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 * When giving arguments without "--" disambiguation, object names 54 that come earlier on the command line must not be interpretable as 55 pathspecs and pathspecs that come later on the command line must 56 not be interpretable as object names. This disambiguation rule has 57 been tweaked so that ":/" (no other string before or after) is 58 always interpreted as a pathspec; "git cmd -- :/" is no longer 59 needed, you can just say "git cmd :/". 60 61 * "git blame" (and "git diff") learned the "--no-follow" option. 62 63 * "git check-ignore" command to help debugging .gitignore files has 64 been added. 65 66 * "git cherry-pick" can be used to replay a root commit to an unborn 67 branch. 68 69 * "git commit" can be told to use --cleanup=whitespace by setting the 70 configuration variable commit.cleanup to 'whitespace'. 71 72 * "git fetch --mirror" and fetch that uses other forms of refspec 73 with wildcard used to attempt to update a symbolic ref that match 74 the wildcard on the receiving end, which made little sense (the 75 real ref that is pointed at by the symbolic ref would be updated 76 anyway). Symbolic refs no longer are affected by such a fetch. 77 78 * "git format-patch" now detects more cases in which a whole branch 79 is being exported, and uses the description for the branch, when 80 asked to write a cover letter for the series. 81 82 * "git format-patch" learned "-v $count" option, and prepends a 83 string "v$count-" to the names of its output files, and also 84 automatically sets the subject prefix to "PATCH v$count". This 85 allows patches from rerolled series to be stored under different 86 names and makes it easier to reuse cover letter messsages. 87 88 * "git log" and friends can be told with --use-mailmap option to 89 rewrite the names and email addresses of people using the mailmap 90 mechanism. 91 92 * "git push" now requires "-f" to update a tag, even if it is a 93 fast-forward, as tags are meant to be fixed points. 94 95 * "git push" will stop without doing anything if the new "pre-push" 96 hook exists and exits with a failure. 97 98 * When "git rebase" fails to generate patches to be applied (e.g. due 99 to oom), it failed to detect the failure and instead behaved as if 100 there were nothing to do. A workaround to use a temporary file has 101 been applied, but we probably would want to revisit this later, as 102 it hurts the common case of not failing at all. 103 104 * Input and preconditions to "git reset" has been loosened where 105 appropriate. "git reset $fromtree Makefile" requires $fromtree to 106 be any tree (it used to require it to be a commit), for example. 107 "git reset" (without options or parameters) used to error out when 108 you do not have any commits in your history, but it now gives you 109 an empty index (to match non-existent commit you are not even on). 110 111 * "git submodule" started learning a new mode to integrate with the 112 tip of the remote branch (as opposed to integrating with the commit 113 recorded in the superproject's gitlink). 114 115 116Foreign Interface 117 118 * "git fast-export" has been updated for its use in the context of 119 the remote helper interface. 120 121 * A new remote helper to interact with bzr has been added to contrib/. 122 123 * "git p4" got various bugfixes around its branch handling. It is 124 also made usable with Python 2.4/2.5. 125 126 * The remote helper to interact with Hg in contrib/ has seen a few 127 fixes. 128 129 130Performance, Internal Implementation, etc. 131 132 * "git fsck" has been taught to be pickier about entries in tree 133 objects that should not be there, e.g. ".", ".git", and "..". 134 135 * Matching paths with common forms of pathspecs that contain wildcard 136 characters has been optimized further. 137 138 * We stopped paying attention to $GIT_CONFIG environment that points 139 at a single configuration file from any command other than "git config" 140 quite a while ago, but "git clone" internally set, exported, and 141 then unexported the variable during its operation unnecessarily. 142 143 * "git reset" internals has been reworked and should be faster in 144 general. We tried to be careful not to break any behaviour but 145 there could be corner cases, especially when running the command 146 from a conflicted state, that we may have missed. 147 148 * The implementation of "imap-send" has been updated to reuse xml 149 quoting code from http-push codepath, and lost a lot of unused 150 code. 151 152 * There is a simple-minded checker for the test scripts in t/ 153 directory to catch most common mistakes (it is not enabled by 154 default). 155 156 * You can build with USE_WILDMATCH=YesPlease to use a replacement 157 implementation of pattern matching logic used for pathname-like 158 things, e.g. refnames and paths in the repository. This new 159 implementation is not expected change the existing behaviour of Git 160 in this release, except for "git for-each-ref" where you can now 161 say "refs/**/master" and match with both refs/heads/master and 162 refs/remotes/origin/master. We plan to use this new implementation 163 in wider places (e.g. "git ls-files '**/Makefile' may find Makefile 164 at the top-level, and "git log '**/t*.sh'" may find commits that 165 touch a shell script whose name begins with "t" at any level) in 166 future versions of Git, but we are not there yet. By building with 167 USE_WILDMATCH, using the resulting Git daily and reporting when you 168 find breakages, you can help us get closer to that goal. 169 170 * Some reimplementations of Git do not write all the stat info back 171 to the index due to their implementation limitations (e.g. jgit). 172 A configuration option can tell Git to ignore changes to most of 173 the stat fields and only pay attention to mtime and size, which 174 these implementations can reliably update. This can be used to 175 avoid excessive revalidation of contents. 176 177 178Also contains minor documentation updates and code clean-ups. 179 180 181Fixes since v1.8.1 182------------------ 183 184Unless otherwise noted, all the fixes since v1.8.1 in the maintenance 185track are contained in this release (see release notes to them for 186details). 187 188 * An element on GIT_CEILING_DIRECTORIES list that does not name the 189 real path to a directory (i.e. a symbolic link) could have caused 190 the GIT_DIR discovery logic to escape the ceiling. 191 192 * When attempting to read the XDG-style $HOME/.config/git/config and 193 finding that $HOME/.config/git is a file, we gave a wrong error 194 message, instead of treating the case as "a custom config file does 195 not exist there" and moving on. 196 197 * The behaviour visible to the end users was confusing, when they 198 attempt to kill a process spawned in the editor that was in turn 199 launched by Git with SIGINT (or SIGQUIT), as Git would catch that 200 signal and die. We ignore these signals now. 201 (merge 1250857 pf/editor-ignore-sigint later to maint). 202 203 * A child process that was killed by a signal (e.g. SIGINT) was 204 reported in an inconsistent way depending on how the process was 205 spawned by us, with or without a shell in between. 206 207 * After failing to create a temporary file using mkstemp(), failing 208 pathname was not reported correctly on some platforms. 209 210 * We used to stuff "user@" and then append what we read from 211 /etc/mailname to come up with a default e-mail ident, but a bug 212 lost the "user@" part. 213 (merge dc342a2 jn/do-not-drop-username-when-reading-from-etc-mailname later to maint). 214 215 * The attribute mechanism didn't allow limiting attributes to be 216 applied to only a single directory itself with "path/" like the 217 exclude mechanism does. The initial implementation of this that 218 was merged to 'maint' and 1.8.1.2 was with a severe performance 219 degradations and needs to merge a fix-up topic. 220 (merge 9db9eec nd/fix-directory-attrs-off-by-one later to maint). 221 222 * "git am" did not parse datestamp correctly from Hg generated patch, 223 when it is run in a locale outside C (or en). 224 (merge 5185b97 dl/am-hg-locale later to maint). 225 226 * "git apply" misbehaved when fixing whitespace breakages by removing 227 excess trailing blank lines. 228 229 * A tar archive created by "git archive" recorded a directory in a 230 way that made NetBSD's implementation of "tar" sometimes unhappy. 231 232 * "git archive" did not record uncompressed size in the header when 233 streaming a zip archive, which confused some implementations of unzip. 234 235 * Attempt to "branch --edit-description" an existing branch, while 236 being on a detached HEAD, errored out. 237 (merge 75135b2 nd/edit-branch-desc-while-detached later to maint). 238 239 * "git clean" showed what it was going to do, but sometimes end up 240 finding that it was not allowed to do so, which resulted in a 241 confusing output (e.g. after saying that it will remove an 242 untracked directory, it found an embedded git repository there 243 which it is not allowed to remove). It now performs the actions 244 and then reports the outcome more faithfully. 245 (merge f538a91 zk/clean-report-failure later to maint). 246 247 * When "git clone --separate-git-dir=$over_there" is interrupted, it 248 failed to remove the real location of the $GIT_DIR it created. 249 This was most visible when interrupting a submodule update. 250 251 * "git fetch --depth" was broken in at least three ways. The 252 resulting history was deeper than specified by one commit, it was 253 unclear how to wipe the shallowness of the repository with the 254 command, and documentation was misleading. 255 (merge cfb70e1 nd/fetch-depth-is-broken later to maint). 256 257 * The way "git svn" asked for password using SSH_ASKPASS and 258 GIT_ASKPASS was not in line with the rest of the system. 259 260 * The --graph code fell into infinite loop when asked to do what the 261 code did not expect. 262 263 * http transport was wrong to ask for the username when the 264 authentication is done by certificate identity. 265 266 * "git pack-refs" that ran in parallel to another process that 267 created new refs had a nasty race. 268 269 * After "git add -N" and then writing a tree object out of the 270 index, the cache-tree data structure got corrupted. 271 272 * "git clone" used to allow --bare and --separate-git-dir=$there 273 options at the same time, which was nonsensical. 274 (merge 95b63f1 nd/clone-no-separate-git-dir-with-bare later to maint). 275 276 * "git rebase --preserve-merges" lost empty merges in recent versions 277 of Git. 278 (merge 9869778 ph/rebase-preserve-all-merges later to maint). 279 280 * "git merge --no-edit" computed who were involved in the work done 281 on the side branch, even though that information is to be discarded 282 without getting seen in the editor. 283 284 * "git merge" started calling prepare-commit-msg hook like "git 285 commit" does some time ago, but forgot to pay attention to the exit 286 status of the hook. 287 288 * When users spell "cc:" in lowercase in the fake "header" in the 289 trailer part, "git send-email" failed to pick up the addresses from 290 there. As e-mail headers field names are case insensitive, this 291 script should follow suit and treat "cc:" and "Cc:" the same way. 292 293 * Output from "git status --ignored" showed an unexpected interaction 294 with "--untracked". 295 296 * "gitweb", when sorting by age to show repositories with new 297 activities first, used to sort repositories with absolutely 298 nothing in it early, which was not very useful. 299 300 * "gitweb"'s code to sanitize control characters before passing it to 301 "highlight" filter lost known-to-be-safe control characters by 302 mistake. 303 304 * When a line to be wrapped has a solid run of non space characters 305 whose length exactly is the wrap width, "git shortlog -w" failed 306 to add a newline after such a line. 307 308 * Command line completion leaked an unnecessary error message while 309 looking for possible matches with paths in <tree-ish>. 310 311 * Command line completion for "tcsh" emitted an unwanted space 312 after completing a single directory name. 313 314 * Command line completion code was inadvertently made incompatible with 315 older versions of bash by using a newer array notation. 316 (merge 50c5885 bc/fix-array-syntax-for-3.0-in-completion-bash later to maint). 317 318 * Some shells do not behave correctly when IFS is unset; work it 319 around by explicitly setting it to the default value. 320 321 * Some scripted programs written in Python did not get updated when 322 PYTHON_PATH changed. 323 (cherry-pick 96a4647fca54031974cd6ad1 later to maint). 324 325 * When autoconf is used, any build on a different commit always ran 326 "config.status --recheck" even when unnecessary. 327 328 * We have been carrying a translated and long-unmaintained copy of an 329 old version of the tutorial; removed. 330 331 * t0050 had tests expecting failures from a bug that was fixed some 332 time ago. 333 (merge 336e2e2 tb/t0050-maint later to maint). 334 335 * t4014, t9502 and t0200 tests had various portability issues that 336 broke on OpenBSD. 337 338 * t9020 and t3600 tests had various portability issues. 339 340 * t9200 runs "cvs init" on a directory that already exists, but a 341 platform can configure this fail for the current user (e.g. you 342 need to be in the cvsadmin group on NetBSD 6.0). 343 344 * t9020 and t9810 had a few non-portable shell script construct. 345 346 * Scripts to test bash completion was inherently flaky as it was 347 affected by whatever random things the user may have on $PATH. 348 (merge 5047822 jc/do-not-let-random-file-interfere-with-completion-tests later to maint).