+ older versions of bash by using a newer array notation.
+ (merge 50c5885 bc/fix-array-syntax-for-3.0-in-completion-bash later to maint).
* Some shells do not behave correctly when IFS is unset; work it
around by explicitly setting it to the default value.
- (merge 393050c jc/maint-fbsd-sh-ifs-workaround later to maint).
+
+ * Some scripted programs written in Python did not get updated when
+ PYTHON_PATH changed.
+ (cherry-pick 96a4647fca54031974cd6ad1 later to maint).
+
+ * When autoconf is used, any build on a different commit always ran
+ "config.status --recheck" even when unnecessary.
+
+ * We have been carrying a translated and long-unmaintained copy of an
+ old version of the tutorial; removed.
+
+ * t0050 had tests expecting failures from a bug that was fixed some
+ time ago.
+ (merge 336e2e2 tb/t0050-maint later to maint).
+
+ * t4014, t9502 and t0200 tests had various portability issues that
+ broke on OpenBSD.
+
+ * t9020 and t3600 tests had various portability issues.
+
+ * t9200 runs "cvs init" on a directory that already exists, but a
+ platform can configure this fail for the current user (e.g. you
+ need to be in the cvsadmin group on NetBSD 6.0).
+
+ * t9020 and t9810 had a few non-portable shell script construct.