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