1Git v1.8.2 Release Notes 2======================== 3 4Backward compatibility notes 5---------------------------- 6 7In the next major release Git 2.0 (not *this* one), we will change the 8behavior 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 25When "git add -u" and "git add -A", that does not specify what paths 26to add on the command line, is run from inside a subdirectory, the 27scope of the operation has always been limited to the subirectory. 28Many users found this counter-intuitive, given that "git commit -a" 29and other commands operate on the entire tree regardless of where you 30are. In this release, these commands give warning in such a case and 31encourage the user to say "git add -u/-A ." instead when restricting 32the scope to the current directory. At Git 2.0 (not *this* one), we 33plan to change these commands without pathspec to operate on the 34entire tree, and training your fingers to type "." will protect you 35against the future change. 36 37 38Updates since v1.8.1 39-------------------- 40 41UI, Workflows & Features 42 43 * Initial ports to QNX and z/OS UNIX System Services have started. 44 45 * Output from the tests is coloured using "green is okay, yellow is 46 questionable, red is bad and blue is informative" scheme. 47 48 * Mention of "GIT/Git/git" in the documentation have been updated to 49 be more uniform and consistent. The name of the system and the 50 concept it embodies is "Git"; the command the users type is "git". 51 All-caps "GIT" was merely a way to imitate "Git" typeset in small 52 caps in our ASCII text only documentation and to be avoided. 53 54 * The completion script (in contrib/completion) used to let the 55 default completer to suggest pathnames, which gave too many 56 irrelevant choices (e.g. "git add" would not want to add an 57 unmodified path). It learnt to use a more git-aware logic to 58 enumerate only relevant ones. 59 60 * In bare repositories, "git shortlog" and other commands now read 61 mailmap files from the tip of the history, to help running these 62 tools in server settings. 63 64 * Color specifiers, e.g. "%C(blue)Hello%C(reset)", used in the 65 "--format=" option of "git log" and friends can be disabled when 66 the output is not sent to a terminal by prefixing them with 67 "auto,", e.g. "%C(auto,blue)Hello%C(auto,reset)". 68 69 * Scripts can ask Git that wildcard patterns in pathspecs they give do 70 not have any significance, i.e. take them as literal strings. 71 72 * The patterns in .gitignore and .gitattributes files can have **/, 73 as a pattern that matches 0 or more levels of subdirectory. 74 E.g. "foo/**/bar" matches "bar" in "foo" itself or in a 75 subdirectory of "foo". 76 77 * When giving arguments without "--" disambiguation, object names 78 that come earlier on the command line must not be interpretable as 79 pathspecs and pathspecs that come later on the command line must 80 not be interpretable as object names. This disambiguation rule has 81 been tweaked so that ":/" (no other string before or after) is 82 always interpreted as a pathspec; "git cmd -- :/" is no longer 83 needed, you can just say "git cmd :/". 84 85 * Various "hint" lines Git gives when it asks the user to edit 86 messages in the editor are commented out with '#' by default. The 87 core.commentchar configuration variable can be used to customize 88 this '#' to a different character. 89 90 * "git add -u" and "git add -A" without pathspec issues warning to 91 make users aware that they are only operating on paths inside the 92 subdirectory they are in. Use ":/" (everything from the top) or 93 "." (everything from the $cwd) to disambiguate. 94 95 * "git blame" (and "git diff") learned the "--no-follow" option. 96 97 * "git branch" now rejects some nonsense combinations of command line 98 arguments (e.g. giving more than one branch name to rename) with 99 more case-specific error messages. 100 101 * "git check-ignore" command to help debugging .gitignore files has 102 been added. 103 104 * "git cherry-pick" can be used to replay a root commit to an unborn 105 branch. 106 107 * "git commit" can be told to use --cleanup=whitespace by setting the 108 configuration variable commit.cleanup to 'whitespace'. 109 110 * "git diff" and other Porcelain commands can be told to use a 111 non-standard algorithm by setting diff.algorithm configuration 112 variable. 113 114 * "git fetch --mirror" and fetch that uses other forms of refspec 115 with wildcard used to attempt to update a symbolic ref that match 116 the wildcard on the receiving end, which made little sense (the 117 real ref that is pointed at by the symbolic ref would be updated 118 anyway). Symbolic refs no longer are affected by such a fetch. 119 120 * "git format-patch" now detects more cases in which a whole branch 121 is being exported, and uses the description for the branch, when 122 asked to write a cover letter for the series. 123 124 * "git format-patch" learned "-v $count" option, and prepends a 125 string "v$count-" to the names of its output files, and also 126 automatically sets the subject prefix to "PATCH v$count". This 127 allows patches from rerolled series to be stored under different 128 names and makes it easier to reuse cover letter messsages. 129 130 * "git log" and friends can be told with --use-mailmap option to 131 rewrite the names and email addresses of people using the mailmap 132 mechanism. 133 134 * "git log --cc --graph" now shows the combined diff output with the 135 ancestry graph. 136 137 * "git log --grep=<pattern>" honors i18n.logoutputencoding to look 138 for the pattern after fixing the log message to the specified 139 encoding. 140 141 * "git mergetool" and "git difftool" learned to list the available 142 tool backends in a more consistent manner. 143 144 * "git mergetool" is aware of TortoiseGitMerge now and uses it over 145 TortoiseMerge when available. 146 147 * "git push" now requires "-f" to update a tag, even if it is a 148 fast-forward, as tags are meant to be fixed points. 149 150 * Error messages from "git push" when it stops to prevent remote refs 151 from getting overwritten by mistake have been improved to explain 152 various situations separately. 153 154 * "git push" will stop without doing anything if the new "pre-push" 155 hook exists and exits with a failure. 156 157 * When "git rebase" fails to generate patches to be applied (e.g. due 158 to oom), it failed to detect the failure and instead behaved as if 159 there were nothing to do. A workaround to use a temporary file has 160 been applied, but we probably would want to revisit this later, as 161 it hurts the common case of not failing at all. 162 163 * Input and preconditions to "git reset" has been loosened where 164 appropriate. "git reset $fromtree Makefile" requires $fromtree to 165 be any tree (it used to require it to be a commit), for example. 166 "git reset" (without options or parameters) used to error out when 167 you do not have any commits in your history, but it now gives you 168 an empty index (to match non-existent commit you are not even on). 169 170 * "git status" says what branch is being bisected or rebased when 171 able, not just "bisecting" or "rebasing". 172 173 * "git submodule" started learning a new mode to integrate with the 174 tip of the remote branch (as opposed to integrating with the commit 175 recorded in the superproject's gitlink). 176 177 * "git upload-pack" which implements the service "ls-remote" and 178 "fetch" talk to can be told to hide ref hierarchies the server 179 side internally uses (and that clients have no business learning 180 about) with transfer.hiderefs configuration. 181 182 183Foreign Interface 184 185 * "git fast-export" has been updated for its use in the context of 186 the remote helper interface. 187 188 * A new remote helper to interact with bzr has been added to contrib/. 189 190 * "git p4" got various bugfixes around its branch handling. It is 191 also made usable with Python 2.4/2.5. In addition, its various 192 portability issues for Cygwin have been addressed. 193 194 * The remote helper to interact with Hg in contrib/ has seen a few 195 fixes. 196 197 198Performance, Internal Implementation, etc. 199 200 * "git fsck" has been taught to be pickier about entries in tree 201 objects that should not be there, e.g. ".", ".git", and "..". 202 203 * Matching paths with common forms of pathspecs that contain wildcard 204 characters has been optimized further. 205 206 * We stopped paying attention to $GIT_CONFIG environment that points 207 at a single configuration file from any command other than "git config" 208 quite a while ago, but "git clone" internally set, exported, and 209 then unexported the variable during its operation unnecessarily. 210 211 * "git reset" internals has been reworked and should be faster in 212 general. We tried to be careful not to break any behaviour but 213 there could be corner cases, especially when running the command 214 from a conflicted state, that we may have missed. 215 216 * The implementation of "imap-send" has been updated to reuse xml 217 quoting code from http-push codepath, and lost a lot of unused 218 code. 219 220 * There is a simple-minded checker for the test scripts in t/ 221 directory to catch most common mistakes (it is not enabled by 222 default). 223 224 * You can build with USE_WILDMATCH=YesPlease to use a replacement 225 implementation of pattern matching logic used for pathname-like 226 things, e.g. refnames and paths in the repository. This new 227 implementation is not expected change the existing behaviour of Git 228 in this release, except for "git for-each-ref" where you can now 229 say "refs/**/master" and match with both refs/heads/master and 230 refs/remotes/origin/master. We plan to use this new implementation 231 in wider places (e.g. "git ls-files '**/Makefile' may find Makefile 232 at the top-level, and "git log '**/t*.sh'" may find commits that 233 touch a shell script whose name begins with "t" at any level) in 234 future versions of Git, but we are not there yet. By building with 235 USE_WILDMATCH, using the resulting Git daily and reporting when you 236 find breakages, you can help us get closer to that goal. 237 238 * Some reimplementations of Git do not write all the stat info back 239 to the index due to their implementation limitations (e.g. jgit). 240 A configuration option can tell Git to ignore changes to most of 241 the stat fields and only pay attention to mtime and size, which 242 these implementations can reliably update. This can be used to 243 avoid excessive revalidation of contents. 244 245 * Some platforms ship with old version of expat where xmlparse.h 246 needs to be included instead of expat.h; the build procedure has 247 been taught about this. 248 249 * "make clean" on platforms that cannot compute header dependencies 250 on the fly did not work with implementations of "rm" that do not 251 like an empty argument list. 252 253Also contains minor documentation updates and code clean-ups. 254 255 256Fixes since v1.8.1 257------------------ 258 259Unless otherwise noted, all the fixes since v1.8.1 in the maintenance 260track are contained in this release (see release notes to them for 261details). 262 263 * An element on GIT_CEILING_DIRECTORIES list that does not name the 264 real path to a directory (i.e. a symbolic link) could have caused 265 the GIT_DIR discovery logic to escape the ceiling. 266 267 * When attempting to read the XDG-style $HOME/.config/git/config and 268 finding that $HOME/.config/git is a file, we gave a wrong error 269 message, instead of treating the case as "a custom config file does 270 not exist there" and moving on. 271 272 * The behaviour visible to the end users was confusing, when they 273 attempt to kill a process spawned in the editor that was in turn 274 launched by Git with SIGINT (or SIGQUIT), as Git would catch that 275 signal and die. We ignore these signals now. 276 (merge 0398fc34 pf/editor-ignore-sigint later to maint). 277 278 * A child process that was killed by a signal (e.g. SIGINT) was 279 reported in an inconsistent way depending on how the process was 280 spawned by us, with or without a shell in between. 281 282 * After failing to create a temporary file using mkstemp(), failing 283 pathname was not reported correctly on some platforms. 284 285 * We used to stuff "user@" and then append what we read from 286 /etc/mailname to come up with a default e-mail ident, but a bug 287 lost the "user@" part. 288 289 * The attribute mechanism didn't allow limiting attributes to be 290 applied to only a single directory itself with "path/" like the 291 exclude mechanism does. The initial implementation of this that 292 was merged to 'maint' and 1.8.1.2 was with a severe performance 293 degradations and needs to merge a fix-up topic. 294 295 * The smart HTTP clients forgot to verify the content-type that comes 296 back from the server side to make sure that the request is being 297 handled properly. 298 (merge 3443db5 sp/smart-http-content-type-check later to maint). 299 300 * "git am" did not parse datestamp correctly from Hg generated patch, 301 when it is run in a locale outside C (or en). 302 303 * "git apply" misbehaved when fixing whitespace breakages by removing 304 excess trailing blank lines. 305 306 * "git apply --summary" has been taught to make sure the similarity 307 value shown in its output is sensible, even when the input had a 308 bogus value. 309 (merge afcb6ac jk/apply-similaritly-parsing later to maint). 310 311 * A tar archive created by "git archive" recorded a directory in a 312 way that made NetBSD's implementation of "tar" sometimes unhappy. 313 314 * "git archive" did not record uncompressed size in the header when 315 streaming a zip archive, which confused some implementations of unzip. 316 317 * "git archive" did not parse configuration values in tar.* namespace 318 correctly. 319 (merge b3873c3 jk/config-parsing-cleanup later to maint). 320 321 * Attempt to "branch --edit-description" an existing branch, while 322 being on a detached HEAD, errored out. 323 324 * "git clean" showed what it was going to do, but sometimes end up 325 finding that it was not allowed to do so, which resulted in a 326 confusing output (e.g. after saying that it will remove an 327 untracked directory, it found an embedded git repository there 328 which it is not allowed to remove). It now performs the actions 329 and then reports the outcome more faithfully. 330 (merge f538a91 zk/clean-report-failure later to maint). 331 332 * When "git clone --separate-git-dir=$over_there" is interrupted, it 333 failed to remove the real location of the $GIT_DIR it created. 334 This was most visible when interrupting a submodule update. 335 336 * "git cvsimport" mishandled timestamps at DST boundary. 337 (merge 48c9162 bw/get-tz-offset-perl later to maint). 338 339 * We used to have an arbitrary 32 limit for combined diff input, 340 resulting in incorrect number of leading colons shown when showing 341 the "--raw --cc" output. 342 (merge edbc00e jc/combine-diff-many-parents later to maint). 343 344 * "git fetch --depth" was broken in at least three ways. The 345 resulting history was deeper than specified by one commit, it was 346 unclear how to wipe the shallowness of the repository with the 347 command, and documentation was misleading. 348 (merge cfb70e1 nd/fetch-depth-is-broken later to maint). 349 350 * "git log --all -p" that walked refs/notes/textconv/ ref can later 351 try to use the textconv data incorrectly after it gets freed. 352 (merge be5c9fb jk/read-commit-buffer-data-after-free later to maint). 353 354 * We forgot to close the file descriptor reading from "gpg" output, 355 killing "git log --show-signature" on a long history. 356 357 * The way "git svn" asked for password using SSH_ASKPASS and 358 GIT_ASKPASS was not in line with the rest of the system. 359 360 * The --graph code fell into infinite loop when asked to do what the 361 code did not expect. 362 363 * http transport was wrong to ask for the username when the 364 authentication is done by certificate identity. 365 366 * "git pack-refs" that ran in parallel to another process that 367 created new refs had a nasty race. 368 369 * Rebasing the history of superproject with change in the submodule 370 has been broken since v1.7.12. 371 372 * After "git add -N" and then writing a tree object out of the 373 index, the cache-tree data structure got corrupted. 374 375 * "git clone" used to allow --bare and --separate-git-dir=$there 376 options at the same time, which was nonsensical. 377 (merge 95b63f1 nd/clone-no-separate-git-dir-with-bare later to maint). 378 379 * "git rebase --preserve-merges" lost empty merges in recent versions 380 of Git. 381 382 * "git merge --no-edit" computed who were involved in the work done 383 on the side branch, even though that information is to be discarded 384 without getting seen in the editor. 385 386 * "git merge" started calling prepare-commit-msg hook like "git 387 commit" does some time ago, but forgot to pay attention to the exit 388 status of the hook. 389 390 * A failure to push due to non-ff while on an unborn branch 391 dereferenced a NULL pointer when showing an error message. 392 393 * When users spell "cc:" in lowercase in the fake "header" in the 394 trailer part, "git send-email" failed to pick up the addresses from 395 there. As e-mail headers field names are case insensitive, this 396 script should follow suit and treat "cc:" and "Cc:" the same way. 397 398 * Output from "git status --ignored" showed an unexpected interaction 399 with "--untracked". 400 401 * "gitweb", when sorting by age to show repositories with new 402 activities first, used to sort repositories with absolutely 403 nothing in it early, which was not very useful. 404 405 * "gitweb"'s code to sanitize control characters before passing it to 406 "highlight" filter lost known-to-be-safe control characters by 407 mistake. 408 409 * "gitweb" pages served over HTTPS, when configured to show picon or 410 gravatar, referred to these external resources to be fetched via 411 HTTP, resulting in mixed contents warning in browsers. 412 (merge 5748558 ab/gitweb-use-same-scheme later to maint). 413 414 * When a line to be wrapped has a solid run of non space characters 415 whose length exactly is the wrap width, "git shortlog -w" failed 416 to add a newline after such a line. 417 418 * Command line completion leaked an unnecessary error message while 419 looking for possible matches with paths in <tree-ish>. 420 421 * Command line completion for "tcsh" emitted an unwanted space 422 after completing a single directory name. 423 424 * Command line completion code was inadvertently made incompatible with 425 older versions of bash by using a newer array notation. 426 427 * "git push" was taught to refuse updating the branch that is 428 currently checked out long time ago, but the user manual was left 429 stale. 430 (merge d9be248 wk/man-deny-current-branch-is-default-these-days later to maint). 431 432 * Some shells do not behave correctly when IFS is unset; work it 433 around by explicitly setting it to the default value. 434 435 * Some scripted programs written in Python did not get updated when 436 PYTHON_PATH changed. 437 (cherry-pick 96a4647fca54031974cd6ad1 later to maint). 438 439 * When autoconf is used, any build on a different commit always ran 440 "config.status --recheck" even when unnecessary. 441 442 * A fix was added to the build procedure to work around buggy 443 versions of ccache broke the auto-generation of dependencies, which 444 unfortunately is still relevant because some people use ancient 445 distros. 446 447 * The autoconf subsystem passed --mandir down to generated 448 config.mak.autogen but forgot to do the same for --htmldir. 449 (merge fc1c541 ct/autoconf-htmldir later to maint). 450 451 * We have been carrying a translated and long-unmaintained copy of an 452 old version of the tutorial; removed. 453 454 * t0050 had tests expecting failures from a bug that was fixed some 455 time ago. 456 457 * t4014, t9502 and t0200 tests had various portability issues that 458 broke on OpenBSD. 459 460 * t9020 and t3600 tests had various portability issues. 461 462 * t9200 runs "cvs init" on a directory that already exists, but a 463 platform can configure this fail for the current user (e.g. you 464 need to be in the cvsadmin group on NetBSD 6.0). 465 466 * t9020 and t9810 had a few non-portable shell script construct. 467 468 * Scripts to test bash completion was inherently flaky as it was 469 affected by whatever random things the user may have on $PATH.