1 Git v1.8.2 Release Notes
2 ========================
4 Backward compatibility notes (this release)
5 -------------------------------------------
7 "git push $there tag v1.2.3" used to allow replacing a tag v1.2.3
8 that already exists in the repository $there, if the rewritten tag
9 you are pushing points at a commit that is a descendant of a commit
10 that the old tag v1.2.3 points at. This was found to be error prone
11 and starting with this release, any attempt to update an existing
12 ref under refs/tags/ hierarchy will fail, without "--force".
14 When "git add -u" and "git add -A" that does not specify what paths
15 to add on the command line is run from inside a subdirectory, the
16 scope of the operation has always been limited to the subdirectory.
17 Many users found this counter-intuitive, given that "git commit -a"
18 and other commands operate on the entire tree regardless of where you
19 are. In this release, these commands give a warning message that
20 suggests the users to use "git add -u/-A ." when they want to limit
21 the scope to the current directory; doing so will squelch the message,
22 while training their fingers.
25 Backward compatibility notes (for Git 2.0)
26 ------------------------------------------
28 When "git push [$there]" does not say what to push, we have used the
29 traditional "matching" semantics so far (all your branches were sent
30 to the remote as long as there already are branches of the same name
31 over there). In Git 2.0, the default will change to the "simple"
32 semantics that pushes the current branch to the branch with the same
33 name, only when the current branch is set to integrate with that
34 remote branch. There is a user preference configuration variable
35 "push.default" to change this. If you are an old-timer who is used
36 to the "matching" semantics, you can set it to "matching" to keep the
37 traditional behaviour. If you want to live in the future early,
38 you can set it to "simple" today without waiting for Git 2.0.
40 When "git add -u" and "git add -A", that does not specify what paths
41 to add on the command line is run from inside a subdirectory, these
42 commands will operate on the entire tree in Git 2.0 for consistency
43 with "git commit -a" and other commands. Because there will be no
44 mechanism to make "git add -u" behave as if "git add -u .", it is
45 important for those who are used to "git add -u" (without pathspec)
46 updating the index only for paths in the current subdirectory to start
47 training their fingers to explicitly say "git add -u ." when they mean
48 it before Git 2.0 comes.
54 UI, Workflows & Features
56 * Initial ports to QNX and z/OS UNIX System Services have started.
58 * Output from the tests is coloured using "green is okay, yellow is
59 questionable, red is bad and blue is informative" scheme.
61 * Mention of "GIT/Git/git" in the documentation have been updated to
62 be more uniform and consistent. The name of the system and the
63 concept it embodies is "Git"; the command the users type is "git".
64 All-caps "GIT" was merely a way to imitate "Git" typeset in small
65 caps in our ASCII text only documentation and to be avoided.
67 * The completion script (in contrib/completion) used to let the
68 default completer to suggest pathnames, which gave too many
69 irrelevant choices (e.g. "git add" would not want to add an
70 unmodified path). It learnt to use a more git-aware logic to
71 enumerate only relevant ones.
73 * In bare repositories, "git shortlog" and other commands now read
74 mailmap files from the tip of the history, to help running these
75 tools in server settings.
77 * Color specifiers, e.g. "%C(blue)Hello%C(reset)", used in the
78 "--format=" option of "git log" and friends can be disabled when
79 the output is not sent to a terminal by prefixing them with
80 "auto,", e.g. "%C(auto,blue)Hello%C(auto,reset)".
82 * Scripts can ask Git that wildcard patterns in pathspecs they give do
83 not have any significance, i.e. take them as literal strings.
85 * The patterns in .gitignore and .gitattributes files can have **/,
86 as a pattern that matches 0 or more levels of subdirectory.
87 E.g. "foo/**/bar" matches "bar" in "foo" itself or in a
88 subdirectory of "foo".
90 * When giving arguments without "--" disambiguation, object names
91 that come earlier on the command line must not be interpretable as
92 pathspecs and pathspecs that come later on the command line must
93 not be interpretable as object names. This disambiguation rule has
94 been tweaked so that ":/" (no other string before or after) is
95 always interpreted as a pathspec; "git cmd -- :/" is no longer
96 needed, you can just say "git cmd :/".
98 * Various "hint" lines Git gives when it asks the user to edit
99 messages in the editor are commented out with '#' by default. The
100 core.commentchar configuration variable can be used to customize
101 this '#' to a different character.
103 * "git add -u" and "git add -A" without pathspec issues warning to
104 make users aware that they are only operating on paths inside the
105 subdirectory they are in. Use ":/" (everything from the top) or
106 "." (everything from the $cwd) to disambiguate.
108 * "git blame" (and "git diff") learned the "--no-follow" option.
110 * "git branch" now rejects some nonsense combinations of command line
111 arguments (e.g. giving more than one branch name to rename) with
112 more case-specific error messages.
114 * "git check-ignore" command to help debugging .gitignore files has
117 * "git cherry-pick" can be used to replay a root commit to an unborn
120 * "git commit" can be told to use --cleanup=whitespace by setting the
121 configuration variable commit.cleanup to 'whitespace'.
123 * "git diff" and other Porcelain commands can be told to use a
124 non-standard algorithm by setting diff.algorithm configuration
127 * "git fetch --mirror" and fetch that uses other forms of refspec
128 with wildcard used to attempt to update a symbolic ref that match
129 the wildcard on the receiving end, which made little sense (the
130 real ref that is pointed at by the symbolic ref would be updated
131 anyway). Symbolic refs no longer are affected by such a fetch.
133 * "git format-patch" now detects more cases in which a whole branch
134 is being exported, and uses the description for the branch, when
135 asked to write a cover letter for the series.
137 * "git format-patch" learned "-v $count" option, and prepends a
138 string "v$count-" to the names of its output files, and also
139 automatically sets the subject prefix to "PATCH v$count". This
140 allows patches from rerolled series to be stored under different
141 names and makes it easier to reuse cover letter messages.
143 * "git log" and friends can be told with --use-mailmap option to
144 rewrite the names and email addresses of people using the mailmap
147 * "git log --cc --graph" now shows the combined diff output with the
150 * "git log --grep=<pattern>" honors i18n.logoutputencoding to look
151 for the pattern after fixing the log message to the specified
154 * "git mergetool" and "git difftool" learned to list the available
155 tool backends in a more consistent manner.
157 * "git mergetool" is aware of TortoiseGitMerge now and uses it over
158 TortoiseMerge when available.
160 * "git push" now requires "-f" to update a tag, even if it is a
161 fast-forward, as tags are meant to be fixed points.
163 * Error messages from "git push" when it stops to prevent remote refs
164 from getting overwritten by mistake have been improved to explain
165 various situations separately.
167 * "git push" will stop without doing anything if the new "pre-push"
168 hook exists and exits with a failure.
170 * When "git rebase" fails to generate patches to be applied (e.g. due
171 to oom), it failed to detect the failure and instead behaved as if
172 there were nothing to do. A workaround to use a temporary file has
173 been applied, but we probably would want to revisit this later, as
174 it hurts the common case of not failing at all.
176 * Input and preconditions to "git reset" has been loosened where
177 appropriate. "git reset $fromtree Makefile" requires $fromtree to
178 be any tree (it used to require it to be a commit), for example.
179 "git reset" (without options or parameters) used to error out when
180 you do not have any commits in your history, but it now gives you
181 an empty index (to match non-existent commit you are not even on).
183 * "git status" says what branch is being bisected or rebased when
184 able, not just "bisecting" or "rebasing".
186 * "git submodule" started learning a new mode to integrate with the
187 tip of the remote branch (as opposed to integrating with the commit
188 recorded in the superproject's gitlink).
190 * "git upload-pack" which implements the service "ls-remote" and
191 "fetch" talk to can be told to hide ref hierarchies the server
192 side internally uses (and that clients have no business learning
193 about) with transfer.hiderefs configuration.
198 * "git fast-export" has been updated for its use in the context of
199 the remote helper interface.
201 * A new remote helper to interact with bzr has been added to contrib/.
203 * "git p4" got various bugfixes around its branch handling. It is
204 also made usable with Python 2.4/2.5. In addition, its various
205 portability issues for Cygwin have been addressed.
207 * The remote helper to interact with Hg in contrib/ has seen a few
211 Performance, Internal Implementation, etc.
213 * "git fsck" has been taught to be pickier about entries in tree
214 objects that should not be there, e.g. ".", ".git", and "..".
216 * Matching paths with common forms of pathspecs that contain wildcard
217 characters has been optimized further.
219 * We stopped paying attention to $GIT_CONFIG environment that points
220 at a single configuration file from any command other than "git config"
221 quite a while ago, but "git clone" internally set, exported, and
222 then unexported the variable during its operation unnecessarily.
224 * "git reset" internals has been reworked and should be faster in
225 general. We tried to be careful not to break any behaviour but
226 there could be corner cases, especially when running the command
227 from a conflicted state, that we may have missed.
229 * The implementation of "imap-send" has been updated to reuse xml
230 quoting code from http-push codepath, and lost a lot of unused
233 * There is a simple-minded checker for the test scripts in t/
234 directory to catch most common mistakes (it is not enabled by
237 * You can build with USE_WILDMATCH=YesPlease to use a replacement
238 implementation of pattern matching logic used for pathname-like
239 things, e.g. refnames and paths in the repository. This new
240 implementation is not expected change the existing behaviour of Git
241 in this release, except for "git for-each-ref" where you can now
242 say "refs/**/master" and match with both refs/heads/master and
243 refs/remotes/origin/master. We plan to use this new implementation
244 in wider places (e.g. "git ls-files '**/Makefile' may find Makefile
245 at the top-level, and "git log '**/t*.sh'" may find commits that
246 touch a shell script whose name begins with "t" at any level) in
247 future versions of Git, but we are not there yet. By building with
248 USE_WILDMATCH, using the resulting Git daily and reporting when you
249 find breakages, you can help us get closer to that goal.
251 * Some reimplementations of Git do not write all the stat info back
252 to the index due to their implementation limitations (e.g. jgit).
253 A configuration option can tell Git to ignore changes to most of
254 the stat fields and only pay attention to mtime and size, which
255 these implementations can reliably update. This can be used to
256 avoid excessive revalidation of contents.
258 * Some platforms ship with old version of expat where xmlparse.h
259 needs to be included instead of expat.h; the build procedure has
260 been taught about this.
262 * "make clean" on platforms that cannot compute header dependencies
263 on the fly did not work with implementations of "rm" that do not
264 like an empty argument list.
266 Also contains minor documentation updates and code clean-ups.
272 Unless otherwise noted, all the fixes since v1.8.1 in the maintenance
273 track are contained in this release (see release notes to them for
276 * An element on GIT_CEILING_DIRECTORIES list that does not name the
277 real path to a directory (i.e. a symbolic link) could have caused
278 the GIT_DIR discovery logic to escape the ceiling.
280 * When attempting to read the XDG-style $HOME/.config/git/config and
281 finding that $HOME/.config/git is a file, we gave a wrong error
282 message, instead of treating the case as "a custom config file does
283 not exist there" and moving on.
285 * The behaviour visible to the end users was confusing, when they
286 attempt to kill a process spawned in the editor that was in turn
287 launched by Git with SIGINT (or SIGQUIT), as Git would catch that
288 signal and die. We ignore these signals now.
289 (merge 0398fc34 pf/editor-ignore-sigint later to maint).
291 * A child process that was killed by a signal (e.g. SIGINT) was
292 reported in an inconsistent way depending on how the process was
293 spawned by us, with or without a shell in between.
295 * After failing to create a temporary file using mkstemp(), failing
296 pathname was not reported correctly on some platforms.
298 * We used to stuff "user@" and then append what we read from
299 /etc/mailname to come up with a default e-mail ident, but a bug
300 lost the "user@" part.
302 * The attribute mechanism didn't allow limiting attributes to be
303 applied to only a single directory itself with "path/" like the
304 exclude mechanism does. The initial implementation of this that
305 was merged to 'maint' and 1.8.1.2 was with a severe performance
306 degradations and needs to merge a fix-up topic.
308 * The smart HTTP clients forgot to verify the content-type that comes
309 back from the server side to make sure that the request is being
312 * "git am" did not parse datestamp correctly from Hg generated patch,
313 when it is run in a locale outside C (or en).
315 * "git apply" misbehaved when fixing whitespace breakages by removing
316 excess trailing blank lines.
318 * "git apply --summary" has been taught to make sure the similarity
319 value shown in its output is sensible, even when the input had a
322 * A tar archive created by "git archive" recorded a directory in a
323 way that made NetBSD's implementation of "tar" sometimes unhappy.
325 * "git archive" did not record uncompressed size in the header when
326 streaming a zip archive, which confused some implementations of unzip.
328 * "git archive" did not parse configuration values in tar.* namespace
330 (merge b3873c3 jk/config-parsing-cleanup later to maint).
332 * Attempt to "branch --edit-description" an existing branch, while
333 being on a detached HEAD, errored out.
335 * "git clean" showed what it was going to do, but sometimes end up
336 finding that it was not allowed to do so, which resulted in a
337 confusing output (e.g. after saying that it will remove an
338 untracked directory, it found an embedded git repository there
339 which it is not allowed to remove). It now performs the actions
340 and then reports the outcome more faithfully.
342 * When "git clone --separate-git-dir=$over_there" is interrupted, it
343 failed to remove the real location of the $GIT_DIR it created.
344 This was most visible when interrupting a submodule update.
346 * "git cvsimport" mishandled timestamps at DST boundary.
348 * We used to have an arbitrary 32 limit for combined diff input,
349 resulting in incorrect number of leading colons shown when showing
350 the "--raw --cc" output.
352 * "git fetch --depth" was broken in at least three ways. The
353 resulting history was deeper than specified by one commit, it was
354 unclear how to wipe the shallowness of the repository with the
355 command, and documentation was misleading.
356 (merge cfb70e1 nd/fetch-depth-is-broken later to maint).
358 * "git log --all -p" that walked refs/notes/textconv/ ref can later
359 try to use the textconv data incorrectly after it gets freed.
361 * We forgot to close the file descriptor reading from "gpg" output,
362 killing "git log --show-signature" on a long history.
364 * The way "git svn" asked for password using SSH_ASKPASS and
365 GIT_ASKPASS was not in line with the rest of the system.
367 * The --graph code fell into infinite loop when asked to do what the
370 * http transport was wrong to ask for the username when the
371 authentication is done by certificate identity.
373 * "git pack-refs" that ran in parallel to another process that
374 created new refs had a nasty race.
376 * Rebasing the history of superproject with change in the submodule
377 has been broken since v1.7.12.
379 * After "git add -N" and then writing a tree object out of the
380 index, the cache-tree data structure got corrupted.
382 * "git clone" used to allow --bare and --separate-git-dir=$there
383 options at the same time, which was nonsensical.
385 * "git rebase --preserve-merges" lost empty merges in recent versions
388 * "git merge --no-edit" computed who were involved in the work done
389 on the side branch, even though that information is to be discarded
390 without getting seen in the editor.
392 * "git merge" started calling prepare-commit-msg hook like "git
393 commit" does some time ago, but forgot to pay attention to the exit
396 * A failure to push due to non-ff while on an unborn branch
397 dereferenced a NULL pointer when showing an error message.
399 * When users spell "cc:" in lowercase in the fake "header" in the
400 trailer part, "git send-email" failed to pick up the addresses from
401 there. As e-mail headers field names are case insensitive, this
402 script should follow suit and treat "cc:" and "Cc:" the same way.
404 * Output from "git status --ignored" showed an unexpected interaction
407 * "gitweb", when sorting by age to show repositories with new
408 activities first, used to sort repositories with absolutely
409 nothing in it early, which was not very useful.
411 * "gitweb"'s code to sanitize control characters before passing it to
412 "highlight" filter lost known-to-be-safe control characters by
415 * "gitweb" pages served over HTTPS, when configured to show picon or
416 gravatar, referred to these external resources to be fetched via
417 HTTP, resulting in mixed contents warning in browsers.
419 * When a line to be wrapped has a solid run of non space characters
420 whose length exactly is the wrap width, "git shortlog -w" failed
421 to add a newline after such a line.
423 * Command line completion leaked an unnecessary error message while
424 looking for possible matches with paths in <tree-ish>.
426 * Command line completion for "tcsh" emitted an unwanted space
427 after completing a single directory name.
429 * Command line completion code was inadvertently made incompatible with
430 older versions of bash by using a newer array notation.
432 * "git push" was taught to refuse updating the branch that is
433 currently checked out long time ago, but the user manual was left
435 (merge 50995ed wk/man-deny-current-branch-is-default-these-days later to maint).
437 * Some shells do not behave correctly when IFS is unset; work it
438 around by explicitly setting it to the default value.
440 * Some scripted programs written in Python did not get updated when
442 (cherry-pick 96a4647fca54031974cd6ad1 later to maint).
444 * When autoconf is used, any build on a different commit always ran
445 "config.status --recheck" even when unnecessary.
447 * A fix was added to the build procedure to work around buggy
448 versions of ccache broke the auto-generation of dependencies, which
449 unfortunately is still relevant because some people use ancient
452 * The autoconf subsystem passed --mandir down to generated
453 config.mak.autogen but forgot to do the same for --htmldir.
454 (merge 55d9bf0 ct/autoconf-htmldir later to maint).
456 * A change made on v1.8.1.x maintenance track had a nasty regression
457 to break the build when autoconf is used.
458 (merge 7f1b697 jn/less-reconfigure later to maint).
460 * We have been carrying a translated and long-unmaintained copy of an
461 old version of the tutorial; removed.
463 * t0050 had tests expecting failures from a bug that was fixed some
466 * t4014, t9502 and t0200 tests had various portability issues that
469 * t9020 and t3600 tests had various portability issues.
471 * t9200 runs "cvs init" on a directory that already exists, but a
472 platform can configure this fail for the current user (e.g. you
473 need to be in the cvsadmin group on NetBSD 6.0).
475 * t9020 and t9810 had a few non-portable shell script construct.
477 * Scripts to test bash completion was inherently flaky as it was
478 affected by whatever random things the user may have on $PATH.
480 * An element on GIT_CEILING_DIRECTORIES could be a "logical" pathname
481 that uses a symbolic link to point at somewhere else (e.g. /home/me
482 that points at /net/host/export/home/me, and the latter directory
483 is automounted). Earlier when Git saw such a pathname e.g. /home/me
484 on this environment variable, the "ceiling" mechanism did not take
485 effect. With this release (the fix has also been merged to the
486 v1.8.1.x maintenance series), elements on GIT_CEILING_DIRECTORIES
487 are by default checked for such aliasing coming from symbolic
488 links. As this needs to actually resolve symbolic links for each
489 element on the GIT_CEILING_DIRECTORIES, you can disable this
490 mechanism for some elements by listing them after an empty element
491 on the GIT_CEILING_DIRECTORIES. e.g. Setting /home/me::/home/him to
492 GIT_CEILING_DIRECTORIES makes Git resolve symbolic links in
493 /home/me when checking if the current directory is under /home/me,
494 but does not do so for /home/him.
495 (merge 7ec30aa mh/maint-ceil-absolute later to maint).
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