1 Git v1.8.2 Release Notes
2 ========================
4 Backward compatibility notes
5 ----------------------------
7 In the upcoming major release (tentatively called 1.8.2), we will
8 change the behavior of the "git push" command.
10 When "git push [$there]" does not say what to push, we have used the
11 traditional "matching" semantics so far (all your branches were sent
12 to the remote as long as there already are branches of the same name
13 over there). We will use the "simple" semantics that pushes the
14 current branch to the branch with the same name, only when the current
15 branch is set to integrate with that remote branch. There is a user
16 preference configuration variable "push.default" to change this.
18 "git push $there tag v1.2.3" used to allow replacing a tag v1.2.3
19 that already exists in the repository $there, if the rewritten tag
20 you are pushing points at a commit that is a decendant of a commit
21 that the old tag v1.2.3 points at. This was found to be error prone
22 and starting with this release, any attempt to update an existing
23 ref under refs/tags/ hierarchy will fail, without "--force".
29 UI, Workflows & Features
31 * Initial ports to QNX and z/OS UNIX System Services have started.
33 * Output from the tests is coloured using "green is okay, yellow is
34 questionable, red is bad and blue is informative" scheme.
36 * In bare repositories, "git shortlog" and other commands now read
37 mailmap files from the tip of the history, to help running these
38 tools in server settings.
40 * Color specifiers, e.g. "%C(blue)Hello%C(reset)", used in the
41 "--format=" option of "git log" and friends can be disabled when
42 the output is not sent to a terminal by prefixing them with
43 "auto,", e.g. "%C(auto,blue)Hello%C(auto,reset)".
45 * Scripts can ask Git that wildcard patterns in pathspecs they give do
46 not have any significance, i.e. take them as literal strings.
48 * The patterns in .gitignore and .gitattributes files can have **/,
49 as a pattern that matches 0 or more levels of subdirectory.
50 E.g. "foo/**/bar" matches "bar" in "foo" itself or in a
51 subdirectory of "foo".
53 * "git blame" (and "git diff") learned the "--no-follow" option.
55 * "git check-ignore" command to help debugging .gitignore files has
58 * "git cherry-pick" can be used to replay a root commit to an unborn
61 * "git commit" can be told to use --cleanup=whitespace by setting the
62 configuration variable commit.cleanup to 'whitespace'.
64 * "git fetch --mirror" and fetch that uses other forms of refspec
65 with wildcard used to attempt to update a symbolic ref that match
66 the wildcard on the receiving end, which made little sense (the
67 real ref that is pointed at by the symbolic ref would be updated
68 anyway). Symbolic refs no longer are affected by such a fetch.
70 * "git format-patch" now detects more cases in which a whole branch
71 is being exported, and uses the description for the branch, when
72 asked to write a cover letter for the series.
74 * "git format-patch" learned "-v $count" option, and prepends a
75 string "v$count-" to the names of its output files, and also
76 automatically sets the subject prefix to "PATCH v$count". This
77 allows patches from rerolled series to be stored under different
78 names and makes it easier to reuse cover letter messsages.
80 * "git log" and friends can be told with --use-mailmap option to
81 rewrite the names and email addresses of people using the mailmap
84 * "git push" now requires "-f" to update a tag, even if it is a
85 fast-forward, as tags are meant to be fixed points.
87 * "git push" will stop without doing anything if the new "pre-push"
88 hook exists and exits with a failure.
90 * When "git rebase" fails to generate patches to be applied (e.g. due
91 to oom), it failed to detect the failure and instead behaved as if
92 there were nothing to do. A workaround to use a temporary file has
93 been applied, but we probably would want to revisit this later, as
94 it hurts the common case of not failing at all.
96 * Input and preconditions to "git reset" has been loosened where
97 appropriate. "git reset $fromtree Makefile" requires $fromtree to
98 be any tree (it used to require it to be a commit), for example.
99 "git reset" (without options or parameters) used to error out when
100 you do not have any commits in your history, but it now gives you
101 an empty index (to match non-existent commit you are not even on).
103 * "git submodule" started learning a new mode to integrate with the
104 tip of the remote branch (as opposed to integrating with the commit
105 recorded in the superproject's gitlink).
110 * "git fast-export" has been updated for its use in the context of
111 the remote helper interface.
113 * A new remote helper to interact with bzr has been added to contrib/.
115 * "git p4" got various bugfixes around its branch handling.
117 * The remote helper to interact with Hg in contrib/ has seen a few
121 Performance, Internal Implementation, etc.
123 * "git fsck" has been taught to be pickier about entries in tree
124 objects that should not be there, e.g. ".", ".git", and "..".
126 * Matching paths with common forms of pathspecs that contain wildcard
127 characters has been optimized further.
129 * "git reset" internals has been reworked and should be faster in
130 general. We tried to be careful not to break any behaviour but
131 there could be corner cases, especially when running the command
132 from a conflicted state, that we may have missed.
134 * The implementation of "imap-send" has been updated to reuse xml
135 quoting code from http-push codepath, and lost a lot of unused
138 * There is a simple-minded checker for the test scripts in t/
139 directory to catch most common mistakes (it is not enabled by
142 * You can build with USE_WILDMATCH=YesPlease to use a replacement
143 implementation of pattern matching logic used for pathname-like
144 things, e.g. refnames and paths in the repository. This new
145 implementation is not expected change the existing behaviour of Git
146 in this release, except for "git for-each-ref" where you can now
147 say "refs/**/master" and match with both refs/heads/master and
148 refs/remotes/origin/master. We plan to use this new implementation
149 in wider places (e.g. "git ls-files '**/Makefile' may find Makefile
150 at the top-level, and "git log '**/t*.sh'" may find commits that
151 touch a shell script whose name begins with "t" at any level) in
152 future versions of Git, but we are not there yet. By building with
153 USE_WILDMATCH, using the resulting Git daily and reporting when you
154 find breakages, you can help us get closer to that goal.
157 Also contains minor documentation updates and code clean-ups.
163 Unless otherwise noted, all the fixes since v1.8.1 in the maintenance
164 track are contained in this release (see release notes to them for
167 * An element on GIT_CEILING_DIRECTORIES list that does not name the
168 real path to a directory (i.e. a symbolic link) could have caused
169 the GIT_DIR discovery logic to escape the ceiling.
170 (merge 059b379 mh/ceiling later to maint).
172 * When attempting to read the XDG-style $HOME/.config/git/config and
173 finding that $HOME/.config/git is a file, we gave a wrong error
174 message, instead of treating the case as "a custom config file does
175 not exist there" and moving on.
176 (merge 8f2bbe4 jn/warn-on-inaccessible-loosen later to maint).
178 * The behaviour visible to the end users was confusing, when they
179 attempt to kill a process spawned in the editor that was in turn
180 launched by Git with SIGINT (or SIGQUIT), as Git would catch that
181 signal and die. We ignore these signals now.
182 (merge 1250857 pf/editor-ignore-sigint later to maint).
184 * A child process that was killed by a signal (e.g. SIGINT) was
185 reported in an inconsistent way depending on how the process was
186 spawned by us, with or without a shell in between.
187 (merge 709ca73 jk/unify-exit-code-by-receiving-signal later to maint).
189 * After failing to create a temporary file using mkstemp(), failing
190 pathname was not reported correctly on some platforms.
191 (merge f7be59b jc/mkstemp-more-careful-error-reporting later to maint).
193 * The attribute mechanism didn't allow limiting attributes to be
194 applied to only a single directory itself with "path/" like the
195 exclude mechanism does. The initial implementation of this that
196 was merged to 'maint' and 1.8.1.2 was with a severe performance
197 degradations and needs to merge a fix-up topic.
198 (merge 9db9eec nd/fix-directory-attrs-off-by-one later to maint).
200 * "git apply" misbehaved when fixing whitespace breakages by removing
201 excess trailing blank lines.
202 (merge 5de7166 jc/apply-trailing-blank-removal later to maint).
204 * A tar archive created by "git archive" recorded a directory in a
205 way that made NetBSD's implementation of "tar" sometimes unhappy.
206 (merge 22f0dcd rs/leave-base-name-in-name-field-of-tar later to maint).
208 * "git archive" did not record uncompressed size in the header when
209 streaming a zip archive, which confused some implementations of unzip.
210 (merge 5ea2c84 rs/zip-with-uncompressed-size-in-the-header later to maint).
212 * "git clean" showed what it was going to do, but sometimes end up
213 finding that it was not allowed to do so, which resulted in a
214 confusing output (e.g. after saying that it will remove an
215 untracked directory, it found an embedded git repository there
216 which it is not allowed to remove). It now performs the actions
217 and then reports the outcome more faithfully.
218 (merge f538a91 zk/clean-report-failure later to maint).
220 * When "git clone --separate-git-dir=$over_there" is interrupted, it
221 failed to remove the real location of the $GIT_DIR it created.
222 This was most visible when interrupting a submodule update.
223 (merge 9be1980 jl/interrupt-clone-remove-separate-git-dir later to maint).
225 * The way "git svn" asked for password using SSH_ASKPASS and
226 GIT_ASKPASS was not in line with the rest of the system.
227 (merge e9263e4 ss/svn-prompt later to maint).
229 * The --graph code fell into infinite loop when asked to do what the
231 (merge 656197a mk/maint-graph-infinity-loop later to maint).
233 * http transport was wrong to ask for the username when the
234 authentication is done by certificate identity.
235 (merge 75e9a40 rb/http-cert-cred-no-username-prompt later to maint).
237 * "git pack-refs" that ran in parallel to another process that
238 created new refs had a nasty race.
239 (merge b3f1280 jk/repack-ref-racefix later to maint).
241 * After "git add -N" and then writing a tree object out of the
242 index, the cache-tree data structure got corrupted.
243 (merge eec3e7e nd/invalidate-i-t-a-cache-tree later to maint).
245 * "git clone" used to allow --bare and --separate-git-dir=$there
246 options at the same time, which was nonsensical.
247 (merge 95b63f1 nd/clone-no-separate-git-dir-with-bare later to maint).
249 * "git rebase --preserve-merges" lost empty merges in recent versions
251 (merge 9869778 ph/rebase-preserve-all-merges later to maint).
253 * "git merge --no-edit" computed who were involved in the work done
254 on the side branch, even though that information is to be discarded
255 without getting seen in the editor.
256 (merge 9bcbb1c jc/maint-fmt-merge-msg-no-edit-lose-credit later to maint).
258 * "git merge" started calling prepare-commit-msg hook like "git
259 commit" does some time ago, but forgot to pay attention to the exit
261 (merge 3e4141d ap/merge-stop-at-prepare-commit-msg-failure later to maint).
263 * When users spell "cc:" in lowercase in the fake "header" in the
264 trailer part, "git send-email" failed to pick up the addresses from
265 there. As e-mail headers field names are case insensitive, this
266 script should follow suit and treat "cc:" and "Cc:" the same way.
267 (merge 6310071 nz/send-email-headers-are-case-insensitive later to maint).
269 * Output from "git status --ignored" showed an unexpected interaction
271 (merge a45fb69 ap/status-ignored-in-ignored-directory later to maint).
273 * "gitweb", when sorting by age to show repositories with new
274 activities first, used to sort repositories with absolutely
275 nothing in it early, which was not very useful.
276 (merge 28dae18 md/gitweb-sort-by-age later to maint).
278 * "gitweb"'s code to sanitize control characters before passing it to
279 "highlight" filter lost known-to-be-safe control characters by
281 (merge 0e901d2 os/gitweb-highlight-uncaptured later to maint).
283 * When a line to be wrapped has a solid run of non space characters
284 whose length exactly is the wrap width, "git shortlog -w" failed
285 to add a newline after such a line.
286 (merge e0db176 sp/shortlog-missing-lf later to maint).
288 * Command line completion leaked an unnecessary error message while
289 looking for possible matches with paths in <tree-ish>.
290 (merge ca87dd6 ds/completion-silence-in-tree-path-probe later to maint).
292 * Command line completion for "tcsh" emitted an unwanted space
293 after completing a single directory name.
294 (merge 92f1c04 mk/complete-tcsh later to maint).
296 * Some shells do not behave correctly when IFS is unset; work it
297 around by explicitly setting it to the default value.
298 (merge 393050c jc/maint-fbsd-sh-ifs-workaround later to maint).
300 * Some scripted programs written in Python did not get updated when
302 (cherry-pick 96a4647fca54031974cd6ad1 later to maint).
304 * When autoconf is used, any build on a different commit always ran
305 "config.status --recheck" even when unnecessary.
306 (merge 1226504 jn/less-reconfigure later to maint).
308 * We have been carrying a translated and long-unmaintained copy of an
309 old version of the tutorial; removed.
310 (merge 0a85441 ta/remove-stale-translated-tut later to maint).
312 * t4014, t9502 and t0200 tests had various portability issues that
314 (merge 27f6342 jc/maint-test-portability later to maint).
316 * t9020 and t3600 tests had various portability issues.
317 (merge 5a02966 jc/test-portability later to maint).
319 * t9200 runs "cvs init" on a directory that already exists, but a
320 platform can configure this fail for the current user (e.g. you
321 need to be in the cvsadmin group on NetBSD 6.0).
322 (merge 8666df0 jc/test-cvs-no-init-in-existing-dir later to maint).
324 * t9020 and t9810 had a few non-portable shell script construct.
325 (merge 2797914 tb/test-t9020-no-which later to maint).
326 (merge 6f4e505 tb/test-t9810-no-sed-i later to maint).
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