| 1 | Git v1.8.4 Release Notes |
| 2 | ======================== |
| 3 | |
| 4 | Backward compatibility notes (for Git 2.0) |
| 5 | ------------------------------------------ |
| 6 | |
| 7 | When "git push [$there]" does not say what to push, we have used the |
| 8 | traditional "matching" semantics so far (all your branches were sent |
| 9 | to the remote as long as there already are branches of the same name |
| 10 | over there). In Git 2.0, the default will change to the "simple" |
| 11 | semantics that pushes: |
| 12 | |
| 13 | - only the current branch to the branch with the same name, and only |
| 14 | when the current branch is set to integrate with that remote |
| 15 | branch, if you are pushing to the same remote as you fetch from; or |
| 16 | |
| 17 | - only the current branch to the branch with the same name, if you |
| 18 | are pushing to a remote that is not where you usually fetch from. |
| 19 | |
| 20 | Use the user preference configuration variable "push.default" to |
| 21 | change this. If you are an old-timer who is used to the "matching" |
| 22 | semantics, you can set the variable to "matching" to keep the |
| 23 | traditional behaviour. If you want to live in the future early, you |
| 24 | can set it to "simple" today without waiting for Git 2.0. |
| 25 | |
| 26 | When "git add -u" (and "git add -A") is run inside a subdirectory and |
| 27 | does not specify which paths to add on the command line, it |
| 28 | will operate on the entire tree in Git 2.0 for consistency |
| 29 | with "git commit -a" and other commands. There will be no |
| 30 | mechanism to make plain "git add -u" behave like "git add -u .". |
| 31 | Current users of "git add -u" (without a pathspec) should start |
| 32 | training their fingers to explicitly say "git add -u ." |
| 33 | before Git 2.0 comes. A warning is issued when these commands are |
| 34 | run without a pathspec and when you have local changes outside the |
| 35 | current directory, because the behaviour in Git 2.0 will be different |
| 36 | from today's version in such a situation. |
| 37 | |
| 38 | In Git 2.0, "git add <path>" will behave as "git add -A <path>", so |
| 39 | that "git add dir/" will notice paths you removed from the directory |
| 40 | and record the removal. Versions before Git 2.0, including this |
| 41 | release, will keep ignoring removals, but the users who rely on this |
| 42 | behaviour are encouraged to start using "git add --ignore-removal <path>" |
| 43 | now before 2.0 is released. |
| 44 | |
| 45 | |
| 46 | Updates since v1.8.3 |
| 47 | -------------------- |
| 48 | |
| 49 | Foreign interfaces, subsystems and ports. |
| 50 | |
| 51 | * Cygwin port has been updated for more recent Cygwin 1.7. |
| 52 | |
| 53 | * "git rebase -i" now honors --strategy and -X options. |
| 54 | |
| 55 | * Git-gui has been updated to its 0.18.0 version. |
| 56 | |
| 57 | * MediaWiki remote helper (in contrib/) has been updated to use the |
| 58 | credential helper interface from Git.pm. |
| 59 | |
| 60 | * Update build for Cygwin 1.[57]. Torsten Bögershausen reports that |
| 61 | this is fine with Cygwin 1.7 (cf. <51A606A0.5060101@web.de>) so let's try moving it |
| 62 | ahead. |
| 63 | |
| 64 | * The credential helper to talk to keychain on OS X (in contrib/) has |
| 65 | been updated to kick in not just when talking http/https but also |
| 66 | imap(s) and smtp. |
| 67 | |
| 68 | * Remote transport helper has been updated to report errors and |
| 69 | maintain ref hierarchy used to keep track of its own state better. |
| 70 | |
| 71 | * With "export" remote-helper protocol, (1) a push that tries to |
| 72 | update a remote ref whose name is different from the pushing side |
| 73 | does not work yet, and (2) the helper may not know how to do |
| 74 | --dry-run; these problematic cases are disabled for now. |
| 75 | |
| 76 | * git-remote-hg/bzr (in contrib/) updates. |
| 77 | |
| 78 | * git-remote-mw (in contrib/) hints users to check the certificate, |
| 79 | when https:// connection failed. |
| 80 | |
| 81 | * git-remote-mw (in contrib/) adds a command to allow previewing the |
| 82 | contents locally before pushing it out, when working with a |
| 83 | MediaWiki remote. |
| 84 | |
| 85 | |
| 86 | UI, Workflows & Features |
| 87 | |
| 88 | * Sample "post-receive-email" hook script got an enhanced replacement |
| 89 | "multimail" (in contrib/). |
| 90 | |
| 91 | * Also in contrib/ is a new "contacts" script that runs "git blame" |
| 92 | to find out the people who may be interested in a set of changes. |
| 93 | |
| 94 | * "git clean" command learned an interactive mode. |
| 95 | |
| 96 | * The "--head" option to "git show-ref" was only to add "HEAD" to the |
| 97 | list of candidate refs to be filtered by the usual rules |
| 98 | (e.g. "--heads" that only show refs under refs/heads). The meaning |
| 99 | of the option has been changed to always show "HEAD" regardless of |
| 100 | what filtering will be applied to any other ref. |
| 101 | |
| 102 | This is a backward incompatible change and might cause breakages to |
| 103 | people's existing scripts. |
| 104 | |
| 105 | * "git show -s" was less discoverable than it should have been. It |
| 106 | now has a natural synonym "git show --no-patch". |
| 107 | |
| 108 | * "git check-mailmap" is a new command that lets you map usernames |
| 109 | and e-mail addresses through the mailmap mechanism, just like many |
| 110 | built-in commands do. |
| 111 | |
| 112 | * "git name-rev" learned to name an annotated tag object back to its |
| 113 | tagname; "git name-rev $(git rev-parse v1.0.0)" gives "tags/v1.0.0", |
| 114 | for example. |
| 115 | |
| 116 | * "git cat-file --batch-check=<format>" is added, primarily to allow |
| 117 | on-disk footprint of objects in packfiles (often they are a lot |
| 118 | smaller than their true size, when expressed as deltas) to be |
| 119 | reported. |
| 120 | |
| 121 | * "git rebase [-i]" used to leave just "rebase" as its reflog messages |
| 122 | for some operations. They have been reworded to be more informative. |
| 123 | |
| 124 | * In addition to the choice from "rebase, merge, or checkout-detach", |
| 125 | "submodule update" can allow a custom command to be used in to |
| 126 | update the working tree of submodules via the "submodule.*.update" |
| 127 | configuration variable. |
| 128 | |
| 129 | * "git submodule update" can optionally clone the submodule |
| 130 | repositories shallowly. |
| 131 | |
| 132 | * "git format-patch" learned "--from[=whom]" option, which sets the |
| 133 | "From: " header to the specified person (or the person who runs the |
| 134 | command, if "=whom" part is missing) and move the original author |
| 135 | information to an in-body From: header as necessary. |
| 136 | |
| 137 | * The configuration variable "merge.ff" was cleary a tri-state to |
| 138 | choose one from "favor fast-forward when possible", "always create |
| 139 | a merge even when the history could fast-forward" and "do not |
| 140 | create any merge, only update when the history fast-forwards", but |
| 141 | the command line parser did not implement the usual convention of |
| 142 | "last one wins, and command line overrides the configuration" |
| 143 | correctly. |
| 144 | |
| 145 | * "gitweb" learned to optionally place extra links that point at the |
| 146 | levels higher than the Gitweb pages themselves in the breadcrumbs, |
| 147 | so that it can be used as part of a larger installation. |
| 148 | |
| 149 | * "git log --format=" now honors i18n.logoutputencoding configuration |
| 150 | variable. |
| 151 | |
| 152 | * The "push.default=simple" mode of "git push" has been updated to |
| 153 | behave like "current" without requiring a remote tracking |
| 154 | information, when you push to a remote that is different from where |
| 155 | you fetch from (i.e. a triangular workflow). |
| 156 | |
| 157 | * Having multiple "fixup!" on a line in the rebase instruction sheet |
| 158 | did not work very well with "git rebase -i --autosquash". |
| 159 | |
| 160 | * "git log" learned the "--author-date-order" option, with which the |
| 161 | output is topologically sorted and commits in parallel histories |
| 162 | are shown intermixed together based on the author timestamp. |
| 163 | |
| 164 | * Various subcommands of "git submodule" refused to run from anywhere |
| 165 | other than the top of the working tree of the superproject, but |
| 166 | they have been taught to let you run from a subdirectory. |
| 167 | |
| 168 | * "git diff" learned a mode that ignores hunks whose change consists |
| 169 | only of additions and removals of blank lines, which is the same as |
| 170 | "diff -B" (ignore blank lines) of GNU diff. |
| 171 | |
| 172 | * "git rm" gives a single message followed by list of paths to report |
| 173 | multiple paths that cannot be removed. |
| 174 | |
| 175 | * "git rebase" can be told with ":/look for this string" syntax commits |
| 176 | to replay the changes onto and where the work to be replayed begins. |
| 177 | |
| 178 | * Many tutorials teach users to set "color.ui" to "auto" as the first |
| 179 | thing after you set "user.name/email" to introduce yourselves to |
| 180 | Git. Now the variable defaults to "auto". |
| 181 | |
| 182 | * On Cygwin, "cygstart" is now recognised as a possible way to start |
| 183 | a web browser (used in "help -w" and "instaweb" among others). |
| 184 | |
| 185 | * "git status" learned status.branch and status.short configuration |
| 186 | variables to use --branch and --short options by default (override |
| 187 | with --no-branch and --no-short options from the command line). |
| 188 | |
| 189 | * "git cmd <name>", when <name> happens to be a 40-hex string, |
| 190 | directly uses the 40-hex string as an object name, even if a ref |
| 191 | "refs/<some hierarchy>/<name>" exists. This disambiguation order |
| 192 | is unlikely to change, but we should warn about the ambiguity just |
| 193 | like we warn when more than one refs/ hierarchies share the same |
| 194 | name. |
| 195 | |
| 196 | * "git rebase" learned "--[no-]autostash" option to save local |
| 197 | changes instead of refusing to run (to which people's normal |
| 198 | response was to stash them and re-run). This introduced a corner |
| 199 | case breakage to "git am --abort" but it has been fixed. |
| 200 | |
| 201 | * "check-ignore" (new feature since 1.8.2) has been updated to work |
| 202 | more like "check-attr" over bidi-pipes. |
| 203 | |
| 204 | * "git describe" learned "--first-parent" option to limit its closest |
| 205 | tagged commit search to the first-parent chain. |
| 206 | |
| 207 | * "git merge foo" that might have meant "git merge origin/foo" is |
| 208 | diagnosed with a more informative error message. |
| 209 | |
| 210 | * "git log -L<line>,<range>:<filename>" has been added. This may |
| 211 | still have leaks and rough edges, though. |
| 212 | |
| 213 | * We used the approxidate() parser for "--expire=<timestamp>" options |
| 214 | of various commands, but it is better to treat --expire=all and |
| 215 | --expire=now a bit more specially than using the current timestamp. |
| 216 | "git gc" and "git reflog" have been updated with a new parsing |
| 217 | function for expiry dates. |
| 218 | |
| 219 | * Updates to completion (both bash and zsh) helpers. |
| 220 | |
| 221 | * The behaviour of the "--chain-reply-to" option of "git send-email" |
| 222 | have changed at 1.7.0, and we added a warning/advice message to |
| 223 | help users adjust to the new behaviour back then, but we kept it |
| 224 | around for too long. The message has finally been removed. |
| 225 | |
| 226 | * "git fetch origin master" unlike "git fetch origin" or "git fetch" |
| 227 | did not update "refs/remotes/origin/master"; this was an early |
| 228 | design decision to keep the update of remote tracking branches |
| 229 | predictable, but in practice it turns out that people find it more |
| 230 | convenient to opportunistically update them whenever we have a |
| 231 | chance, and we have been updating them when we run "git push" which |
| 232 | already breaks the original "predictability" anyway. |
| 233 | |
| 234 | * The configuration variable core.checkstat was advertised in the |
| 235 | documentation but the code expected core.statinfo instead. |
| 236 | For now, we accept both core.checkstat and core.statinfo, but the |
| 237 | latter will be removed in the longer term. |
| 238 | |
| 239 | |
| 240 | Performance, Internal Implementation, etc. |
| 241 | |
| 242 | * On Cygwin, we used to use our own lstat(2) emulation that is |
| 243 | allegedly faster than the platform one in codepaths where some of |
| 244 | the information it returns did not matter, but it started to bite |
| 245 | us in a few codepaths where the trick it uses to cheat does show |
| 246 | breakages. This emulation has been removed and we use the native |
| 247 | lstat(2) emulation supplied by Cygwin now. |
| 248 | |
| 249 | * The function attributes extensions are used to catch mistakes in |
| 250 | use of our own variadic functions that use NULL sentinel at the end |
| 251 | (i.e. like execl(3)) and format strings (i.e. like printf(3)). |
| 252 | |
| 253 | * The code to allow configuration data to be read from in-tree blob |
| 254 | objects is in. This may help working in a bare repository and |
| 255 | submodule updates. |
| 256 | |
| 257 | * Fetching between repositories with many refs employed O(n^2) |
| 258 | algorithm to match up the common objects, which has been corrected. |
| 259 | |
| 260 | * The original way to specify remote repository using .git/branches/ |
| 261 | used to have a nifty feature. The code to support the feature was |
| 262 | still in a function but the caller was changed not to call it 5 |
| 263 | years ago, breaking that feature and leaving the supporting code |
| 264 | unreachable. The dead code has been removed. |
| 265 | |
| 266 | * "git pack-refs" that races with new ref creation or deletion have |
| 267 | been susceptible to lossage of refs under right conditions, which |
| 268 | has been tightened up. |
| 269 | |
| 270 | * We read loose and packed references in two steps, but after |
| 271 | deciding to read a loose ref but before actually opening it to read |
| 272 | it, another process racing with us can unlink it, which would cause |
| 273 | us to barf. The codepath has been updated to retry when such a |
| 274 | race is detected, instead of outright failing. |
| 275 | |
| 276 | * Uses of the platform fnmatch(3) function (many places in the code, |
| 277 | matching pathspec, .gitignore and .gitattributes to name a few) |
| 278 | have been replaced with wildmatch, allowing "foo/**/bar" that would |
| 279 | match foo/bar, foo/a/bar, foo/a/b/bar, etc. |
| 280 | |
| 281 | * Memory ownership and lifetime rules for what for-each-ref feeds to |
| 282 | its callbacks have been clarified (in short, "you do not own it, so |
| 283 | make a copy if you want to keep it"). |
| 284 | |
| 285 | * The revision traversal logic to improve culling of irrelevant |
| 286 | parents while traversing a mergy history has been updated. |
| 287 | |
| 288 | * Some leaks in unpack-trees (used in merge, cherry-pick and other |
| 289 | codepaths) have been plugged. |
| 290 | |
| 291 | * The codepath to read from marks files in fast-import/export did not |
| 292 | have to accept anything but 40-hex representation of the object |
| 293 | name. Further, fast-export did not need full in-core object |
| 294 | representation to have parsed wen reading from them. These |
| 295 | codepaths have been optimized by taking advantage of these access |
| 296 | patterns. |
| 297 | |
| 298 | * Object lookup logic, when the object hashtable starts to become |
| 299 | crowded, has been optimized. |
| 300 | |
| 301 | * When TEST_OUTPUT_DIRECTORY setting is used, it was handled somewhat |
| 302 | inconsistently between the test framework and t/Makefile, and logic |
| 303 | to summarize the results looked at a wrong place. |
| 304 | |
| 305 | * "git clone" uses a lighter-weight implementation when making sure |
| 306 | that the history behind refs are complete. |
| 307 | |
| 308 | * Many warnings from sparse source checker in compat/ area has been |
| 309 | squelched. |
| 310 | |
| 311 | * The code to reading and updating packed-refs file has been updated, |
| 312 | correcting corner case bugs. |
| 313 | |
| 314 | |
| 315 | Also contains various documentation updates and code clean-ups. |
| 316 | |
| 317 | |
| 318 | Fixes since v1.8.3 |
| 319 | ------------------ |
| 320 | |
| 321 | Unless otherwise noted, all the fixes since v1.8.3 in the maintenance |
| 322 | track are contained in this release (see release notes to them for |
| 323 | details). |
| 324 | |
| 325 | * Newer Net::SMTP::SSL module does not want the user programs to use |
| 326 | the default behaviour to let server certificate go without |
| 327 | verification, so by default enable the verification with a |
| 328 | mechanism to turn it off if needed. |
| 329 | (merge 35035bb rr/send-email-ssl-verify later to maint). |
| 330 | |
| 331 | * When "git" is spawned in such a way that any of the low 3 file |
| 332 | descriptors is closed, our first open() may yield file descriptor 2, |
| 333 | and writing error message to it would screw things up in a big way. |
| 334 | (merge a11c396 tr/protect-low-3-fds later to maint). |
| 335 | |
| 336 | * The mailmap mechanism unnecessarily downcased the e-mail addresses |
| 337 | in the output, and also ignored the human name when it is a single |
| 338 | character name. |
| 339 | (merge bd23794 jc/mailmap-case-insensitivity later to maint). |
| 340 | |
| 341 | * In two places we did not check return value (expected to be a file |
| 342 | descriptor) correctly. |
| 343 | (merge a77f106 tr/fd-gotcha-fixes later to maint). |
| 344 | |
| 345 | * Logic to auto-detect character encodings in the commit log message |
| 346 | did not reject overlong and invalid UTF-8 characters. |
| 347 | (merge 81050ac bc/commit-invalid-utf8 later to maint). |
| 348 | |
| 349 | * Pass port number as a separate argument when "send-email" initializes |
| 350 | Net::SMTP, instead of as a part of the hostname, i.e. host:port. |
| 351 | This allows GSSAPI codepath to match with the hostname given. |
| 352 | (merge 1a741bf bc/send-email-use-port-as-separate-param later to maint). |
| 353 | |
| 354 | * "git diff" refused to even show difference when core.safecrlf is |
| 355 | set to true (i.e. error out) and there are offending lines in the |
| 356 | working tree files. |
| 357 | (merge 5430bb2 jc/maint-diff-core-safecrlf later to maint). |
| 358 | |
| 359 | * A test that should have failed but didn't revealed a bug that needs |
| 360 | to be corrected. |
| 361 | (merge 94d75d1 jc/t1512-fix later to maint). |
| 362 | |
| 363 | * An overlong path to a .git directory may have overflown the |
| 364 | temporary path buffer used to create a name for lockfiles. |
| 365 | (merge 2fbd4f9 mh/maint-lockfile-overflow later to maint). |
| 366 | |
| 367 | * Invocations of "git checkout" used internally by "git rebase" were |
| 368 | counted as "checkout", and affected later "git checkout -", which took |
| 369 | the user to an unexpected place. |
| 370 | (merge 3bed291 rr/rebase-checkout-reflog later to maint). |
| 371 | |
| 372 | * The configuration variable column.ui was poorly documented. |
| 373 | (merge 5e62cc1 rr/column-doc later to maint). |
| 374 | |
| 375 | * "git name-rev --refs=tags/v*" were forbidden, which was a bit |
| 376 | inconvenient (you had to give a pattern to match refs fully, like |
| 377 | --refs=refs/tags/v*). |
| 378 | (merge 98c5c4a nk/name-rev-abbreviated-refs later to maint). |
| 379 | |
| 380 | * "git apply" parsed patches that add new files, generated by |
| 381 | programs other than Git, incorrectly. This is an old breakage in |
| 382 | v1.7.11 and will need to be merged down to the maintenance tracks. |
| 383 | |
| 384 | * Older cURL wanted piece of memory we call it with to be stable, but |
| 385 | we updated the auth material after handing it to a call. |
| 386 | |
| 387 | * "git pull" into nothing trashed "local changes" that were in the |
| 388 | index, and this avoids it. |
| 389 | |
| 390 | * Many "git submodule" operations do not work on a submodule at a |
| 391 | path whose name is not in ASCII. |
| 392 | |
| 393 | * "cherry-pick" had a small leak in an error codepath. |
| 394 | |
| 395 | * Logic used by git-send-email to suppress cc mishandled names like |
| 396 | "A U. Thor" <author@example.xz>, where the human readable part |
| 397 | needs to be quoted (the user input may not have the double quotes |
| 398 | around the name, and comparison was done between quoted and |
| 399 | unquoted strings). It also mishandled names that need RFC2047 |
| 400 | quoting. |
| 401 | |
| 402 | * Call to discard_cache/discard_index (used when we use different |
| 403 | contents of the index in-core, in many operations like commit, |
| 404 | apply, and merge) used to leak memory that held the array of index |
| 405 | entries, which has been plugged. |
| 406 | (merge a0fc4db rs/discard-index-discard-array later to maint). |
| 407 | |
| 408 | * "gitweb" forgot to clear a global variable $search_regexp upon each |
| 409 | request, mistakenly carrying over the previous search to a new one |
| 410 | when used as a persistent CGI. |
| 411 | |
| 412 | * The wildmatch engine did not honor WM_CASEFOLD option correctly. |
| 413 | |
| 414 | * "git log -c --follow $path" segfaulted upon hitting the commit that |
| 415 | renamed the $path being followed. |
| 416 | |
| 417 | * When a reflog notation is used for implicit "current branch", we |
| 418 | did not say which branch and worse said "branch ''". |
| 419 | |
| 420 | * "difftool --dir-diff" did not copy back changes made by the |
| 421 | end-user in the diff tool backend to the working tree in some |
| 422 | cases. |
| 423 | |
| 424 | * "git push $there HEAD:branch" did not resolve HEAD early enough, so |
| 425 | it was easy to flip it around while push is still going on and push |
| 426 | out a branch that the user did not originally intended when the |
| 427 | command was started. |
| 428 | |
| 429 | * The bash prompt code (in contrib/) displayed the name of the branch |
| 430 | being rebased when "rebase -i/-m/-p" modes are in use, but not the |
| 431 | plain vanilla "rebase". |
| 432 | |
| 433 | * Handling of negative exclude pattern for directories "!dir" was |
| 434 | broken in the update to v1.8.3. |
| 435 | |
| 436 | * zsh prompt script that borrowed from bash prompt script did not |
| 437 | work due to slight differences in array variable notation between |
| 438 | these two shells. |
| 439 | |
| 440 | * An entry for "file://" scheme in the enumeration of URL types Git |
| 441 | can take in the HTML documentation was made into a clickable link |
| 442 | by mistake. |
| 443 | |
| 444 | * "git push --[no-]verify" was not documented. |
| 445 | |
| 446 | * Stop installing the git-remote-testpy script that is only used for |
| 447 | testing. |
| 448 | |
| 449 | * "git commit --allow-empty-message -m ''" should not start an |
| 450 | editor. |
| 451 | |
| 452 | * "git merge @{-1}~22" was rewritten to "git merge frotz@{1}~22" |
| 453 | incorrectly when your previous branch was "frotz" (it should be |
| 454 | rewritten to "git merge frotz~22" instead). |
| 455 | |
| 456 | * "git diff -c -p" was not showing a deleted line from a hunk when |
| 457 | another hunk immediately begins where the earlier one ends. |
| 458 | |
| 459 | * "git log --ancestry-path A...B" did not work as expected, as it did |
| 460 | not pay attention to the fact that the merge base between A and B |
| 461 | was the bottom of the range being specified. |
| 462 | |
| 463 | * Mac OS X does not like to write(2) more than INT_MAX number of |
| 464 | bytes; work it around by chopping write(2) into smaller pieces. |
| 465 | |
| 466 | * Newer MacOS X encourages the programs to compile and link with |
| 467 | their CommonCrypto, not with OpenSSL. |
| 468 | |
| 469 | * "git clone foo/bar:baz" cannot be a request to clone from a remote |
| 470 | over git-over-ssh specified in the scp style. This case is now |
| 471 | detected and clones from a local repository at "foo/bar:baz". |
| 472 | |
| 473 | * When $HOME is misconfigured to point at an unreadable directory, we |
| 474 | used to complain and die. Loosen the check. |
| 475 | |
| 476 | * "git subtree" (in contrib/) had one codepath with loose error |
| 477 | checks to lose data at the remote side. |
| 478 | |
| 479 | * "git fetch" into a shallow repository from a repository that does |
| 480 | not know about the shallow boundary commits (e.g. a different fork |
| 481 | from the repository the current shallow repository was cloned from) |
| 482 | did not work correctly. |
| 483 | |
| 484 | * "git checkout foo" DWIMs the intended "upstream" and turns it into |
| 485 | "git checkout -t -b foo remotes/origin/foo". This codepath has been |
| 486 | updated to correctly take existing remote definitions into account. |