Git v1.8.4 Release Notes ======================== Updates since v1.8.3 -------------------- Foreign interfaces, subsystems and ports. * Git-gui has been updated to its 0.18.0 version. * MediaWiki remote helper (in contrib/) has been updated to use the credential helper interface from Git.pm. * Update build for Cygwin 1.[57]. Torsten Bögershausen reports that this is fine with Cygwin 1.7 ($gmane/225824) so let's try moving it ahead. * The credential helper to talk to keychain on OS X (in contrib/) has been updated to kick in not just when talking http/https but also imap(s) and smtp. * Remote transport helper has been updated to report errors and maintain ref hierarchy used to keep track of its own state better. * With "export" remote-helper protocol, (1) a push that tries to update a remote ref whose name is different from the pushing side does not work yet, and (2) the helper may not know how to do --dry-run; these problematic cases are disabled for now. * git-remote-hg/bzr (in contrib/) updates. * git-remote-mw (in contrib/) hints users to check the certificate, when https:// connection failed. UI, Workflows & Features * "git rm" gives a single message followed by list of paths to report multiple paths that cannot be removed. * "git rebase" can be told with ":/look for this string" syntax commits to replay the changes onto and where the work to be replayed begins. * Many tutorials teach users to set "color.ui" to "auto" as the first thing after you set "user.name/email" to introduce yourselves to Git. Now the variable defaults to "auto". * On Cygwin, "cygstart" is now recognised as a possible way to start a web browser (used in "help -w" and "instaweb" among others). ### * "git status" learned status.branch and status.short configuration ### variables to use --branch and --short options by default (override ### with --no-branch and --no-short options from the command line). * "git cmd ", when happens to be a 40-hex string, directly uses the 40-hex string as an object name, even if a ref "refs//" exists. This disambiguation order is unlikely to change, but we should warn about the ambiguity just like we warn when more than one refs/ hierachies share the same name. * "git rebase" learned "--[no-]autostash" option to save local changes instead of refusing to run (to which people's normal response was to stash them and re-run). This introduced a corner case breakage to "git am --abort" but it has been fixed. * Instead of typing four capital letters "HEAD", you can say "@" now, e.g. "git log @". * "check-ignore" (new feature since 1.8.2) has been updated to work more like "check-attr" over bidi-pipes. * "git describe" learned "--first-parent" option to limit its closest tagged commit search to the first-parent chain. * "git merge foo" that might have meant "git merge origin/foo" is diagnosed with a more informative error message. * "git log -L,:" has been added. This may still have leaks and rough edges, though. * We used the approxidate() parser for "--expire=" options of various commands, but it is better to treat --expire=all and --expire=now a bit more specially than using the current timestamp. "git gc" and "git reflog" have been updated with a new parsing function for expiry dates. * Updates to completion (both bash and zsh) helpers. * The behaviour of the "--chain-reply-to" option of "git send-email" have changed at 1.7.0, and we added a warning/advice message to help users adjust to the new behaviour back then, but we kept it around for too long. The message has finally been removed. * "git fetch origin master" unlike "git fetch origin" or "git fetch" did not update "refs/remotes/origin/master"; this was an early design decision to keep the update of remote tracking branches predictable, but in practice it turns out that people find it more convenient to opportunistically update them whenever we have a chance, and we have been updating them when we run "git push" which already breaks the original "predictability" anyway. * The configuration variable core.checkstat was advertised in the documentation but the code expected core.statinfo instead. For now, we accept both core.checkstat and core.statinfo, but the latter will be removed in the longer term. Performance, Internal Implementation, etc. * Uses of the platform fnmatch(3) function (many places in the code, matching pathspec, .gitignore and .gitattributes to name a few) have been replaced with wildmatch, allowing "foo/**/bar" that would match foo/bar, foo/a/bar, foo/a/b/bar, etc. * Memory ownership and lifetime rules for what for-each-ref feeds to its callbacks have been clarified (in short, "you do not own it, so make a copy if you want to keep it"). * The revision traversal logic to improve culling of irrelevant parents while traversing a mergy history has been updated. * Some leaks in unpack-trees (used in merge, cherry-pick and other codepaths) have been plugged. * The codepath to read from marks files in fast-import/export did not have to accept anything but 40-hex representation of the object name. Further, fast-export did not need full in-core object representation to have parsed wen reading from them. These codepaths have been optimized by taking advantage of these access patterns. * Object lookup logic, when the object hashtable starts to become crowded, has been optimized. * When TEST_OUTPUT_DIRECTORY setting is used, it was handled somewhat inconsistently between the test framework and t/Makefile, and logic to summarize the results looked at a wrong place. * "git clone" uses a lighter-weight implementation when making sure that the history behind refs are complete. * Many warnings from sparse source checker in compat/ area has been squelched. * The code to reading and updating packed-refs file has been updated, correcting corner case bugs. Also contains various documentation updates and code clean-ups. Fixes since v1.8.3 ------------------ Unless otherwise noted, all the fixes since v1.8.3 in the maintenance track are contained in this release (see release notes to them for details). * "git apply" parsed patches that add new files, generated by programs other than Git, incorrectly. This is an old breakage in v1.7.11 and will need to be merged down to the maintanance tracks. (merge 212eb96 tr/maint-apply-non-git-patch-parsefix later to maint). * Many "git submodule" operations do not work on a submodule at a path whose name is not in ASCII. (merge bed9470 fg/submodule-non-ascii-path later to maint). * "cherry-pick" had a small leak in an error codepath. (merge 706728a fc/sequencer-plug-leak later to maint). * Logic used by git-send-email to suppress cc mishandled names like "A U. Thor" , where the human readable part needs to be quoted (the user input may not have the double quotes around the name, and comparison was done between quoted and unquoted strings). (merge 1495266 mt/send-email-cc-match-fix later to maint). * Call to discard_cache/discard_index (used when we use different contents of the index in-core, in many operations like commit, apply, and merge) used to leak memory that held the array of index entries, which has been plugged. (merge a0fc4db rs/discard-index-discard-array later to maint). * "gitweb" forgot to clear a global variable $search_regexp upon each request, mistakenly carrying over the previous search to a new one when used as a persistent CGI. (merge ca7a5dc cm/gitweb-project-list-persistent-cgi-fix later to maint). * The wildmatch engine did not honor WM_CASEFOLD option correctly. (merge b79c0c3 ar/wildmatch-foldcase later to maint). * "git log -c --follow $path" segfaulted upon hitting the commit that renamed the $path being followed. (merge 46ec510 cb/log-follow-with-combined later to maint). * When a reflog notation is used for implicit "current branch", we did not say which branch and worse said "branch ''". (merge 305ebea rr/die-on-missing-upstream later to maint). * "difftool --dir-diff" did not copy back changes made by the end-user in the diff tool backend to the working tree in some cases. (merge 32eaf1d ks/difftool-dir-diff-copy-fix later to maint). * "git push $there HEAD:branch" did not resolve HEAD early enough, so it was easy to flip it around while push is still going on and push out a branch that the user did not originally intended when the command was started. (merge 0f075b2 rr/push-head later to maint). * The bash prompt code (in contrib/) displayed the name of the branch being rebased when "rebase -i/-m/-p" modes are in use, but not the plain vanilla "rebase". (merge 1306321 fc/show-branch-in-rebase-am later to maint). * Handling of negative exclude pattern for directories "!dir" was broken in the update to v1.8.3. (merge c3c327d kb/status-ignored-optim-2 later to maint). * zsh prompt script that borrowed from bash prompt script did not work due to slight differences in array variable notation between these two shells. (merge d0583da tg/maint-zsh-svn-remote-prompt later to maint). * An entry for "file://" scheme in the enumeration of URL types Git can take in the HTML documentation was made into a clickable link by mistake. (merge 4c32e36 nd/urls-doc-no-file-hyperlink-fix later to maint). * "git push --[no-]verify" was not documented. (merge 90d32d1 tr/push-no-verify-doc later to maint). * Stop installing the git-remote-testpy script that is only used for testing. (merge 416fda6 fc/makefile later to maint). * "git commit --allow-empty-message -m ''" should not start an editor. (merge 2520677 rs/commit-m-no-edit later to maint). * "git merge @{-1}~22" was rewritten to "git merge frotz@{1}~22" incorrectly when your previous branch was "frotz" (it should be rewritten to "git merge frotz~22" instead). (merge 84cf246 jc/strbuf-branchname-fix later to maint). * "git diff -c -p" was not showing a deleted line from a hunk when another hunk immediately begins where the earlier one ends. (merge aac3857 mk/combine-diff-context-horizon-fix later to maint). * "git log --ancestry-path A...B" did not work as expected, as it did not pay attention to the fact that the merge base between A and B was the bottom of the range being specified. (merge a765499 kb/ancestry-path-threedots later to maint). * Mac OS X does not like to write(2) more than INT_MAX number of bytes; work it around by chopping write(2) into smaller pieces. (merge 6c642a8 fc/macos-x-clipped-write later to maint). * Newer MacOS X encourages the programs to compile and link with their CommonCrypto, not with OpenSSL. (merge be4c828 da/darwin later to maint). * "git clone foo/bar:baz" cannot be a request to clone from a remote over git-over-ssh specified in the scp style. This case is now detected and clones from a local repository at "foo/bar:baz". (merge 6000334 nd/clone-local-with-colon later to maint). * When $HOME is misconfigured to point at an unreadable directory, we used to complain and die. Loosen the check. (merge 4698c8f jn/config-ignore-inaccessible later to maint). * "git subtree" (in contrib/) had one codepath with loose error checks to lose data at the remote side. (merge 3212d56 jk/subtree-do-not-push-if-split-fails later to maint). * "git fetch" into a shallow repository from a repository that does not know about the shallow boundary commits (e.g. a different fork from the repository the current shallow repository was cloned from) did not work correctly. (merge 71d5f93 mh/fetch-into-shallow later to maint). * "git checkout foo" DWIMs the intended "upstream" and turns it into "git checkout -t -b foo remotes/origin/foo". This codepath has been updated to correctly take existing remote definitions into account. (merge 229177a jh/checkout-auto-tracking later to maint).