UI, Workflows & Features
+ * A new mode for push, "simple", which is a cross between "current"
+ and "upstream", has been introduced. "git push" without any refspec
+ will push the current branch out to the same name at the remote
+ repository only when it is set to track the branch with the same
+ name over there. The plan is to make this mode the new default
+ value when push.default is not configured.
+
+ * A couple of commands learned the "--column" option to produce
+ columnar output.
+
* A third-party tool "git subtree" is distributed in contrib/
+ * Error messages given when @{u} is used for a branch without its
+ upstream configured have been clatified.
+
* Even with "-q"uiet option, "checkout" used to report setting up
tracking. Also "branch" learned the "-q"uiet option to squelch
informational message.
+ * Your build platform may support hardlinks but you may prefer not to
+ use them, e.g. when installing to DESTDIR to make a tarball and
+ untarring on a filesystem that has poor support for hardlinks.
+ There is a Makefile option NO_INSTALL_HARDLINKS for you.
+
* The smart-http backend used to always override GIT_COMMITTER_*
variables with REMOTE_USER and REMOTE_ADDR, but these variables are
now preserved when set.
+ * "git am" learned the "--include" option, which is an opposite of
+ existing the "--exclude" option.
+
+ * When "git am -3" needs to fall back to an application to a
+ synthesized preimage followed by a 3-way merge, the paths that
+ needed such treatment are now reported to the end user, so that the
+ result in them can be eyeballed with extra care.
+
+ * The output from "diff/log --stat" used to always allocate 4 columns
+ to show the number of modified lines, but not anymore.
+
+ * "git difftool" learned the "--dir-diff" option to spawn external
+ diff tools that can compare two directory hierarchies at a time
+ after populating two temporary directories, instead of running an
+ instance of the external tool once per a file pair.
+
+ * The "fmt-merge-msg" command learns to list the primary contributors
+ involved in the side topic you are merging.
+
+ * "git rebase" learned to optionally keep commits that do not
+ introduce any change in the original history.
+
+ * "git push --recurse-submodules" learned to optionally look into the
+ histories of submodules bound to the superproject and push them
+ out.
+
* A 'snapshot' request to "gitweb" honors If-Modified-Since: header,
based on the commit date.
+ * "gitweb" learned to highlight the patch it outputs even more.
+
Foreign Interface
+ * "git svn" used to die with unwanted SIGPIPE when talking with HTTP
+ server that uses keep-alive.
+
+ * "git svn" learned to use platform specific authentication
+ providers, e.g. gnome-keyring, kwallet, etc.
+
+ * "git p4" has been moved out of contrib/ area and has seen more work
+ on importing labels as tags from (and exporting tags as labels to)
+ p4.
-Performance
+Performance and Internal Implementation (please report possible regressions)
+ * An experimental "version 4" format of the index file has been
+ introduced to reduce on-disk footprint and I/O overhead.
-Internal Implementation (please report possible regressions)
+ * "git archive" learned to produce its output without reading the
+ blob object it writes out in memory in its entirety.
- * Minor memory leak during unpack_trees (hence "merge" and "checkout"
- to check out another branch) has been plugged.
+ * "git index-pack" that runs when fetching or pushing objects to
+ complete the packfile on the receiving end learned to use multiple
+ threads to do its job when available.
+
+ * The code to compute hash values for lines used by the internal diff
+ engine was optimized on little-endian machines, using the same
+ trick the kernel folks came up with.
+
+ * "git apply" had some memory leaks plugged.
+
+ * Setting up a revision traversal with many starting points was
+ inefficient as these were placed in a date-order priority queue
+ one-by-one. Now they are collected in the queue unordered first,
+ and sorted immediately before getting used.
* More lower-level commands learned to use the streaming API to read
from the object store without keeping everything in core.
* Because "sh" on the user's PATH may be utterly broken on some
systems, run-command API now uses SHELL_PATH, not /bin/sh, when
- spawning an external command.
+ spawning an external command (not applicable to Windows port).
+
+ * The API to iterate over refs/ hierarchy has been tweaked to allow
+ walking only a subset of it more efficiently.
Also contains minor documentation updates and code clean-ups.
releases are contained in this release (see release notes to them for
details).
- * "git clean -d -f" (not "-d -f -f") is supposed to protect nested
- working trees of independent git repositories that exist in the
- current project working tree from getting removed, but the
- protection applied only to such working trees that are at the
- top-level of the current project by mistake.
- (merge ae2f203 jc/maint-clean-nested-worktree-in-subdir later to maint).
-
- * Rename detection logic used to match two empty files as renames
- during merge-recursive, leading unnatural mismerges.
- (merge 4f7cb99 jk/diff-no-rename-empty later to maint).
-
- * An age-old corner case bug in combine diff (only triggered with -U0
- and the hunk at the beginning of the file needs to be shown) has
- been fixed.
- (merge e5e9b56 rs/combine-diff-zero-context-at-the-beginning later to maint).
-
- * When "git commit --template F" errors out because the user did not
- touch the message, it claimed that it aborts due to "empty
- message", which was utterly wrong.
- (merge 1f08c2c jc/commit-unedited-template later to maint).
-
- * "git add -p" is not designed to deal with unmerged paths but did
- not exclude them and tried to apply funny patches only to fail.
- (merge 4066bd6 jk/add-p-skip-conflicts later to maint).
-
- * "git commit --author=$name" did not tell the name that was being
- recorded in the resulting commit to hooks, even though it does do
- so when the end user overrode the authorship via the
- "GIT_AUTHOR_NAME" environment variable.
- (merge 7dfe8ad jc/commit-hook-authorship later to maint).
-
- * The regexp configured with diff.wordregex was incorrectly reused
- across files.
- (merge 6440d34 tr/maint-word-diff-regex-sticky later to maint).
-
- * Running "notes merge --commit" failed to perform correctly when run
- from any directory inside $GIT_DIR/. When "notes merge" stops with
- conflicts, $GIT_DIR/NOTES_MERGE_WORKTREE is the place a user edits
- to resolve it.
- (merge dabba59 jh/notes-merge-in-git-dir-worktree later to maint).
+ * When a submodule repository uses alternate object store mechanism,
+ some commands that were started from the superproject did not
+ notice it and failed with "No such object" errors. The subcommands
+ of "git submodule" command that properly recursed into the
+ submodule in a separate process were OK; only the ones that cheated
+ and peeked directly into the submodule's repository from the
+ primary process were affected.
+ (merge 5e73633 hv/submodule-alt-odb later to maint).
+
+ * The directory path used in "git diff --no-index", when it recurses
+ down, was broken with a recent update after v1.7.10.1 release.
+ (merge 176a335 bp/diff-no-index-strbuf-fix later to maint).
+
+ * "git status --porcelain" ignored "--branch" option by mistake. The
+ output for "git status --branch -z" was also incorrect and did not
+ terminate the record for the current branch name with NUL as asked.
+ (merge d4a6bf1 jk/maint-status-porcelain-z-b later to maint).
+
+ * "git diff --stat" used to fully count a binary file with modified
+ execution bits whose contents is unmodified, which was not quite
+ right.