1 GIT v1.5.3 Release Notes
2 ========================
7 * The commit walkers other than http are officially deprecated,
8 but still supported for now.
10 * The submodule support has Porcelain layer.
12 Note that the current submodule support is minimal and this is
13 deliberately so. A design decision we made is that operations
14 at the supermodule level do not recurse into submodules by
15 default. The expectation is that later we would add a
16 mechanism to tell git which submodules the user is interested
17 in, and this information might be used to determine the
18 recursive behaviour of certain commands (e.g. "git checkout"
19 and "git diff"), but currently we haven't agreed on what that
20 mechanism should look like. Therefore, if you use submodules,
21 you would probably need "git submodule update" on the
22 submodules you care about after running a "git checkout" at
23 the supermodule level.
25 * There are a handful pack-objects changes to help you cope better
26 with repositories with pathologically large blobs in them.
28 * For people who need to import from Perforce, a front-end for
29 fast-import is in contrib/fast-import/.
31 * Comes with git-gui 0.8.2.
33 * Comes with updated gitk.
35 * New commands and options.
37 - "git log --date=<format>" can use more formats: iso8601, rfc2822.
39 - The hunk header output from "git diff" family can be customized
40 with the attributes mechanism. See gitattributes(5) for details.
42 - "git stash" allows you to quickly save away your work in
43 progress and replay it later on an updated state.
45 - "git rebase" learned an "interactive" mode that let you
46 pick and reorder which commits to rebuild.
48 - "git fsck" can save its findings in $GIT_DIR/lost-found, without a
49 separate invocation of "git lost-found" command. The blobs stored by
50 lost-found are stored in plain format to allow you to grep in them.
52 - $GIT_WORK_TREE environment variable can be used together with
53 $GIT_DIR to work in a subdirectory of a working tree that is
54 not located at "$GIT_DIR/..".
56 - Giving "--file=<file>" option to "git config" is the same as
57 running the command with GIT_CONFIG=<file> environment.
59 - "git log" learned a new option "--follow", to follow
60 renaming history of a single file.
62 - "git filter-branch" lets you rewrite the revision history of
63 specified branches. You can specify a number of filters to
64 modify the commits, files and trees.
66 - "git cvsserver" learned new options (--base-path, --export-all,
67 --strict-paths) inspired by "git daemon".
69 - "git daemon --base-path-relaxed" can help migrating a repository URL
70 that did not use to use --base-path to use --base-path.
72 - "git commit" can use "-t templatefile" option and commit.template
73 configuration variable to prime the commit message given to you in the
76 - "git submodule" command helps you manage the projects from
77 the superproject that contain them.
79 - In addition to core.compression configuration option,
80 core.loosecompression and pack.compression options can
81 independently tweak zlib compression levels used for loose
84 - "git ls-tree -l" shows size of blobs pointed at by the
85 tree entries, similar to "/bin/ls -l".
87 - "git rev-list" learned --regexp-ignore-case and
88 --extended-regexp options to tweak its matching logic used
91 - "git describe --contains" is a handier way to call more
92 obscure command "git name-rev --tags".
94 - "git gc --aggressive" tells the command to spend more cycles
95 to optimize the repository harder.
97 - "git repack" learned a "window-memory" limit which
98 dynamically reduces the window size to stay within the
99 specified memory usage.
101 - "git repack" can be told to split resulting packs to avoid
102 exceeding limit specified with "--max-pack-size".
104 - "git fsck" gained --verbose option. This is really really
105 verbose but it might help you identify exact commit that is
106 corrupt in your repository.
108 - "git format-patch" learned --numbered-files option. This
109 may be useful for MH users.
111 - "git format-patch" learned format.subjectprefix configuration
112 variable, which serves the same purpose as "--subject-prefix"
115 - "git tag -n -l" shows tag annotations while listing tags.
117 - "git cvsimport" can optionally use the separate-remote layout.
119 - "git blame" can be told to see through commits that change
120 whitespaces and indentation levels with "-w" option.
122 - "git send-email" can be told not to thread the messages when
123 sending out more than one patches.
125 - "git send-email" can also be told how to find whom to cc the
126 message to for each message via --cc-cmd.
128 - "git config" learned NUL terminated output format via -z to
131 - "git add" learned "--refresh <paths>..." option to selectively refresh
132 the cached stat information.
134 - "git init -q" makes the command quieter.
136 - "git -p command" now has a cousin of opposite sex, "git --no-pager
139 * Updated behavior of existing commands.
141 - "gitweb" can offer multiple snapshot formats.
143 ***NOTE*** Unfortunately, this changes the format of the
144 $feature{snapshot}{default} entry in the per-site
145 configuration file 'gitweb_config.perl'. It used to be a
146 three-element tuple that describe a single format; with the
147 new configuration item format, you only have to say the name
148 of the format ('tgz', 'tbz2' or 'zip'). Please update the
149 your configuration file accordingly.
151 - "git clone" uses -l (hardlink files under .git) by default when
154 - URL used for "git clone" and friends can specify nonstandard SSH port
155 by using ssh://host:port/path/to/repo syntax.
157 - "git bundle create" can now create a bundle without negative refs,
158 i.e. "everything since the beginning up to certain points".
160 - "git diff" (but not the plumbing level "git diff-tree") now
161 recursively descends into trees by default.
163 - "git diff" does not show differences that come only from
164 stat-dirtiness in the form of "diff --git" header anymore.
165 It runs "update-index --refresh" silently as needed.
167 - "git tag -l" used to match tags by globbing its parameter as if it
168 has wildcard '*' on both ends, which made "git tag -l gui" to match
169 tag 'gitgui-0.7.0'; this was very annoying. You now have to add
170 asterisk on the sides you want to wildcard yourself.
172 - The editor to use with many interactive commands can be
173 overridden with GIT_EDITOR environment variable, or if it
174 does not exist, with core.editor configuration variable. As
175 before, if you have neither, environment variables VISUAL
176 and EDITOR are consulted in this order, and then finally we
179 - "git rm --cached" does not complain when removing a newly
180 added file from the index anymore.
182 - Options to "git log" to affect how --grep/--author options look for
183 given strings now have shorter abbreviations. -i is for ignore case,
184 and -E is for extended regexp.
186 - "git log" learned --log-size to show the number of bytes in
187 the log message part of the output to help qgit.
189 - "git log --name-status" does not require you to give "-r" anymore.
190 As a general rule, Porcelain commands should recurse when showing
193 - "git format-patch --root A" can be used to format everything
194 since the beginning up to A. This was supported with
195 "git format-patch --root A A" for a long time, but was not
198 - "git svn dcommit" retains local merge information.
200 - "git svnimport" allows an empty string to be specified as the
201 trunk/ directory. This is necessary to suck data from a SVN
202 repository that doe not have trunk/ branches/ and tags/ organization
205 - "git config" to set values also honors type flags like --bool
208 - core.quotepath configuration can be used to make textual git
209 output to emit most of the characters in the path literally.
211 - "git mergetool" chooses its backend more wisely, taking
212 notice of its environment such as use of X, Gnome/KDE, etc.
214 - "gitweb" shows merge commits a lot nicer than before. The
215 default view uses more compact --cc format, while the UI
216 allows to choose normal diff with any parent.
218 - snapshot files "gitweb" creates from a repository at
219 $path/$project/.git are more useful. We use $project part
220 in the filename, which we used to discard.
222 - "git cvsimport" creates lightweight tags; there is no
223 interesting information we can record in an annotated tag,
224 and the handcrafted ones the old code created was not
225 properly formed anyway.
227 - "git push" pretends that you immediately fetched back from
228 the remote by updating corresponding remote tracking
229 branches if you have any.
231 - The diffstat given after a merge (or a pull) honors the
232 color.diff configuration.
234 - "git commit --amend" is now compatible with various message source
235 options such as -m/-C/-c/-F.
237 - "git apply --whitespace=strip" removes blank lines added at
240 - "git fetch" over git native protocols with "-v" option shows
241 connection status, and the IP address of the other end, to
242 help diagnosing problems.
244 - We used to have core.legacyheaders configuration, when
245 set to false, allowed git to write loose objects in a format
246 that mimics the format used by objects stored in packs. It
247 turns out that this was not so useful. Although we will
248 continue to read objects written in that format, we do not
249 honor that configuration anymore and create loose objects in
250 the legacy/traditional format.
252 - "--find-copies-harder" option to diff family can now be
253 spelled as "-C -C" for brevity.
255 - "git mailsplit" (hence "git am") can read from Maildir
258 - "git cvsserver" does not barf upon seeing "cvs login"
261 - "pack-objects" honors "delta" attribute set in
262 .gitattributes. It does not attempt to deltify blobs that
263 come from paths with delta attribute set to false.
265 - "new-workdir" script (in contrib) can now be used with a
268 - "git mergetool" learned to use gvimdiff.
270 - "gitview" (in contrib) has a better blame interface.
272 - "git log" and friends did not handle a commit log message
273 that is larger than 16kB; they do now.
275 - "--pretty=oneline" output format for "git log" and friends
276 deals with "malformed" commit log messages that have more
277 than one lines in the first paragraph better. We used to
278 show the first line, cutting the title at mid-sentence; we
279 concatenate them into a single line and treat the result as
282 - "git p4import" has been demoted to contrib status. For
283 a superior option, checkout the "git p4" front end to
284 "git fast-import" (also in contrib). The man page and p4
285 rpm have been removed as well.
287 - "git mailinfo" (hence "am") now tries to see if the message
288 is in utf-8 first, instead of assuming iso-8859-1, if
289 incoming e-mail does not say what encoding it is in.
293 - old-style function definitions (most notably, a function
294 without parameter defined with "func()", not "func(void)")
295 have been eradicated.
297 - "git tag" and "git verify-tag" have been rewritten in C.
301 - "git pack-objects" avoids re-deltification cost by caching
302 small enough delta results it creates while looking for the
303 best delta candidates.
305 - "git pack-objects" learned a new heuristic to prefer delta
306 that is shallower in depth over the smallest delta
307 possible. This improves both overall packfile access
308 performance and packfile density.
310 - diff-delta code that is used for packing has been improved
311 to work better on big files.
313 - when there are more than one pack files in the repository,
314 the runtime used to try finding an object always from the
315 newest packfile; it now tries the same packfile as we found
316 the object requested the last time, which exploits the
317 locality of references.
319 - verifying pack contents done by "git fsck --full" got boost
320 by carefully choosing the order to verify objects in them.
322 - "git read-tree -m" to read into an already populated index
323 has been optimized vastly. The effect of this can be seen
324 when switching branches that have differences in only a
327 - "git add paths..." and "git commit paths..." has also been
333 All of the fixes in v1.5.2 maintenance series are included in
334 this release, unless otherwise noted.
338 - "gitweb" had trouble handling non UTF-8 text with older
339 Encode.pm Perl module.
341 - "git svn" misparsed the data from the commits in the repository when
342 the user had "color.diff = true" in the configuration. This has been
345 - There was a case where "git svn dcommit" clobbered changes made on the
346 SVN side while committing multiple changes.
348 - "git-write-tree" had a bad interaction with racy-git avoidance and
349 gitattributes mechanisms.
351 - "git --bare command" overrode existing GIT_DIR setting and always
352 made it treat the current working directory as GIT_DIR.
354 - "git ls-files --error-unmatch" does not complain if you give the
355 same path pattern twice by mistake.
357 - "git init" autodetected core.filemode but not core.symlinks, which
358 made a new directory created automatically by "git clone" cumbersome
359 to use on filesystems that require these configurations to be set.
361 - "git log" family of commands behaved differently when run as "git
362 log" (no pathspec) and as "git log --" (again, no pathspec). This
363 inconsistency was introduced somewhere in v1.3.0 series but now has
366 - "git rebase -m" incorrectly displayed commits that were skipped.
projects / git / blob