-Git v1.9 Release Notes
-======================
-
-Backward compatibility notes
-----------------------------
-
-"git submodule foreach $cmd $args" used to treat "$cmd $args" the same
-way "ssh" did, concatenating them into a single string and letting the
-shell unquote. Careless users who forget to sufficiently quote $args
-get their argument split at $IFS whitespaces by the shell, and got
-unexpected results due to this. Starting from this release, the
-command line is passed directly to the shell, if it has an argument.
-
-Read-only support for experimental loose-object format, in which users
-could optionally choose to write their loose objects for a short
-while between v1.4.3 and v1.5.3 era, has been dropped.
-
-The meanings of the "--tags" option to "git fetch" has changed; the
-command fetches tags _in addition to_ what is fetched by the same
-command line without the option.
-
-The way "git push $there $what" interprets the $what part given on the
-command line, when it does not have a colon that explicitly tells us
-what ref at the $there repository is to be updated, has been enhanced.
-
-A handful of ancient commands that have long been deprecated are
-finally gone (repo-config, tar-tree, lost-found, and peek-remote).
-
-
-Backward compatibility notes (for Git 2.0)
-------------------------------------------
-
-When "git push [$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). In Git 2.0, the default will change to the "simple"
-semantics, which pushes:
-
- - only the current branch to the branch with the same name, and only
- when the current branch is set to integrate with that remote
- branch, if you are pushing to the same remote as you fetch from; or
-
- - only the current branch to the branch with the same name, if you
- are pushing to a remote that is not where you usually fetch from.
-
-Use the 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 the variable 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") is run inside a subdirectory and
-does not specify which paths to add on the command line, it
-will operate on the entire tree in Git 2.0 for consistency
-with "git commit -a" and other commands. There will be no
-mechanism to make plain "git add -u" behave like "git add -u .".
-Current users of "git add -u" (without a pathspec) should start
-training their fingers to explicitly say "git add -u ."
-before Git 2.0 comes. A warning is issued when these commands are
-run without a pathspec and when you have local changes outside the
-current directory, because the behaviour in Git 2.0 will be different
-from today's version in such a situation.
-
-In Git 2.0, "git add <path>" will behave as "git add -A <path>", so
-that "git add dir/" will notice paths you removed from the directory
-and record the removal. Versions before Git 2.0, including this
-release, will keep ignoring removals, but the users who rely on this
-behaviour are encouraged to start using "git add --ignore-removal <path>"
-now before 2.0 is released.
-
-The default prefix for "git svn" will change in Git 2.0. For a long
-time, "git svn" created its remote-tracking branches directly under
-refs/remotes, but it will place them under refs/remotes/origin/ unless
-it is told otherwise with its --prefix option.
-
-
-Updates since v1.8.5
---------------------
-
-Foreign interfaces, subsystems and ports.
-
- * The HTTP transport, when talking GSS-Negotiate, uses "100
- Continue" response to avoid having to rewind and resend a large
- payload, which may not be always doable.
-
- * Various bugfixes to remote-bzr and remote-hg (in contrib/).
-
- * The build procedure is aware of MirBSD now.
-
- * Various "git p4", "git svn" and "gitk" updates.
-
-
-UI, Workflows & Features
-
- * Fetching from a shallowly-cloned repository used to be forbidden,
- primarily because the codepaths involved were not carefully vetted
- and we did not bother supporting such usage. This release attempts
- to allow object transfer out of a shallowly-cloned repository in a
- more controlled way (i.e. the receiver becomes a shallow repository
- with a truncated history).
-
- * Just like we give a reasonable default for "less" via the LESS
- environment variable, we now specify a reasonable default for "lv"
- via the "LV" environment variable when spawning the pager.
-
- * Two-level configuration variable names in "branch.*" and "remote.*"
- hierarchies, whose variables are predominantly three-level, were
- not completed by hitting a <TAB> in bash and zsh completions.
-
- * Fetching a 'frotz' branch with "git fetch", while a 'frotz/nitfol'
- remote-tracking branch from an earlier fetch was still there, would
- error out, primarily because the command was not told that it is
- allowed to lose any information on our side. "git fetch --prune"
- now can be used to remove 'frotz/nitfol' to make room for fetching and
- storing the 'frotz' remote-tracking branch.
-
- * "diff.orderfile=<file>" configuration variable can be used to
- pretend as if the "-O<file>" option were given from the command
- line of "git diff", etc.
-
- * The negative pathspec syntax allows "git log -- . ':!dir'" to tell
- us "I am interested in everything but 'dir' directory".
-
- * "git difftool" shows how many different paths there are in total,
- and how many of them have been shown so far, to indicate progress.
-
- * "git push origin master" used to push our 'master' branch to update
- the 'master' branch at the 'origin' repository. This has been
- enhanced to use the same ref mapping "git push origin" would use to
- determine what ref at the 'origin' to be updated with our 'master'.
- For example, with this configuration
-
- [remote "origin"]
- push = refs/heads/*:refs/review/*
-
- that would cause "git push origin" to push out our local branches
- to corresponding refs under refs/review/ hierarchy at 'origin',
- "git push origin master" would update 'refs/review/master' over
- there. Alternatively, if push.default is set to 'upstream' and our
- 'master' is set to integrate with 'topic' from the 'origin' branch,
- running "git push origin" while on our 'master' would update their
- 'topic' branch, and running "git push origin master" while on any
- of our branches does the same.
-
- * "gitweb" learned to treat ref hierarchies other than refs/heads as
- if they are additional branch namespaces (e.g. refs/changes/ in
- Gerrit).
-
- * "git for-each-ref --format=..." learned a few formatting directives;
- e.g. "%(color:red)%(HEAD)%(color:reset) %(refname:short) %(subject)".
-
- * The command string given to "git submodule foreach" is passed
- directly to the shell, without being eval'ed. This is a backward
- incompatible change that may break existing users.
-
- * "git log" and friends learned the "--exclude=<glob>" option, to
- allow people to say "list history of all branches except those that
- match this pattern" with "git log --exclude='*/*' --branches".
-
- * "git rev-parse --parseopt" learned a new "--stuck-long" option to
- help scripts parse options with an optional parameter.
-
- * The "--tags" option to "git fetch" no longer tells the command to
- fetch _only_ the tags. It instead fetches tags _in addition to_
- what are fetched by the same command line without the option.
-
-
-Performance, Internal Implementation, etc.
-
- * When parsing a 40-hex string into the object name, the string is
- checked to see if it can be interpreted as a ref so that a warning
- can be given for ambiguity. The code kicked in even when the
- core.warnambiguousrefs is set to false to squelch this warning, in
- which case the cycles spent to look at the ref namespace were an
- expensive no-op, as the result was discarded without being used.
-
- * The naming convention of the packfiles has been updated; it used to
- be based on the enumeration of names of the objects that are
- contained in the pack, but now it also depends on how the packed
- result is represented---packing the same set of objects using
- different settings (or delta order) would produce a pack with
- different name.
-
- * "git diff --no-index" mode used to unnecessarily attempt to read
- the index when there is one.
-
- * The deprecated parse-options macro OPT_BOOLEAN has been removed;
- use OPT_BOOL or OPT_COUNTUP in new code.
-
- * A few duplicate implementations of prefix/suffix string comparison
- functions have been unified to starts_with() and ends_with().
-
- * The new PERLLIB_EXTRA makefile variable can be used to specify
- additional directories Perl modules (e.g. the ones necessary to run
- git-svn) are installed on the platform when building.
-
- * "git merge-base" learned the "--fork-point" mode, that implements
- the same logic used in "git pull --rebase" to find a suitable fork
- point out of the reflog entries for the remote-tracking branch the
- work has been based on. "git rebase" has the same logic that can be
- triggered with the "--fork-point" option.
-
- * A third-party "receive-pack" (the responder to "git push") can
- advertise the "no-thin" capability to tell "git push" not to use
- the thin-pack optimization. Our receive-pack has always been
- capable of accepting and fattening a thin-pack, and will continue
- not to ask "git push" to use a non-thin pack.
-
-
-Also contains various documentation updates and code clean-ups.
-
-
-Fixes since v1.8.5
-------------------
-
-Unless otherwise noted, all the fixes since v1.8.5 in the maintenance
-track are contained in this release (see the maintenance releases' notes
-for details).
-
- * The pathspec matching code, while comparing two trees (e.g. "git
- diff A B -- path1 path2") was too aggressive and failed to match
- some paths when multiple pathspecs were involved.
- (merge e4ddb05 as/tree-walk-fix-aggressive-short-cut later to maint).
-
- * "git repack --max-pack-size=8g" stopped being parsed correctly when
- the command was reimplemented in C.
- (merge b861e23 sb/repack-in-c later to maint).
-
- * An earlier update in v1.8.4.x to "git rev-list --objects" with
- negative ref had a performance regression.
- (merge 200abe7 jk/mark-edges-uninteresting later to maint).
-
- * A recent update to "git send-email" broke platforms where
- /etc/ssl/certs/ directory exists but cannot be used as SSL_ca_path
- (e.g. Fedora rawhide).
- (merge 01645b7 rk/send-email-ssl-cert later to maint).
-
- * A handful of bugs around interpreting $branch@{upstream} notation
- and its lookalike, when $branch part has interesting characters,
- e.g. "@", and ":", have been fixed.
- (merge 9892d5d jk/interpret-branch-name-fix later to maint).
-
- * "git clone" would fail to clone from a repository that has a ref
- directly under "refs/", e.g. "refs/stash", because different
- validation paths do different things on such a refname. Loosen the
- client side's validation to allow such a ref.
- (merge 4c22408 jk/allow-fetch-onelevel-refname later to maint).
-
- * "git log --left-right A...B" lost the "leftness" of commits
- reachable from A when A is a tag as a side effect of a recent
- bugfix. This is a regression in 1.8.4.x series.
- (merge a743528 jc/revision-range-unpeel later to maint).
-
- * documentations to "git pull" hinted there is an "-m" option because
- it incorrectly shared the documentation with "git merge".
- (merge 08f19cf jc/maint-pull-docfix later to maint).
-
- * "git diff A B submod" and "git diff A B submod/" ought to have done
- the same for a submodule "submod", but didn't.
-
- * "git clone $origin foo\bar\baz" on Windows failed to create the
- leading directories (i.e. a moral-equivalent of "mkdir -p").
-
- * "submodule.*.update=checkout", when propagated from .gitmodules to
- .git/config, turned into a "submodule.*.update=none", which did not
- make much sense.
- (merge efa8fd7 fp/submodule-checkout-mode later to maint).
-
- * The implementation of 'git stash $cmd "stash@{...}"' did not quote
- the stash argument properly and left it split at IFS whitespace.
- (merge 2a07e43 ow/stash-with-ifs later to maint).
-
- * The "--[no-]informative-errors" options to "git daemon" were parsed
- a bit too loosely, allowing any other string after these option
- names.
- (merge 82246b7 nd/daemon-informative-errors-typofix later to maint).
-
- * There is no reason to have a hardcoded upper limit for the number of
- parents of an octopus merge, created via the graft mechanism, but
- there was.
- (merge e228c17 js/lift-parent-count-limit later to maint).
-
- * The basic test used to leave unnecessary trash directories in the
- t/ directory.
- (merge 738a8be jk/test-framework-updates later to maint).
-
- * "git merge-base --octopus" used to leave cleaning up suboptimal
- result to the caller, but now it does the clean-up itself.
- (merge 8f29299 bm/merge-base-octopus-dedup later to maint).
-
- * A "gc" process running as a different user should be able to stop a
- new "gc" process from starting, but it didn't.
- (merge ed7eda8 km/gc-eperm later to maint).
-
- * An earlier "clean-up" introduced an unnecessary memory leak.
- (merge e1c1a32 jk/credential-plug-leak later to maint).
-
- * "git add -A" (no other arguments) in a totally empty working tree
- used to emit an error.
- (merge 64ed07c nd/add-empty-fix later to maint).
-
- * "git log --decorate" did not handle a tag pointed by another tag
- nicely.
- (merge 5e1361c bc/log-decoration later to maint).
-
- * When we figure out how many file descriptors to allocate for
- keeping packfiles open, a system with non-working getrlimit() could
- cause us to die(), but because we make this call only to get a
- rough estimate of how many are available and we do not even attempt
- to use up all available file descriptors ourselves, it is nicer to
- fall back to a reasonable low value rather than dying.
- (merge 491a8de jh/rlimit-nofile-fallback later to maint).
-
- * read_sha1_file(), that is the workhorse to read the contents given
- an object name, honoured object replacements, but there was no
- corresponding mechanism to sha1_object_info() that was used to
- obtain the metainfo (e.g. type & size) about the object. This led
- callers to weird inconsistencies.
- (merge 663a856 cc/replace-object-info later to maint).
-
- * "git cat-file --batch=", an admittedly useless command, did not
- behave very well.
- (merge 6554dfa jk/cat-file-regression-fix later to maint).
-
- * "git rev-parse <revs> -- <paths>" did not implement the usual
- disambiguation rules the commands in the "git log" family used in
- the same way.
- (merge 62f162f jk/rev-parse-double-dashes later to maint).
-
- * "git mv A B/", when B does not exist as a directory, should error
- out, but it didn't.
- (merge c57f628 mm/mv-file-to-no-such-dir-with-slash later to maint).
-
- * A workaround to an old bug in glibc prior to glibc 2.17 has been
- retired; this would remove a side effect of the workaround that
- corrupts system error messages in non-C locales.
-
- * SSL-related options were not passed correctly to underlying socket
- layer in "git send-email".
- (merge 5508f3e tr/send-email-ssl later to maint).
-
- * "git commit -v" appends the patch to the log message before
- editing, and then removes the patch when the editor returned
- control. However, the patch was not stripped correctly when the
- first modified path was a submodule.
- (merge 1a72cfd jl/commit-v-strip-marker later to maint).
-
- * "git fetch --depth=0" was a no-op, and was silently ignored.
- Diagnose it as an error.
- (merge 5594bca nd/transport-positive-depth-only later to maint).
-
- * Remote repository URLs expressed in scp-style host:path notation are
- parsed more carefully (e.g. "foo/bar:baz" is local, "[::1]:/~user" asks
- to connect to user's home directory on host at address ::1.
- (merge a2036d7 tb/clone-ssh-with-colon-for-port later to maint).
-
- * "git diff -- ':(icase)makefile'" was unnecessarily rejected at the
- command line parser.
- (merge 887c6c1 nd/magic-pathspec later to maint).
-
- * "git cat-file --batch-check=ok" did not check the existence of
- the named object.
- (merge 4ef8d1d sb/sha1-loose-object-info-check-existence later to maint).
-
- * "git am --abort" sometimes complained about not being able to write
- a tree with an 0{40} object in it.
- (merge 77b43ca jk/two-way-merge-corner-case-fix later to maint).
-
- * Two processes creating loose objects at the same time could have
- failed unnecessarily when the name of their new objects started
- with the same byte value, due to a race condition.
- (merge b2476a6 jh/loose-object-dirs-creation-race later to maint).