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.
+ * "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
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 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 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).
+
+ * 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.