1Git v1.8.2 Release Notes 2======================== 3 4Backward compatibility notes 5---------------------------- 6 7In the upcoming major release (tentatively called 1.8.2), we will 8change the behavior of the "git push" command. 9 10When "git push [$there]" does not say what to push, we have used the 11traditional "matching" semantics so far (all your branches were sent 12to the remote as long as there already are branches of the same name 13over there). We will use the "simple" semantics that pushes the 14current branch to the branch with the same name, only when the current 15branch is set to integrate with that remote branch. There is a user 16preference configuration variable "push.default" to change this. 17 18"git push $there tag v1.2.3" used to allow replacing a tag v1.2.3 19that already exists in the repository $there, if the rewritten tag 20you are pushing points at a commit that is a decendant of a commit 21that the old tag v1.2.3 points at. This was found to be error prone 22and starting with this release, any attempt to update an existing 23ref under refs/tags/ hierarchy will fail, without "--force". 24 25 26Updates since v1.8.1 27-------------------- 28 29UI, Workflows & Features 30 31 * Initial ports to QNX and z/OS UNIX System Services have started. 32 33 * Output from the tests is coloured using "green is okay, yellow is 34 questionable, red is bad and blue is informative" scheme. 35 36 * In bare repositories, "git shortlog" and other commands now read 37 mailmap files from the tip of the history, to help running these 38 tools in server settings. 39 40 * Color specifiers, e.g. "%C(blue)Hello%C(reset)", used in the 41 "--format=" option of "git log" and friends can be disabled when 42 the output is not sent to a terminal by prefixing them with 43 "auto,", e.g. "%C(auto,blue)Hello%C(auto,reset)". 44 45 * Scripts can ask Git that wildcard patterns in pathspecs they give do 46 not have any significance, i.e. take them as literal strings. 47 48 * The patterns in .gitignore and .gitattributes files can have **/, 49 as a pattern that matches 0 or more levels of subdirectory. 50 E.g. "foo/**/bar" matches "bar" in "foo" itself or in a 51 subdirectory of "foo". 52 53 * "git blame" (and "git diff") learned the "--no-follow" option. 54 55 * "git check-ignore" command to help debugging .gitignore files has 56 been added. 57 58 * "git cherry-pick" can be used to replay a root commit to an unborn 59 branch. 60 61 * "git commit" can be told to use --cleanup=whitespace by setting the 62 configuration variable commit.cleanup to 'whitespace'. 63 64 * "git fetch --mirror" and fetch that uses other forms of refspec 65 with wildcard used to attempt to update a symbolic ref that match 66 the wildcard on the receiving end, which made little sense (the 67 real ref that is pointed at by the symbolic ref would be updated 68 anyway). Symbolic refs no longer are affected by such a fetch. 69 70 * "git format-patch" now detects more cases in which a whole branch 71 is being exported, and uses the description for the branch, when 72 asked to write a cover letter for the series. 73 74 * "git format-patch" learned "-v $count" option, and prepends a 75 string "v$count-" to the names of its output files, and also 76 automatically sets the subject prefix to "PATCH v$count". This 77 allows patches from rerolled series to be stored under different 78 names and makes it easier to reuse cover letter messsages. 79 80 * "git log" and friends can be told with --use-mailmap option to 81 rewrite the names and email addresses of people using the mailmap 82 mechanism. 83 84 * "git push" now requires "-f" to update a tag, even if it is a 85 fast-forward, as tags are meant to be fixed points. 86 87 * "git push" will stop without doing anything if the new "pre-push" 88 hook exists and exits with a failure. 89 90 * When "git rebase" fails to generate patches to be applied (e.g. due 91 to oom), it failed to detect the failure and instead behaved as if 92 there were nothing to do. A workaround to use a temporary file has 93 been applied, but we probably would want to revisit this later, as 94 it hurts the common case of not failing at all. 95 96 * Input and preconditions to "git reset" has been loosened where 97 appropriate. "git reset $fromtree Makefile" requires $fromtree to 98 be any tree (it used to require it to be a commit), for example. 99 "git reset" (without options or parameters) used to error out when 100 you do not have any commits in your history, but it now gives you 101 an empty index (to match non-existent commit you are not even on). 102 103 * "git submodule" started learning a new mode to integrate with the 104 tip of the remote branch (as opposed to integrating with the commit 105 recorded in the superproject's gitlink). 106 107 108Foreign Interface 109 110 * "git fast-export" has been updated for its use in the context of 111 the remote helper interface. 112 113 * A new remote helper to interact with bzr has been added to contrib/. 114 115 * "git p4" got various bugfixes around its branch handling. 116 117 * The remote helper to interact with Hg in contrib/ has seen a few 118 fixes. 119 120 121Performance, Internal Implementation, etc. 122 123 * "git fsck" has been taught to be pickier about entries in tree 124 objects that should not be there, e.g. ".", ".git", and "..". 125 126 * Matching paths with common forms of pathspecs that contain wildcard 127 characters has been optimized further. 128 129 * "git reset" internals has been reworked and should be faster in 130 general. We tried to be careful not to break any behaviour but 131 there could be corner cases, especially when running the command 132 from a conflicted state, that we may have missed. 133 134 * The implementation of "imap-send" has been updated to reuse xml 135 quoting code from http-push codepath, and lost a lot of unused 136 code. 137 138 * There is a simple-minded checker for the test scripts in t/ 139 directory to catch most common mistakes (it is not enabled by 140 default). 141 142 * You can build with USE_WILDMATCH=YesPlease to use a replacement 143 implementation of pattern matching logic used for pathname-like 144 things, e.g. refnames and paths in the repository. This new 145 implementation is not expected change the existing behaviour of Git 146 in this release, except for "git for-each-ref" where you can now 147 say "refs/**/master" and match with both refs/heads/master and 148 refs/remotes/origin/master. We plan to use this new implementation 149 in wider places (e.g. "git ls-files '**/Makefile' may find Makefile 150 at the top-level, and "git log '**/t*.sh'" may find commits that 151 touch a shell script whose name begins with "t" at any level) in 152 future versions of Git, but we are not there yet. By building with 153 USE_WILDMATCH, using the resulting Git daily and reporting when you 154 find breakages, you can help us get closer to that goal. 155 156 157Also contains minor documentation updates and code clean-ups. 158 159 160Fixes since v1.8.1 161------------------ 162 163Unless otherwise noted, all the fixes since v1.8.1 in the maintenance 164track are contained in this release (see release notes to them for 165details). 166 167 * An element on GIT_CEILING_DIRECTORIES list that does not name the 168 real path to a directory (i.e. a symbolic link) could have caused 169 the GIT_DIR discovery logic to escape the ceiling. 170 (merge 059b379 mh/ceiling later to maint). 171 172 * When attempting to read the XDG-style $HOME/.config/git/config and 173 finding that $HOME/.config/git is a file, we gave a wrong error 174 message, instead of treating the case as "a custom config file does 175 not exist there" and moving on. 176 (merge 8f2bbe4 jn/warn-on-inaccessible-loosen later to maint). 177 178 * The behaviour visible to the end users was confusing, when they 179 attempt to kill a process spawned in the editor that was in turn 180 launched by Git with SIGINT (or SIGQUIT), as Git would catch that 181 signal and die. We ignore these signals now. 182 (merge 1250857 pf/editor-ignore-sigint later to maint). 183 184 * A child process that was killed by a signal (e.g. SIGINT) was 185 reported in an inconsistent way depending on how the process was 186 spawned by us, with or without a shell in between. 187 (merge 709ca73 jk/unify-exit-code-by-receiving-signal later to maint). 188 189 * After failing to create a temporary file using mkstemp(), failing 190 pathname was not reported correctly on some platforms. 191 (merge f7be59b jc/mkstemp-more-careful-error-reporting later to maint). 192 193 * The attribute mechanism didn't allow limiting attributes to be 194 applied to only a single directory itself with "path/" like the 195 exclude mechanism does. The initial implementation of this that 196 was merged to 'maint' and 1.8.1.2 was with a severe performance 197 degradations and needs to merge a fix-up topic. 198 (merge 9db9eec nd/fix-directory-attrs-off-by-one later to maint). 199 200 * "git apply" misbehaved when fixing whitespace breakages by removing 201 excess trailing blank lines. 202 (merge 5de7166 jc/apply-trailing-blank-removal later to maint). 203 204 * A tar archive created by "git archive" recorded a directory in a 205 way that made NetBSD's implementation of "tar" sometimes unhappy. 206 (merge 22f0dcd rs/leave-base-name-in-name-field-of-tar later to maint). 207 208 * "git archive" did not record uncompressed size in the header when 209 streaming a zip archive, which confused some implementations of unzip. 210 (merge 5ea2c84 rs/zip-with-uncompressed-size-in-the-header later to maint). 211 212 * "git clean" showed what it was going to do, but sometimes end up 213 finding that it was not allowed to do so, which resulted in a 214 confusing output (e.g. after saying that it will remove an 215 untracked directory, it found an embedded git repository there 216 which it is not allowed to remove). It now performs the actions 217 and then reports the outcome more faithfully. 218 (merge f538a91 zk/clean-report-failure later to maint). 219 220 * When "git clone --separate-git-dir=$over_there" is interrupted, it 221 failed to remove the real location of the $GIT_DIR it created. 222 This was most visible when interrupting a submodule update. 223 (merge 9be1980 jl/interrupt-clone-remove-separate-git-dir later to maint). 224 225 * The way "git svn" asked for password using SSH_ASKPASS and 226 GIT_ASKPASS was not in line with the rest of the system. 227 (merge e9263e4 ss/svn-prompt later to maint). 228 229 * The --graph code fell into infinite loop when asked to do what the 230 code did not expect. 231 (merge 656197a mk/maint-graph-infinity-loop later to maint). 232 233 * http transport was wrong to ask for the username when the 234 authentication is done by certificate identity. 235 (merge 75e9a40 rb/http-cert-cred-no-username-prompt later to maint). 236 237 * "git pack-refs" that ran in parallel to another process that 238 created new refs had a nasty race. 239 (merge b3f1280 jk/repack-ref-racefix later to maint). 240 241 * After "git add -N" and then writing a tree object out of the 242 index, the cache-tree data structure got corrupted. 243 (merge eec3e7e nd/invalidate-i-t-a-cache-tree later to maint). 244 245 * "git clone" used to allow --bare and --separate-git-dir=$there 246 options at the same time, which was nonsensical. 247 (merge 95b63f1 nd/clone-no-separate-git-dir-with-bare later to maint). 248 249 * "git rebase --preserve-merges" lost empty merges in recent versions 250 of Git. 251 (merge 9869778 ph/rebase-preserve-all-merges later to maint). 252 253 * "git merge --no-edit" computed who were involved in the work done 254 on the side branch, even though that information is to be discarded 255 without getting seen in the editor. 256 (merge 9bcbb1c jc/maint-fmt-merge-msg-no-edit-lose-credit later to maint). 257 258 * "git merge" started calling prepare-commit-msg hook like "git 259 commit" does some time ago, but forgot to pay attention to the exit 260 status of the hook. 261 (merge 3e4141d ap/merge-stop-at-prepare-commit-msg-failure later to maint). 262 263 * When users spell "cc:" in lowercase in the fake "header" in the 264 trailer part, "git send-email" failed to pick up the addresses from 265 there. As e-mail headers field names are case insensitive, this 266 script should follow suit and treat "cc:" and "Cc:" the same way. 267 (merge 6310071 nz/send-email-headers-are-case-insensitive later to maint). 268 269 * Output from "git status --ignored" showed an unexpected interaction 270 with "--untracked". 271 (merge a45fb69 ap/status-ignored-in-ignored-directory later to maint). 272 273 * "gitweb", when sorting by age to show repositories with new 274 activities first, used to sort repositories with absolutely 275 nothing in it early, which was not very useful. 276 (merge 28dae18 md/gitweb-sort-by-age later to maint). 277 278 * "gitweb"'s code to sanitize control characters before passing it to 279 "highlight" filter lost known-to-be-safe control characters by 280 mistake. 281 (merge 0e901d2 os/gitweb-highlight-uncaptured later to maint). 282 283 * When a line to be wrapped has a solid run of non space characters 284 whose length exactly is the wrap width, "git shortlog -w" failed 285 to add a newline after such a line. 286 (merge e0db176 sp/shortlog-missing-lf later to maint). 287 288 * Command line completion leaked an unnecessary error message while 289 looking for possible matches with paths in <tree-ish>. 290 (merge ca87dd6 ds/completion-silence-in-tree-path-probe later to maint). 291 292 * Command line completion for "tcsh" emitted an unwanted space 293 after completing a single directory name. 294 (merge 92f1c04 mk/complete-tcsh later to maint). 295 296 * Some shells do not behave correctly when IFS is unset; work it 297 around by explicitly setting it to the default value. 298 (merge 393050c jc/maint-fbsd-sh-ifs-workaround later to maint). 299 300 * Some scripted programs written in Python did not get updated when 301 PYTHON_PATH changed. 302 (cherry-pick 96a4647fca54031974cd6ad1 later to maint). 303 304 * When autoconf is used, any build on a different commit always ran 305 "config.status --recheck" even when unnecessary. 306 (merge 1226504 jn/less-reconfigure later to maint). 307 308 * We have been carrying a translated and long-unmaintained copy of an 309 old version of the tutorial; removed. 310 (merge 0a85441 ta/remove-stale-translated-tut later to maint). 311 312 * t4014, t9502 and t0200 tests had various portability issues that 313 broke on OpenBSD. 314 (merge 27f6342 jc/maint-test-portability later to maint). 315 316 * t9020 and t3600 tests had various portability issues. 317 (merge 5a02966 jc/test-portability later to maint). 318 319 * t9200 runs "cvs init" on a directory that already exists, but a 320 platform can configure this fail for the current user (e.g. you 321 need to be in the cvsadmin group on NetBSD 6.0). 322 (merge 8666df0 jc/test-cvs-no-init-in-existing-dir later to maint). 323 324 * t9020 and t9810 had a few non-portable shell script construct. 325 (merge 2797914 tb/test-t9020-no-which later to maint). 326 (merge 6f4e505 tb/test-t9810-no-sed-i later to maint).