Git v1.8.2 Release Notes
========================
-Backward compatibility notes
-----------------------------
+Backward compatibility notes (this release)
+-------------------------------------------
-In the upcoming major release (tentatively called 1.8.2), we will
-change the behavior of the "git push" command.
+"git push $there tag v1.2.3" used to allow replacing a tag v1.2.3
+that already exists in the repository $there, if the rewritten tag
+you are pushing points at a commit that is a descendant of a commit
+that the old tag v1.2.3 points at. This was found to be error prone
+and starting with this release, any attempt to update an existing
+ref under refs/tags/ hierarchy will fail, without "--force".
+
+When "git add -u" and "git add -A" that does not specify what paths
+to add on the command line is run from inside a subdirectory, the
+scope of the operation has always been limited to the subdirectory.
+Many users found this counter-intuitive, given that "git commit -a"
+and other commands operate on the entire tree regardless of where you
+are. In this release, these commands give a warning message that
+suggests the users to use "git add -u/-A ." when they want to limit
+the scope to the current directory; doing so will squelch the message,
+while training their fingers.
+
+
+Backward compatibility notes (for Git 2.0)
+------------------------------------------
When "git push [$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). We will use 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.
+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.
Updates since v1.8.1
UI, Workflows & Features
- *
+ * Initial ports to QNX and z/OS UNIX System Services have started.
+
+ * 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.
+
+ * Color specifiers, e.g. "%C(blue)Hello%C(reset)", used in the
+ "--format=" option of "git log" and friends can be disabled when
+ the output is not sent to a terminal by prefixing them with
+ "auto,", e.g. "%C(auto,blue)Hello%C(auto,reset)".
+
+ * 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".
+
+ * 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 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
+ 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 messages.
+
+ * "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 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.
+
+ * 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).
+
+ * "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
- *
+ * "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. 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.
- *
+ * "git fsck" has been taught to be pickier about entries in tree
+ objects that should not be there, e.g. ".", ".git", and "..".
+
+ * 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, 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.
+
+ * 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.
* 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).
+ * 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.
- * t9020 and t3600 tests had various portability issues.
- (merge 5a02966 jc/test-portability 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 0398fc34 pf/editor-ignore-sigint 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).
+ * 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).
+
+ * 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. 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.
+
+ * "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.
+
+ * 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 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.
+
+ * When "git clone --separate-git-dir=$over_there" is interrupted, it
+ failed to remove the real location of the $GIT_DIR it created.
+ This was most visible when interrupting a submodule update.
+
+ * "git cvsimport" mishandled timestamps at DST boundary.
+
+ * We used to have an arbitrary 32 limit for combined diff input,
+ resulting in incorrect number of leading colons shown when showing
+ the "--raw --cc" output.
+
+ * "git fetch --depth" was broken in at least three ways. The
+ resulting history was deeper than specified by one commit, it was
+ unclear how to wipe the shallowness of the repository with the
+ command, and documentation was misleading.
+ (merge cfb70e1 nd/fetch-depth-is-broken later to maint).
+
+ * "git log --all -p" that walked refs/notes/textconv/ ref can later
+ try to use the textconv data incorrectly after it gets freed.
+
+ * We forgot to close the file descriptor reading from "gpg" output,
+ killing "git log --show-signature" on a long history.
* The way "git svn" asked for password using SSH_ASKPASS and
GIT_ASKPASS was not in line with the rest of the system.
- (merge e9263e4 ss/svn-prompt later to maint).
* The --graph code fell into infinite loop when asked to do what the
code did not expect.
- (merge 656197a mk/maint-graph-infinity-loop later to maint).
* http transport was wrong to ask for the username when the
authentication is done by certificate identity.
- (merge 75e9a40 rb/http-cert-cred-no-username-prompt later to maint).
* "git pack-refs" that ran in parallel to another process that
created new refs had a nasty race.
- (merge b3f1280 jk/repack-ref-racefix later to maint).
+
+ * Rebasing the history of superproject with change in the submodule
+ has been broken since v1.7.12.
* After "git add -N" and then writing a tree object out of the
index, the cache-tree data structure got corrupted.
- (merge eec3e7e nd/invalidate-i-t-a-cache-tree later to maint).
+
+ * "git clone" used to allow --bare and --separate-git-dir=$there
+ options at the same time, which was nonsensical.
+
+ * "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.
+
+ * "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.
+
+ * 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.
+
+ * 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.
+
+ * "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.
* 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.
+
+ * "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 50995ed 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.
- (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.
+
+ * 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 55d9bf0 ct/autoconf-htmldir later to maint).
+
+ * A change made on v1.8.1.x maintenance track had a nasty regression
+ to break the build when autoconf is used.
+ (merge 7f1b697 jn/less-reconfigure later to maint).
+
+ * 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.
+
+ * 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.
+
+ * Scripts to test bash completion was inherently flaky as it was
+ affected by whatever random things the user may have on $PATH.
+
+ * An element on GIT_CEILING_DIRECTORIES could be a "logical" pathname
+ that uses a symbolic link to point at somewhere else (e.g. /home/me
+ that points at /net/host/export/home/me, and the latter directory
+ is automounted). Earlier when Git saw such a pathname e.g. /home/me
+ on this environment variable, the "ceiling" mechanism did not take
+ effect. With this release (the fix has also been merged to the
+ v1.8.1.x maintenance series), elements on GIT_CEILING_DIRECTORIES
+ are by default checked for such aliasing coming from symbolic
+ links. As this needs to actually resolve symbolic links for each
+ element on the GIT_CEILING_DIRECTORIES, you can disable this
+ mechanism for some elements by listing them after an empty element
+ on the GIT_CEILING_DIRECTORIES. e.g. Setting /home/me::/home/him to
+ GIT_CEILING_DIRECTORIES makes Git resolve symbolic links in
+ /home/me when checking if the current directory is under /home/me,
+ but does not do so for /home/him.
+ (merge 7ec30aa mh/maint-ceil-absolute later to maint).