1Git v1.8.4 Release Notes 2======================== 3 4Backward compatibility notes (for Git 2.0) 5------------------------------------------ 6 7When "git push [$there]" does not say what to push, we have used the 8traditional "matching" semantics so far (all your branches were sent 9to the remote as long as there already are branches of the same name 10over there). In Git 2.0, the default will change to the "simple" 11semantics that pushes: 12 13 - only the current branch to the branch with the same name, and only 14 when the current branch is set to integrate with that remote 15 branch, if you are pushing to the same remote as you fetch from; or 16 17 - only the current branch to the branch with the same name, if you 18 are pushing to a remote that is not where you usually fetch from. 19 20Use the user preference configuration variable "push.default" to 21change this. If you are an old-timer who is used to the "matching" 22semantics, you can set the variable to "matching" to keep the 23traditional behaviour. If you want to live in the future early, you 24can set it to "simple" today without waiting for Git 2.0. 25 26When "git add -u" (and "git add -A") is run inside a subdirectory and 27does not specify which paths to add on the command line, it 28will operate on the entire tree in Git 2.0 for consistency 29with "git commit -a" and other commands. There will be no 30mechanism to make plain "git add -u" behave like "git add -u .". 31Current users of "git add -u" (without a pathspec) should start 32training their fingers to explicitly say "git add -u ." 33before Git 2.0 comes. A warning is issued when these commands are 34run without a pathspec and when you have local changes outside the 35current directory, because the behaviour in Git 2.0 will be different 36from today's version in such a situation. 37 38In Git 2.0, "git add <path>" will behave as "git add -A <path>", so 39that "git add dir/" will notice paths you removed from the directory 40and record the removal. Versions before Git 2.0, including this 41release, will keep ignoring removals, but the users who rely on this 42behaviour are encouraged to start using "git add --ignore-removal <path>" 43now before 2.0 is released. 44 45 46Updates since v1.8.3 47-------------------- 48 49Foreign interfaces, subsystems and ports. 50 51 * "git rebase -i" now honors --strategy and -X options. 52 53 * Git-gui has been updated to its 0.18.0 version. 54 55 * MediaWiki remote helper (in contrib/) has been updated to use the 56 credential helper interface from Git.pm. 57 58 * Update build for Cygwin 1.[57]. Torsten Bögershausen reports that 59 this is fine with Cygwin 1.7 ($gmane/225824) so let's try moving it 60 ahead. 61 62 * The credential helper to talk to keychain on OS X (in contrib/) has 63 been updated to kick in not just when talking http/https but also 64 imap(s) and smtp. 65 66 * Remote transport helper has been updated to report errors and 67 maintain ref hierarchy used to keep track of its own state better. 68 69 * With "export" remote-helper protocol, (1) a push that tries to 70 update a remote ref whose name is different from the pushing side 71 does not work yet, and (2) the helper may not know how to do 72 --dry-run; these problematic cases are disabled for now. 73 74 * git-remote-hg/bzr (in contrib/) updates. 75 76 * git-remote-mw (in contrib/) hints users to check the certificate, 77 when https:// connection failed. 78 79 80UI, Workflows & Features 81 82 * "gitweb" learned to optionally place extra links that point at the 83 levels higher than the Gitweb pages themselves in the breadcrumbs, 84 so that it can be used as part of a larger installation. 85 86 * "git log --format=" now honors i18n.logoutputencoding configuration 87 variable. 88 89 * The "push.default=simple" mode of "git push" has been updated to 90 behave like "current" without requiring a remote tracking 91 information, when you push to a remote that is different from where 92 you fetch from (i.e. a triangular workflow). 93 94 * Having multiple "fixup!" on a line in the rebase instruction sheet 95 did not work very well with "git rebase -i --autosquash". 96 97 * "git log" learned the "--author-date-order" option, with which the 98 output is topologically sorted and commits in parallel histories 99 are shown intermixed together based on the author timestamp. 100 101 * Various subcommands of "git submodule" refused to run from anywhere 102 other than the top of the working tree of the superproject, but 103 they have been taught to let you run from a subdirectory. 104 105 * "git diff" learned a mode that ignores hunks whose change consists 106 only of additions and removals of blank lines, which is the same as 107 "diff -B" (ignore blank lines) of GNU diff. 108 109 * "git rm" gives a single message followed by list of paths to report 110 multiple paths that cannot be removed. 111 112 * "git rebase" can be told with ":/look for this string" syntax commits 113 to replay the changes onto and where the work to be replayed begins. 114 115 * Many tutorials teach users to set "color.ui" to "auto" as the first 116 thing after you set "user.name/email" to introduce yourselves to 117 Git. Now the variable defaults to "auto". 118 119 * On Cygwin, "cygstart" is now recognised as a possible way to start 120 a web browser (used in "help -w" and "instaweb" among others). 121 122 * "git status" learned status.branch and status.short configuration 123 variables to use --branch and --short options by default (override 124 with --no-branch and --no-short options from the command line). 125 126 * "git cmd <name>", when <name> happens to be a 40-hex string, 127 directly uses the 40-hex string as an object name, even if a ref 128 "refs/<some hierarchy>/<name>" exists. This disambiguation order 129 is unlikely to change, but we should warn about the ambiguity just 130 like we warn when more than one refs/ hierachies share the same 131 name. 132 133 * "git rebase" learned "--[no-]autostash" option to save local 134 changes instead of refusing to run (to which people's normal 135 response was to stash them and re-run). This introduced a corner 136 case breakage to "git am --abort" but it has been fixed. 137 138 * Instead of typing four capital letters "HEAD", you can say "@" now, 139 e.g. "git log @". 140 141 * "check-ignore" (new feature since 1.8.2) has been updated to work 142 more like "check-attr" over bidi-pipes. 143 144 * "git describe" learned "--first-parent" option to limit its closest 145 tagged commit search to the first-parent chain. 146 147 * "git merge foo" that might have meant "git merge origin/foo" is 148 diagnosed with a more informative error message. 149 150 * "git log -L<line>,<range>:<filename>" has been added. This may 151 still have leaks and rough edges, though. 152 153 * We used the approxidate() parser for "--expire=<timestamp>" options 154 of various commands, but it is better to treat --expire=all and 155 --expire=now a bit more specially than using the current timestamp. 156 "git gc" and "git reflog" have been updated with a new parsing 157 function for expiry dates. 158 159 * Updates to completion (both bash and zsh) helpers. 160 161 * The behaviour of the "--chain-reply-to" option of "git send-email" 162 have changed at 1.7.0, and we added a warning/advice message to 163 help users adjust to the new behaviour back then, but we kept it 164 around for too long. The message has finally been removed. 165 166 * "git fetch origin master" unlike "git fetch origin" or "git fetch" 167 did not update "refs/remotes/origin/master"; this was an early 168 design decision to keep the update of remote tracking branches 169 predictable, but in practice it turns out that people find it more 170 convenient to opportunistically update them whenever we have a 171 chance, and we have been updating them when we run "git push" which 172 already breaks the original "predictability" anyway. 173 174 * The configuration variable core.checkstat was advertised in the 175 documentation but the code expected core.statinfo instead. 176 For now, we accept both core.checkstat and core.statinfo, but the 177 latter will be removed in the longer term. 178 179 180Performance, Internal Implementation, etc. 181 182 * The original way to specify remote repository using .git/branches/ 183 used to have a nifty feature. The code to support the feature was 184 still in a function but the caller was changed not to call it 5 185 years ago, breaking that feature and leaving the supporting code 186 unreachable. The dead code has been removed. 187 188 * "git pack-refs" that races with new ref creation or deletion have 189 been susceptible to lossage of refs under right conditions, which 190 has been tightened up. 191 192 * We read loose and packed rerferences in two steps, but after 193 deciding to read a loose ref but before actually opening it to read 194 it, another process racing with us can unlink it, which would cause 195 us to barf. The codepath has been updated to retry when such a 196 race is detected, instead of outright failing. 197 198 * Uses of the platform fnmatch(3) function (many places in the code, 199 matching pathspec, .gitignore and .gitattributes to name a few) 200 have been replaced with wildmatch, allowing "foo/**/bar" that would 201 match foo/bar, foo/a/bar, foo/a/b/bar, etc. 202 203 * Memory ownership and lifetime rules for what for-each-ref feeds to 204 its callbacks have been clarified (in short, "you do not own it, so 205 make a copy if you want to keep it"). 206 207 * The revision traversal logic to improve culling of irrelevant 208 parents while traversing a mergy history has been updated. 209 210 * Some leaks in unpack-trees (used in merge, cherry-pick and other 211 codepaths) have been plugged. 212 213 * The codepath to read from marks files in fast-import/export did not 214 have to accept anything but 40-hex representation of the object 215 name. Further, fast-export did not need full in-core object 216 representation to have parsed wen reading from them. These 217 codepaths have been optimized by taking advantage of these access 218 patterns. 219 220 * Object lookup logic, when the object hashtable starts to become 221 crowded, has been optimized. 222 223 * When TEST_OUTPUT_DIRECTORY setting is used, it was handled somewhat 224 inconsistently between the test framework and t/Makefile, and logic 225 to summarize the results looked at a wrong place. 226 227 * "git clone" uses a lighter-weight implementation when making sure 228 that the history behind refs are complete. 229 230 * Many warnings from sparse source checker in compat/ area has been 231 squelched. 232 233 * The code to reading and updating packed-refs file has been updated, 234 correcting corner case bugs. 235 236 237Also contains various documentation updates and code clean-ups. 238 239 240Fixes since v1.8.3 241------------------ 242 243Unless otherwise noted, all the fixes since v1.8.3 in the maintenance 244track are contained in this release (see release notes to them for 245details). 246 247 * "git diff" refused to even show difference when core.safecrlf is 248 set to true (i.e. error out) and there are offending lines in the 249 working tree files. 250 (merge 5430bb2 jc/maint-diff-core-safecrlf later to maint). 251 252 * A test that should have failed but didn't revealed a bug that needs 253 to be corrected. 254 (merge 94d75d1 jc/t1512-fix later to maint). 255 256 * An overlong path to a .git directory may have overflown the 257 temporary path buffer used to create a name for lockfiles. 258 (merge 2fbd4f9 mh/maint-lockfile-overflow later to maint). 259 260 * Invocations of "git checkout" used internally by "git rebase" were 261 counted as "checkout", and affected later "git checkout -" to the 262 the user to an unexpected place. 263 (merge 3bed291 rr/rebase-checkout-reflog later to maint). 264 265 * "git stash save", when your local change turns a tracked file into 266 a directory, has to remove files in that directory in order to 267 revert your working tree to a pristine state. This will lose 268 untracked files in such a directory, and the command now requires 269 you to "--force" it. 270 271 * The configuration variable column.ui was poorly documented. 272 (merge 5e62cc1 rr/column-doc later to maint). 273 274 * "git name-rev --refs=tags/v*" were forbidden, which was a bit 275 inconvenient (you had to give a pattern to match refs fully, like 276 --refs=refs/tags/v*). 277 (merge 98c5c4a nk/name-rev-abbreviated-refs later to maint). 278 279 * "git apply" parsed patches that add new files, generated by 280 programs other than Git, incorrectly. This is an old breakage in 281 v1.7.11 and will need to be merged down to the maintanance tracks. 282 (merge 212eb96 tr/maint-apply-non-git-patch-parsefix later to maint). 283 284 * Older cURL wanted piece of memory we call it with to be stable, but 285 we updated the auth material after handing it to a call. 286 (merge a94cf2c bc/http-keep-memory-given-to-curl later to maint). 287 288 * "git pull" into nothing trashed "local changes" that were in the 289 index, and this avoids it. 290 (merge b4dc085 jk/pull-into-dirty-unborn later to maint). 291 292 * Many "git submodule" operations do not work on a submodule at a 293 path whose name is not in ASCII. 294 (merge bed9470 fg/submodule-non-ascii-path later to maint). 295 296 * "cherry-pick" had a small leak in an error codepath. 297 (merge 706728a fc/sequencer-plug-leak later to maint). 298 299 * Logic used by git-send-email to suppress cc mishandled names like 300 "A U. Thor" <author@example.xz>, where the human readable part 301 needs to be quoted (the user input may not have the double quotes 302 around the name, and comparison was done between quoted and 303 unquoted strings). It also mishandled names that need RFC2047 304 quoting. 305 (merge 1495266 mt/send-email-cc-match-fix later to maint). 306 307 * Call to discard_cache/discard_index (used when we use different 308 contents of the index in-core, in many operations like commit, 309 apply, and merge) used to leak memory that held the array of index 310 entries, which has been plugged. 311 (merge a0fc4db rs/discard-index-discard-array later to maint). 312 313 * "gitweb" forgot to clear a global variable $search_regexp upon each 314 request, mistakenly carrying over the previous search to a new one 315 when used as a persistent CGI. 316 (merge ca7a5dc cm/gitweb-project-list-persistent-cgi-fix later to maint). 317 318 * The wildmatch engine did not honor WM_CASEFOLD option correctly. 319 (merge b79c0c3 ar/wildmatch-foldcase later to maint). 320 321 * "git log -c --follow $path" segfaulted upon hitting the commit that 322 renamed the $path being followed. 323 (merge 46ec510 cb/log-follow-with-combined later to maint). 324 325 * When a reflog notation is used for implicit "current branch", we 326 did not say which branch and worse said "branch ''". 327 (merge 305ebea rr/die-on-missing-upstream later to maint). 328 329 * "difftool --dir-diff" did not copy back changes made by the 330 end-user in the diff tool backend to the working tree in some 331 cases. 332 (merge 32eaf1d ks/difftool-dir-diff-copy-fix later to maint). 333 334 * "git push $there HEAD:branch" did not resolve HEAD early enough, so 335 it was easy to flip it around while push is still going on and push 336 out a branch that the user did not originally intended when the 337 command was started. 338 (merge 0f075b2 rr/push-head later to maint). 339 340 * The bash prompt code (in contrib/) displayed the name of the branch 341 being rebased when "rebase -i/-m/-p" modes are in use, but not the 342 plain vanilla "rebase". 343 (merge 1306321 fc/show-branch-in-rebase-am later to maint). 344 345 * Handling of negative exclude pattern for directories "!dir" was 346 broken in the update to v1.8.3. 347 (merge c3c327d kb/status-ignored-optim-2 later to maint). 348 349 * zsh prompt script that borrowed from bash prompt script did not 350 work due to slight differences in array variable notation between 351 these two shells. 352 (merge d0583da tg/maint-zsh-svn-remote-prompt later to maint). 353 354 * An entry for "file://" scheme in the enumeration of URL types Git 355 can take in the HTML documentation was made into a clickable link 356 by mistake. 357 (merge 4c32e36 nd/urls-doc-no-file-hyperlink-fix later to maint). 358 359 * "git push --[no-]verify" was not documented. 360 (merge 90d32d1 tr/push-no-verify-doc later to maint). 361 362 * Stop installing the git-remote-testpy script that is only used for 363 testing. 364 (merge 416fda6 fc/makefile later to maint). 365 366 * "git commit --allow-empty-message -m ''" should not start an 367 editor. 368 (merge 2520677 rs/commit-m-no-edit later to maint). 369 370 * "git merge @{-1}~22" was rewritten to "git merge frotz@{1}~22" 371 incorrectly when your previous branch was "frotz" (it should be 372 rewritten to "git merge frotz~22" instead). 373 (merge 84cf246 jc/strbuf-branchname-fix later to maint). 374 375 * "git diff -c -p" was not showing a deleted line from a hunk when 376 another hunk immediately begins where the earlier one ends. 377 (merge aac3857 mk/combine-diff-context-horizon-fix later to maint). 378 379 * "git log --ancestry-path A...B" did not work as expected, as it did 380 not pay attention to the fact that the merge base between A and B 381 was the bottom of the range being specified. 382 (merge a765499 kb/ancestry-path-threedots later to maint). 383 384 * Mac OS X does not like to write(2) more than INT_MAX number of 385 bytes; work it around by chopping write(2) into smaller pieces. 386 (merge 6c642a8 fc/macos-x-clipped-write later to maint). 387 388 * Newer MacOS X encourages the programs to compile and link with 389 their CommonCrypto, not with OpenSSL. 390 (merge be4c828 da/darwin later to maint). 391 392 * "git clone foo/bar:baz" cannot be a request to clone from a remote 393 over git-over-ssh specified in the scp style. This case is now 394 detected and clones from a local repository at "foo/bar:baz". 395 (merge 6000334 nd/clone-local-with-colon later to maint). 396 397 * When $HOME is misconfigured to point at an unreadable directory, we 398 used to complain and die. Loosen the check. 399 (merge 4698c8f jn/config-ignore-inaccessible later to maint). 400 401 * "git subtree" (in contrib/) had one codepath with loose error 402 checks to lose data at the remote side. 403 (merge 3212d56 jk/subtree-do-not-push-if-split-fails later to maint). 404 405 * "git fetch" into a shallow repository from a repository that does 406 not know about the shallow boundary commits (e.g. a different fork 407 from the repository the current shallow repository was cloned from) 408 did not work correctly. 409 (merge 71d5f93 mh/fetch-into-shallow later to maint). 410 411 * "git checkout foo" DWIMs the intended "upstream" and turns it into 412 "git checkout -t -b foo remotes/origin/foo". This codepath has been 413 updated to correctly take existing remote definitions into account. 414 (merge 229177a jh/checkout-auto-tracking later to maint).