Documentation / RelNotes / 1.8.4.txton commit Update draft release notes to 1.8.4 (9832cb9)
   1Git v1.8.4 Release Notes
   2========================
   3
   4Updates since v1.8.3
   5--------------------
   6
   7Foreign interfaces, subsystems and ports.
   8
   9 * Git-gui has been updated to its 0.18.0 version.
  10
  11 * MediaWiki remote helper (in contrib/) has been updated to use the
  12   credential helper interface from Git.pm.
  13
  14 * Update build for Cygwin 1.[57].  Torsten Bögershausen reports that
  15   this is fine with Cygwin 1.7 ($gmane/225824) so let's try moving it
  16   ahead.
  17
  18 * The credential helper to talk to keychain on OS X (in contrib/) has
  19   been updated to kick in not just when talking http/https but also
  20   imap(s) and smtp.
  21
  22 * Remote transport helper has been updated to report errors and
  23   maintain ref hierarchy used to keep track of its own state better.
  24
  25 * With "export" remote-helper protocol, (1) a push that tries to
  26   update a remote ref whose name is different from the pushing side
  27   does not work yet, and (2) the helper may not know how to do
  28   --dry-run; these problematic cases are disabled for now.
  29
  30 * git-remote-hg/bzr (in contrib/) updates.
  31
  32 * git-remote-mw (in contrib/) hints users to check the certificate,
  33   when https:// connection failed.
  34
  35
  36UI, Workflows & Features
  37
  38 * "git rm" gives a single message followed by list of paths to report
  39   multiple paths that cannot be removed.
  40
  41 * "git rebase" can be told with ":/look for this string" syntax commits
  42   to replay the changes onto and where the work to be replayed begins.
  43
  44 * Many tutorials teach users to set "color.ui" to "auto" as the first
  45   thing after you set "user.name/email" to introduce yourselves to
  46   Git.  Now the variable defaults to "auto".
  47
  48### * "git status" learned status.branch and status.short configuration
  49###   variables to use --branch and --short options by default (override
  50###   with --no-branch and --no-short options from the command line).
  51
  52 * "git cmd <name>", when <name> happens to be a 40-hex string,
  53   directly uses the 40-hex string as an object name, even if a ref
  54   "refs/<some hierarchy>/<name>" exists.  This disambiguation order
  55   is unlikely to change, but we should warn about the ambiguity just
  56   like we warn when more than one refs/ hierachies share the same
  57   name.
  58
  59 * "git rebase" learned "--[no-]autostash" option to save local
  60   changes instead of refusing to run (to which people's normal
  61   response was to stash them and re-run).  This introduced a corner
  62   case breakage to "git am --abort" but it has been fixed.
  63
  64 * Instead of typing four capital letters "HEAD", you can say "@" now,
  65   e.g. "git log @".
  66
  67 * "check-ignore" (new feature since 1.8.2) has been updated to work
  68   more like "check-attr" over bidi-pipes.
  69
  70 * "git describe" learned "--first-parent" option to limit its closest
  71   tagged commit search to the first-parent chain.
  72
  73 * "git merge foo" that might have meant "git merge origin/foo" is
  74   diagnosed with a more informative error message.
  75
  76 * "git log -L<line>,<range>:<filename>" has been added.  This may
  77   still have leaks and rough edges, though.
  78
  79 * We used the approxidate() parser for "--expire=<timestamp>" options
  80   of various commands, but it is better to treat --expire=all and
  81   --expire=now a bit more specially than using the current timestamp.
  82   "git gc" and "git reflog" have been updated with a new parsing
  83   function for expiry dates.
  84
  85 * Updates to completion (both bash and zsh) helpers.
  86
  87 * The behaviour of the "--chain-reply-to" option of "git send-email"
  88   have changed at 1.7.0, and we added a warning/advice message to
  89   help users adjust to the new behaviour back then, but we kept it
  90   around for too long.  The message has finally been removed.
  91
  92 * "git fetch origin master" unlike "git fetch origin" or "git fetch"
  93   did not update "refs/remotes/origin/master"; this was an early
  94   design decision to keep the update of remote tracking branches
  95   predictable, but in practice it turns out that people find it more
  96   convenient to opportunistically update them whenever we have a
  97   chance, and we have been updating them when we run "git push" which
  98   already breaks the original "predictability" anyway.
  99
 100 * The configuration variable core.checkstat was advertised in the
 101   documentation but the code expected core.statinfo instead.
 102   For now, we accept both core.checkstat and core.statinfo, but the
 103   latter will be removed in the longer term.
 104
 105
 106Performance, Internal Implementation, etc.
 107
 108 * Uses of the platform fnmatch(3) function (many places in the code,
 109   matching pathspec, .gitignore and .gitattributes to name a few)
 110   have been replaced with wildmatch, allowing "foo/**/bar" that would
 111   match foo/bar, foo/a/bar, foo/a/b/bar, etc.
 112
 113 * Memory ownership and lifetime rules for what for-each-ref feeds to
 114   its callbacks have been clarified (in short, "you do not own it, so
 115   make a copy if you want to keep it").
 116
 117 * The revision traversal logic to improve culling of irrelevant
 118   parents while traversing a mergy history has been updated.
 119
 120 * Some leaks in unpack-trees (used in merge, cherry-pick and other
 121   codepaths) have been plugged.
 122
 123 * The codepath to read from marks files in fast-import/export did not
 124   have to accept anything but 40-hex representation of the object
 125   name.  Further, fast-export did not need full in-core object
 126   representation to have parsed wen reading from them.  These
 127   codepaths have been optimized by taking advantage of these access
 128   patterns.
 129
 130 * Object lookup logic, when the object hashtable starts to become
 131   crowded, has been optimized.
 132
 133 * When TEST_OUTPUT_DIRECTORY setting is used, it was handled somewhat
 134   inconsistently between the test framework and t/Makefile, and logic
 135   to summarize the results looked at a wrong place.
 136
 137 * "git clone" uses a lighter-weight implementation when making sure
 138   that the history behind refs are complete.
 139
 140 * Many warnings from sparse source checker in compat/ area has been
 141   squelched.
 142
 143 * The code to reading and updating packed-refs file has been updated,
 144   correcting corner case bugs.
 145
 146
 147Also contains various documentation updates and code clean-ups.
 148
 149
 150Fixes since v1.8.3
 151------------------
 152
 153Unless otherwise noted, all the fixes since v1.8.3 in the maintenance
 154track are contained in this release (see release notes to them for
 155details).
 156
 157 * "cherry-pick" had a small leak in an error codepath.
 158   (merge 706728a fc/sequencer-plug-leak later to maint).
 159
 160 * Logic used by git-send-email to suppress cc mishandled names like
 161   "A U. Thor" <author@example.xz>, where the human readable part
 162   needs to be quoted (the user input may not have the double quotes
 163   around the name, and comparison was done between quoted and
 164   unquoted strings).
 165   (merge 1495266 mt/send-email-cc-match-fix later to maint).
 166
 167 * Call to discard_cache/discard_index (used when we use different
 168   contents of the index in-core, in many operations like commit,
 169   apply, and merge) used to leak memory that held the array of index
 170   entries, which has been plugged.
 171   (merge a0fc4db rs/discard-index-discard-array later to maint).
 172
 173 * "gitweb" forgot to clear a global variable $search_regexp upon each
 174   request, mistakenly carrying over the previous search to a new one
 175   when used as a persistent CGI.
 176   (merge ca7a5dc cm/gitweb-project-list-persistent-cgi-fix later to maint).
 177
 178 * The wildmatch engine did not honor WM_CASEFOLD option correctly.
 179   (merge b79c0c3 ar/wildmatch-foldcase later to maint).
 180
 181 * "git log -c --follow $path" segfaulted upon hitting the commit that
 182   renamed the $path being followed.
 183   (merge 46ec510 cb/log-follow-with-combined later to maint).
 184
 185 * When a reflog notation is used for implicit "current branch", we
 186   did not say which branch and worse said "branch ''".
 187   (merge 305ebea rr/die-on-missing-upstream later to maint).
 188
 189 * "difftool --dir-diff" did not copy back changes made by the
 190   end-user in the diff tool backend to the working tree in some
 191   cases.
 192   (merge 32eaf1d ks/difftool-dir-diff-copy-fix later to maint).
 193
 194 * "git push $there HEAD:branch" did not resolve HEAD early enough, so
 195   it was easy to flip it around while push is still going on and push
 196   out a branch that the user did not originally intended when the
 197   command was started.
 198   (merge 0f075b2 rr/push-head later to maint).
 199
 200 * The bash prompt code (in contrib/) displayed the name of the branch
 201   being rebased when "rebase -i/-m/-p" modes are in use, but not the
 202   plain vanilla "rebase".
 203   (merge 1306321 fc/show-branch-in-rebase-am later to maint).
 204
 205 * Handling of negative exclude pattern for directories "!dir" was
 206   broken in the update to v1.8.3.
 207   (merge c3c327d kb/status-ignored-optim-2 later to maint).
 208
 209 * zsh prompt script that borrowed from bash prompt script did not
 210   work due to slight differences in array variable notation between
 211   these two shells.
 212   (merge d0583da tg/maint-zsh-svn-remote-prompt later to maint).
 213
 214 * An entry for "file://" scheme in the enumeration of URL types Git
 215   can take in the HTML documentation was made into a clickable link
 216   by mistake.
 217   (merge 4c32e36 nd/urls-doc-no-file-hyperlink-fix later to maint).
 218
 219 * "git push --[no-]verify" was not documented.
 220   (merge 90d32d1 tr/push-no-verify-doc later to maint).
 221
 222 * Stop installing the git-remote-testpy script that is only used for
 223   testing.
 224   (merge 416fda6 fc/makefile later to maint).
 225
 226 * "git commit --allow-empty-message -m ''" should not start an
 227   editor.
 228   (merge 2520677 rs/commit-m-no-edit later to maint).
 229
 230 * "git merge @{-1}~22" was rewritten to "git merge frotz@{1}~22"
 231   incorrectly when your previous branch was "frotz" (it should be
 232   rewritten to "git merge frotz~22" instead).
 233   (merge 84cf246 jc/strbuf-branchname-fix later to maint).
 234
 235 * "git diff -c -p" was not showing a deleted line from a hunk when
 236   another hunk immediately begins where the earlier one ends.
 237   (merge aac3857 mk/combine-diff-context-horizon-fix later to maint).
 238
 239 * "git log --ancestry-path A...B" did not work as expected, as it did
 240   not pay attention to the fact that the merge base between A and B
 241   was the bottom of the range being specified.
 242   (merge a765499 kb/ancestry-path-threedots later to maint).
 243
 244 * Mac OS X does not like to write(2) more than INT_MAX number of
 245   bytes; work it around by chopping write(2) into smaller pieces.
 246   (merge 6c642a8 fc/macos-x-clipped-write later to maint).
 247
 248 * Newer MacOS X encourages the programs to compile and link with
 249   their CommonCrypto, not with OpenSSL.
 250   (merge be4c828 da/darwin later to maint).
 251
 252 * "git clone foo/bar:baz" cannot be a request to clone from a remote
 253   over git-over-ssh specified in the scp style.  This case is now
 254   detected and clones from a local repository at "foo/bar:baz".
 255   (merge 6000334 nd/clone-local-with-colon later to maint).
 256
 257 * When $HOME is misconfigured to point at an unreadable directory, we
 258   used to complain and die. Loosen the check.
 259   (merge 4698c8f jn/config-ignore-inaccessible later to maint).
 260
 261 * "git subtree" (in contrib/) had one codepath with loose error
 262   checks to lose data at the remote side.
 263   (merge 3212d56 jk/subtree-do-not-push-if-split-fails later to maint).
 264
 265 * "git fetch" into a shallow repository from a repository that does
 266   not know about the shallow boundary commits (e.g. a different fork
 267   from the repository the current shallow repository was cloned from)
 268   did not work correctly.
 269   (merge 71d5f93 mh/fetch-into-shallow later to maint).
 270
 271 * "git checkout foo" DWIMs the intended "upstream" and turns it into
 272   "git checkout -t -b foo remotes/origin/foo". This codepath has been
 273   updated to correctly take existing remote definitions into account.
 274   (merge 229177a jh/checkout-auto-tracking later to maint).