Backward compatibility notes
----------------------------
-In the next major release, we will change the behaviour of the "git
-push" command. When "git push [$there]" does not say what to push, we
-have used the traditional "matching" semantics (all your branches were
-sent to the remote as long as there already are branches of the same
-name over there). We will use the "simple" semantics, that pushes the
-current branch to the branch with the same name only when the current
+In the next major release (not *this* one), we will change the
+behavior of the "git push" command.
+
+When "git push [$there]" does not say what to push, we have used the
+traditional "matching" semantics so far (all your branches were sent
+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, and
"git push" will warn about the upcoming change until you set this
-variable.
+variable in this release.
+
+"git branch --set-upstream" is deprecated and may be removed in a
+relatively distant future. "git branch [-u|--set-upstream-to]" has
+been introduced with a saner order of arguments.
Updates since v1.7.12
* A credential helper for Win32 to allow access to the keychain of
the logged-in user has been added.
+ * An initial port to HP NonStop.
+
+ * A credential helper to allow access to the Gnome keyring has been
+ added.
+
+ * When "git am" sanitizes the "Subject:" line, we strip the prefix from
+ "Re: subject" and also from a less common "re: subject", but left
+ the even less common "RE: subject" intact. Now we strip that too.
+
+ * It was tempting to say "git branch --set-upstream origin/master",
+ but that tells Git to arrange the local branch "origin/master" to
+ integrate with the currently checked out branch, which is highly
+ unlikely what the user meant. The option is deprecated; use the
+ new "--set-upstream-to" (with a short-and-sweet "-u") option
+ instead.
+
+ * "git cherry-pick" learned the "--allow-empty-message" option to
+ allow it to replay a commit without any log message.
+
+ * After "git cherry-pick -s" gave control back to the user asking
+ help to resolve conflicts, concluding "git commit" used to need to
+ be run with "-s" if the user wants to sign it off; now the command
+ leaves the sign-off line in the log template.
+
+ * "git daemon" learned the "--access-hook" option to allow an
+ external command to decline service based on the client address,
+ repository path, etc.
+
* "git difftool --dir-diff" learned to use symbolic links to prepare
- temporary copy of the working tree when available.
+ a temporary copy of the working tree when available.
* "git grep" learned to use a non-standard pattern type by default if
a configuration variable tells it to.
+ * Accumulated updates to "git gui" has been merged.
+
+ * "git log -g" learned the "--grep-reflog=<pattern>" option to limit
+ its output to commits with a reflog message that matches the given
+ pattern.
+
+ * "git merge-base" learned the "--is-ancestor A B" option to tell if A is
+ an ancestor of B. The result is indicated by its exit status code.
+
+ * "git mergetool" now allows users to override the actual command used
+ with the mergetool.$name.cmd configuration variable even for built-in
+ mergetool backends.
+
+ * "git rebase -i" learned the "--edit-todo" option to open an editor
+ to edit the instruction sheet.
+
+
Foreign Interface
* "git svn" has been updated to work with SVN 1.7.
-Performance, Internal Implementation, etc. (please report possible regressions)
+ * "git p4" learned the "--conflicts" option to specify what to do when
+ encountering a conflict during "p4 submit".
+
+
+Performance, Internal Implementation, etc.
+
+ * Git ships with a fall-back regexp implementation for platforms with
+ buggy regexp library, but it was easy for people to keep using their
+ platform regexp by mistake. A new test has been added to check this.
* The "check-docs" build target has been updated and greatly
simplified.
+ * The test suite is run under MALLOC_CHECK_ when running with a glibc
+ that supports the feature.
+
* The documentation in the TeXinfo format was using indented output
for materials meant to be examples that are better typeset in
monospace.
+ * Compatibility wrapper around some mkdir(2) implementations that
+ reject parameters with trailing slash has been introduced.
+
+ * Compatibility wrapper for systems that lack usable setitimer() has
+ been added.
+
+ * The option parsing of "git checkout" had error checking, dwim and
+ defaulting missing options, all mixed in the code, and issuing an
+ appropriate error message with useful context was getting harder.
+ The code has been reorganized to allow giving a proper diagnosis
+ when the user says "git checkout -b -t foo bar" (e.g. "-t" is not a
+ good name for a branch).
+
+ * Many internal uses of a "git merge-base" equivalent were only to see
+ if one commit fast-forwards to the other, which did not need the
+ full set of merge bases to be computed. They have been updated to
+ use less expensive checks.
+
+ * The heuristics to detect and silently convert latin1 to utf8 when
+ we were told to use utf-8 in the log message has been transplanted
+ from "mailinfo" to "commit" and "commit-tree".
+
+ * Messages given by "git <subcommand> -h" from many subcommands have
+ been marked for translation.
+
+
Also contains minor documentation updates and code clean-ups.
maintenance track are contained in this release (see release notes
to them for details).
- * Code to work around MacOS X UTF-8 gotcha has been cleaned up.
- (merge 9a27f96 rr/precompose-utf8-cleanup later to maint).
-
- * Documentation for the configuration file format had a confusing
- example.
- (merge d1e1fe7 mh/maint-config-doc-proxy-command later to maint).
-
- * "git submodule <cmd> path" did not error out when the path to the
- submodule was misspelt.
- (merge be9d0a3 hv/submodule-path-unmatch later to maint).
-
- * Some capabilities were asked by fetch-pack even when upload-pack
- did not advertise that they are available. fetch-pack has been
- fixed not to do so.
-
- * The reflog entries left by "git rebase" and "git rebase -i" were
- inconsistent (the interactive one gave an abbreviated object name).
- (merge 1af221e mg/rebase-i-onto-reflog-in-full later to maint).
-
- * When the user exports a non-default IFS without HT, scripts that
- rely on being able to parse "ls-files -s | while read a b c..."
- start to fail. Protect them from such a misconfiguration.
- (merge 785063e jc/maint-protect-sh-from-ifs later to maint).
-
- * "git prune" without "-v" used to warn about leftover temporary
- files (which is an indication of an earlier aborted operation).
- (merge 90b29cb bc/prune-info later to maint).
-
- * When "git push" triggered the automatic gc on the receiving end, a
- message from "git prune" that said it was removing cruft leaked to
- the standard output, breaking the communication protocol.
- (merge 4b7f2fa bc/receive-pack-stdout-protection later to maint).
-
- * "git diff" had a confusion between taking data from a path in the
- working tree and taking data from an object that happens to have
- name 0{40} recorded in a tree.
- (merge c479d14 jk/maint-null-in-trees later to maint).
-
- * The output from "git diff -B" for a file that ends with an
- incomplete line did not put "\ No newline..." on a line of its own.
-
- * "git send-email" did not unquote encoded words that appear on the
- header correctly, and lost "_" from strings.
- (merge b622d4d tr/maint-send-email-2047 later to maint).
-
- * When the user gives an argument that can be taken as both a
- revision name and a pathname without disambiguating with "--", we
- used to give a help message "Use '--' to separate". The message
- has been clarified to show where that '--' goes on the command
- line.
- (merge 4d4b573 mm/die-with-dashdash-help later to maint).
-
- * "gitweb" when used with PATH_INFO failed to notice directories with
- SP (and other characters that need URL-style quoting) in them.
- (merge cacfc09 js/gitweb-path-info-unquote later to maint).
+ * The attribute system may be asked for a path that itself or its
+ leading directories no longer exists in the working tree, and it is
+ fine if we cannot open .gitattribute file in such a case. Failure
+ to open per-directory .gitattributes with error status other than
+ ENOENT and ENOTDIR should be diagnosed, but it wasn't.
+
+ * When looking for $HOME/.gitconfig etc., it is OK if we cannot read
+ them because they do not exist, but we did not diagnose existing
+ files that we cannot read.
+
+ * When "git am" is fed an input that has multiple "Content-type: ..."
+ header, it did not grok charset= attribute correctly.
+
+ * "git am" mishandled a patch attached as application/octet-stream
+ (e.g. not text/*); Content-Transfer-Encoding (e.g. base64) was not
+ honored correctly.
+
+ * "git blame MAKEFILE" run in a history that has "Makefile" but not
+ "MAKEFILE" should say "No such file MAKEFILE in HEAD", but got
+ confused on a case insensitive filesystem and failed to do so.
+
+ * Even during a conflicted merge, "git blame $path" always meant to
+ blame uncommitted changes to the "working tree" version; make it
+ more useful by showing cleanly merged parts as coming from the other
+ branch that is being merged.
+
+ * It was unclear in the documentation for "git blame" that it is
+ unnecessary for users to use the "--follow" option.
+
+ * Output from "git branch -v" contains "(no branch)" that could be
+ localized, but the code to align it along with the names of
+ branches was counting in bytes, not in display columns.
+
+ * "git cherry-pick A C B" used to replay changes in A and then B and
+ then C if these three commits had committer timestamps in that
+ order, which is not what the user who said "A C B" naturally
+ expects.
+
+ * A repository created with "git clone --single" had its fetch
+ refspecs set up just like a clone without "--single", leading the
+ subsequent "git fetch" to slurp all the other branches, defeating
+ the whole point of specifying "only this branch".
+
+ * Documentation talked about "first line of commit log" when it meant
+ the title of the commit. The description was clarified by defining
+ how the title is decided and rewording the casual mention of "first
+ line" to "title".
+
+ * "git cvsimport" did not thoroughly cleanse tag names that it
+ inferred from the names of the tags it obtained from CVS, which
+ caused "git tag" to barf and stop the import in the middle.
+
+ * Earlier we made the diffstat summary line that shows the number of
+ lines added/deleted localizable, but it was found irritating having
+ to see them in various languages on a list whose discussion language
+ is English, and this change has been reverted.
+
+ * "git fetch --all", when passed "--no-tags", did not honor the
+ "--no-tags" option while fetching from individual remotes (the same
+ issue existed with "--tags", but the combination "--all --tags" makes
+ much less sense than "--all --no-tags").
+
+ * "git fetch" over http had an old workaround for an unlikely server
+ misconfiguration; it turns out that this hurts debuggability of the
+ configuration in general, and has been reverted.
+
+ * "git fetch" over http advertised that it supports "deflate", which
+ is much less common, and did not advertise the more common "gzip" on
+ its Accept-Encoding header.
+
+ * "git fetch" over the dumb-http revision walker could segfault when
+ curl's multi interface was used.
+
+ * "git gc --auto" notified the user that auto-packing has triggered
+ even under the "--quiet" option.
+
+ * After "gitk" showed the contents of a tag, neither "Reread
+ references" nor "Reload" updated what is shown as the
+ contents of it when the user overwrote the tag with "git tag -f".
+
+ * "git log --all-match --grep=A --grep=B" ought to show commits that
+ mention both A and B, but when these three options are used with
+ --author or --committer, it showed commits that mention either A or
+ B (or both) instead.
+
+ * The "-Xours" backend option to "git merge -s recursive" was ignored
+ for binary files.
+
+ * "git p4", when "--use-client-spec" and "--detect-branches" are used
+ together, misdetected branches.
+
+ * "git receive-pack" (the counterpart to "git push") did not give
+ progress output while processing objects it received to the puser
+ when run over the smart-http protocol.
+
+ * When you misspell the command name you give to the "exec" action in
+ the "git rebase -i" instruction sheet you were told that 'rebase' is not a
+ git subcommand from "git rebase --continue".
+
+ * The subcommand in "git remote" to remove a defined remote was
+ "rm" and the command did not take a fully-spelled "remove".
+
+ * The interactive prompt that "git send-email" gives was error prone. It
+ asked "What e-mail address do you want to use?" with the address it
+ guessed (correctly) the user would want to use in its prompt,
+ tempting the user to say "y". But the response was taken as "No,
+ please use 'y' as the e-mail address instead", which is most
+ certainly not what the user meant.
+
+ * "git show --format='%ci'" did not give the timestamp correctly for
+ commits created without human readable name on the "committer" line.
+
+ * "git show --quiet" ought to be a synonym for "git show -s", but
+ wasn't.
+
+ * "git submodule frotz" was not diagnosed as "frotz" being an unknown
+ subcommand to "git submodule"; the user instead got a complaint
+ that "git submodule status" was run with an unknown path "frotz".
+
+ * "git status" honored the ignore=dirty settings in .gitmodules but
+ "git commit" didn't.
+
+ * "gitweb" did not give the correct committer timezone in its feed
+ output due to a typo.