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
--------------------
* Output from the tests is coloured using "green is okay, yellow is
questionable, red is bad and blue is informative" scheme.
+ * Mention of "GIT/Git/git" in the documentation have been updated to
+ be more uniform and consistent. The name of the system and the
+ concept it embodies is "Git"; the command the users type is "git".
+ 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.
* Scripts can ask Git that wildcard patterns in pathspecs they give do
not have any significance, i.e. take them as literal strings.
- * The pathspec code learned to grok "foo/**/bar" as a pattern that
- matches "bar" in 0-or-more levels of subdirectory in "foo".
+ * 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".
+
+ * When giving arguments without "--" disambiguation, object names
+ that come earlier on the command line must not be interpretable as
+ pathspecs and pathspecs that come later on the command line must
+ not be interpretable as object names. This disambiguation rule has
+ been tweaked so that ":/" (no other string before or after) is
+ always interpreted as a pathspec; "git cmd -- :/" is no longer
+ needed, you can just say "git cmd :/".
+
+ * Various "hint" lines Git gives when it asks the user to edit
+ messages in the editor are commented out with '#' by default. The
+ core.commentchar configuration variable can be used to customize
+ this '#' to a different character.
+
+ * "git add -u" and "git add -A" without pathspec issues warning to
+ make users aware that they are only operating on paths inside the
+ subdirectory they are in. Use ":/" (everything from the top) or
+ "." (everything from the $cwd) to disambiguate.
* "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 cherry-pick" can be used to replay a root commit to an unborn
branch.
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 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.
+ * Error messages from "git push" when it stops to prevent remote refs
+ from getting overwritten by mistake have been improved to explain
+ various situations separately.
+
+ * "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 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).
* A new remote helper to interact with bzr has been added to contrib/.
+ * "git p4" got various bugfixes around its branch handling. It is
+ also made usable with Python 2.4/2.5. In addition, its various
+ portability issues for Cygwin have been addressed.
+
+ * 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.
+ * We stopped paying attention to $GIT_CONFIG environment that points
+ at a single configuration file from any command other than "git config"
+ quite a while ago, but "git clone" internally set, exported, and
+ then unexported the variable during its operation unnecessarily.
+
+ * "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.
+
+ * Some reimplementations of Git do not write all the stat info back
+ to the index due to their implementation limitations (e.g. jgit).
+ A configuration option can tell Git to ignore changes to most of
+ the stat fields and only pay attention to mtime and size, which
+ these implementations can reliably update. This can be used to
+ avoid excessive revalidation of contents.
+
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).
* 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.
- (merge 8f2bbe4 jn/warn-on-inaccessible-loosen later to maint).
* The behaviour visible to the end users was confusing, when they
attempt to kill a process spawned in the editor that was in turn
launched by Git with SIGINT (or SIGQUIT), as Git would catch that
signal and die. We ignore these signals now.
- (merge 1250857 pf/editor-ignore-sigint later to maint).
+ (merge 0398fc34 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.
- (merge 709ca73 jk/unify-exit-code-by-receiving-signal later to maint).
* 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).
+
+ * We used to stuff "user@" and then append what we read from
+ /etc/mailname to come up with a default e-mail ident, but a bug
+ lost the "user@" part.
* 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.
+
+ * 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.
- (merge 5de7166 jc/apply-trailing-blank-removal later to maint).
+
+ * "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.
- (merge 22f0dcd rs/leave-base-name-in-name-field-of-tar later to maint).
* "git archive" did not record uncompressed size in the header when
streaming a zip archive, which confused some implementations of unzip.
- (merge 5ea2c84 rs/zip-with-uncompressed-size-in-the-header later to maint).
+
+ * "git archive" did not parse configuration values in tar.* namespace
+ correctly.
+ (merge b3873c3 jk/config-parsing-cleanup later to maint).
+
+ * Attempt to "branch --edit-description" an existing branch, while
+ being on a detached HEAD, errored out.
+
+ * "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.
- (merge 9be1980 jl/interrupt-clone-remove-separate-git-dir later to maint).
+
+ * "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
+ command, and documentation was misleading.
+ (merge cfb70e1 nd/fetch-depth-is-broken later to maint).
+
+ * "git log --all -p" that walked refs/notes/textconv/ ref can later
+ try to use the textconv data incorrectly after it gets freed.
+ (merge be5c9fb jk/read-commit-buffer-data-after-free later to maint).
+
+ * We forgot to close the file descriptor reading from "gpg" output,
+ killing "git log --show-signature" on a long history.
* 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).
+
+ * Rebasing the history of superproject with change in the submodule
+ has been broken since v1.7.12.
* 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.
* "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.
- (merge 9bcbb1c jc/maint-fmt-merge-msg-no-edit-lose-credit later to maint).
* "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.
- (merge 3e4141d ap/merge-stop-at-prepare-commit-msg-failure later to maint).
+
+ * A failure to push due to non-ff while on an unborn branch
+ dereferenced a NULL pointer when showing an error message.
* 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.
- (merge 6310071 nz/send-email-headers-are-case-insensitive later to maint).
* Output from "git status --ignored" showed an unexpected interaction
with "--untracked".
- (merge a45fb69 ap/status-ignored-in-ignored-directory later to maint).
* "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.
- (merge 0e901d2 os/gitweb-highlight-uncaptured later to maint).
+
+ * "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.
- (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>.
- (merge ca87dd6 ds/completion-silence-in-tree-path-probe later to maint).
* Command line completion for "tcsh" emitted an unwanted space
after completing a single directory name.
- (merge 92f1c04 mk/complete-tcsh later to maint).
+
+ * Command line completion code was inadvertently made incompatible with
+ older versions of bash by using a newer array notation.
* 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.
* When autoconf is used, any build on a different commit always ran
"config.status --recheck" even when unnecessary.
- (merge 1226504 jn/less-reconfigure later to maint).
+
+ * A fix was added to the build procedure to work around buggy
+ versions of ccache broke the auto-generation of dependencies, which
+ unfortunately is still relevant because some people use ancient
+ distros.
+
+ * 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.
- (merge 0a85441 ta/remove-stale-translated-tut later to maint).
+
+ * t0050 had tests expecting failures from a bug that was fixed some
+ time ago.
* 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).
* t9020 and t9810 had a few non-portable shell script construct.
- (merge 2797914 tb/test-t9020-no-which later to maint).
- (merge 6f4e505 tb/test-t9810-no-sed-i later to maint).
+
+ * Scripts to test bash completion was inherently flaky as it was
+ affected by whatever random things the user may have on $PATH.