Documentation/RelNotes/1.6.0.txt

   1 GIT v1.6.0 Release Notes
   2 ========================
   3
   4 User visible changes
   5 --------------------
   6
   7 With the default Makefile settings, most of the programs are now
   8 installed outside your $PATH, except for "git", "gitk" and
   9 some server side programs that need to be accessible for technical
  10 reasons.  Invoking a git subcommand as "git-xyzzy" from the command
  11 line has been deprecated since early 2006 (and officially announced in
  12 1.5.4 release notes); use of them from your scripts after adding
  13 output from "git --exec-path" to the $PATH is still supported in this
  14 release, but users are again strongly encouraged to adjust their
  15 scripts to use "git xyzzy" form, as we will stop installing
  16 "git-xyzzy" hardlinks for built-in commands in later releases.
  17
  18 An earlier change to page "git status" output was overwhelmingly unpopular
  19 and has been reverted.
  20
  21 Source changes needed for porting to MinGW environment are now all in the
  22 main git.git codebase.
  23
  24 By default, packfiles created with this version uses delta-base-offset
  25 encoding introduced in v1.4.4.  Pack idx files are using version 2 that
  26 allows larger packs and added robustness thanks to its CRC checking,
  27 introduced in v1.5.2 and v1.4.4.5.  If you want to keep your repositories
  28 backwards compatible past these versions, set repack.useDeltaBaseOffset
  29 to false or pack.indexVersion to 1, respectively.
  30
  31 We used to prevent sample hook scripts shipped in templates/ from
  32 triggering by default by relying on the fact that we install them as
  33 unexecutable, but on some filesystems, this approach does not work.
  34 They are now shipped with ".sample" suffix.  If you want to activate
  35 any of these samples as-is, rename them to drop the ".sample" suffix,
  36 instead of running "chmod +x" on them.  For example, you can rename
  37 hooks/post-update.sample to hooks/post-update to enable the sample
  38 hook that runs update-server-info, in order to make repositories
  39 friendly to dumb protocols (i.e. HTTP).
  40
  41 GIT_CONFIG, which was only documented as affecting "git config", but
  42 actually affected all git commands, now only affects "git config".
  43 GIT_LOCAL_CONFIG, also only documented as affecting "git config" and
  44 not different from GIT_CONFIG in a useful way, is removed.
  45
  46 The ".dotest" temporary area "git am" and "git rebase" use is now moved
  47 inside the $GIT_DIR, to avoid mistakes of adding it to the project by
  48 accident.
  49
  50 An ancient merge strategy "stupid" has been removed.
  51
  52
  53 Updates since v1.5.6
  54 --------------------
  55
  56 (subsystems)
  57
  58 * git-p4 in contrib learned "allowSubmit" configuration to control on
  59   which branch to allow "submit" subcommand.
  60
  61 * git-gui learned to stage changes per-line.
  62
  63 (portability)
  64
  65 * Changes for MinGW port have been merged, thanks to Johannes Sixt and
  66   gangs.
  67
  68 * Sample hook scripts shipped in templates/ are now suffixed with
  69   *.sample.
  70
  71 * perl's in-place edit (-i) does not work well without backup files on Windows;
  72   some tests are rewritten to cope with this.
  73
  74 (documentation)
  75
  76 * Updated howto/update-hook-example
  77
  78 * Got rid of usage of "git-foo" from the tutorial and made typography
  79   more consistent.
  80
  81 * Disambiguating "--" between revs and paths is finally documented.
  82
  83 (performance, robustness, sanity etc.)
  84
  85 * index-pack used too much memory when dealing with a deep delta chain.
  86   This has been optimized.
  87
  88 * reduced excessive inlining to shrink size of the "git" binary.
  89
  90 * verify-pack checks the object CRC when using version 2 idx files.
  91
  92 * When an object is corrupt in a pack, the object became unusable even
  93   when the same object is available in a loose form,  We now try harder to
  94   fall back to these redundant objects when able.  In particular, "git
  95   repack -a -f" can be used to fix such a corruption as long as necessary
  96   objects are available.
  97
  98 * Performance of "git-blame -C -C" operation is vastly improved.
  99
 100 * git-clone does not create refs in loose form anymore (it behaves as
 101   if you immediately ran git-pack-refs after cloning).  This will help
 102   repositories with insanely large number of refs.
 103
 104 * core.fsyncobjectfiles configuration can be used to ensure that the loose
 105   objects created will be fsync'ed (this is only useful on filesystems
 106   that does not order data writes properly).
 107
 108 * "git commit-tree" plumbing can make Octopus with more than 16 parents.
 109   "git commit" has been capable of this for quite some time.
 110
 111 (usability, bells and whistles)
 112
 113 * even more documentation pages are now accessible via "man" and "git help".
 114
 115 * A new environment variable GIT_CEILING_DIRECTORIES can be used to stop
 116   the discovery process of the toplevel of working tree; this may be useful
 117   when you are working in a slow network disk and are outside any working tree,
 118   as bash-completion and "git help" may still need to run in these places.
 119
 120 * By default, stash entries never expire.  Set reflogexpire in [gc
 121   "refs/stash"] to a reasonable value to get traditional auto-expiration
 122   behaviour back
 123
 124 * Longstanding latency issue with bash completion script has been
 125   addressed.  This will need to be backmerged to 'maint' later.
 126
 127 * pager.<cmd> configuration variable can be used to enable/disable the
 128   default paging behaviour per command.
 129
 130 * "git-add -i" has a new action 'e/dit' to allow you edit the patch hunk
 131   manually.
 132
 133 * git-am records the original tip of the branch in ORIG_HEAD before it
 134   starts applying patches.
 135
 136 * git-apply can handle a patch that touches the same path more than once
 137   much better than before.
 138
 139 * git-apply can be told not to trust the line counts recorded in the input
 140   patch but recount, with the new --recount option.
 141
 142 * git-apply can be told to apply a patch to a path deeper than what the
 143   patch records with --directory option.
 144
 145 * git-archive can be told to omit certain paths from its output using
 146   export-ignore attributes.
 147
 148 * git-archive uses the zlib default compression level when creating
 149   zip archive.
 150
 151 * git-archive's command line options --exec and --remote can take their
 152   parameters as separate command line arguments, similar to other commands.
 153   IOW, both "--exec=path" and "--exec path" are now supported.
 154
 155 * With -v option, git-branch describes the remote tracking statistics
 156   similar to the way git-checkout reports by how many commits your branch
 157   is ahead/behind.
 158
 159 * git-branch's --contains option used to always require a commit parameter
 160   to limit the branches with; it now defaults to list branches that
 161   contains HEAD if this parameter is omitted.
 162
 163 * git-branch's --merged and --no-merged option used to always limit the
 164   branches relative to the HEAD, but they can now take an optional commit
 165   argument that is used in place of HEAD.
 166
 167 * git-bundle can read the revision arguments from the standard input.
 168
 169 * git-cherry-pick can replay a root commit now.
 170
 171 * git-clone can clone from a remote whose URL would be rewritten by
 172   configuration stored in $HOME/.gitconfig now.
 173
 174 * "git-clone --mirror" is a handy way to set up a bare mirror repository.
 175
 176 * git-cvsserver learned to respond to "cvs co -c".
 177
 178 * git-diff --check now checks leftover merge conflict markers.
 179
 180 * "git-diff -p" learned to grab a better hunk header lines in
 181   BibTex, Pascal/Delphi, and Ruby files and also pays attention to
 182   chapter and part boundary in TeX documents.
 183
 184 * When remote side used to have branch 'foo' and git-fetch finds that now
 185   it has branch 'foo/bar', it refuses to lose the existing remote tracking
 186   branch and its reflog.  The error message has been improved to suggest
 187   pruning the remote if the user wants to proceed and get the latest set
 188   of branches from the remote, including such 'foo/bar'.
 189
 190 * fast-export learned to export and import marks file; this can be used to
 191   interface with fast-import incrementally.
 192
 193 * fast-import and fast-export learned to export and import gitlinks.
 194
 195 * "gitk" left background process behind after being asked to dig very deep
 196   history and the user killed the UI; the process is killed when the UI goes
 197   away now.
 198
 199 * git-rebase records the original tip of branch in ORIG_HEAD before it is
 200   rewound.
 201
 202 * "git rerere" can be told to update the index with auto-reused resolution
 203   with rerere.autoupdate configuration variable.
 204
 205 * git-rev-parse learned $commit^! and $commit^@ notations used in "log"
 206   family.  These notations are available in gitk as well, because the gitk
 207   command internally uses rev-parse to interpret its arguments.
 208
 209 * git-rev-list learned --children option to show child commits it
 210   encountered during the traversal, instead of showing parent commits.
 211
 212 * git-send-mail can talk not just over SSL but over TLS now.
 213
 214 * git-shortlog honors custom output format specified with "--pretty=format:".
 215
 216 * "git-stash save" learned --keep-index option.  This lets you stash away the
 217   local changes and bring the changes staged in the index to your working
 218   tree for examination and testing.
 219
 220 * git-stash also learned branch subcommand to create a new branch out of
 221   stashed changes.
 222
 223 * git-status gives the remote tracking statistics similar to the way
 224   git-checkout reports by how many commits your branch is ahead/behind.
 225
 226 * "git-svn dcommit" is now aware of auto-props setting the subversion user
 227   has.
 228
 229 * You can tell "git status -u" to even more aggressively omit checking
 230   untracked files with --untracked-files=no.
 231
 232 * Original SHA-1 value for "update-ref -d" is optional now.
 233
 234 * Error codes from gitweb are made more descriptive where possible, rather
 235   than "403 forbidden" as we used to issue everywhere.
 236
 237 (internal)
 238
 239 * git-merge has been reimplemented in C.
 240
 241
 242 Fixes since v1.5.6
 243 ------------------
 244
 245 All of the fixes in v1.5.6 maintenance series are included in
 246 this release, unless otherwise noted.
 247
 248  * git-clone ignored its -u option; the fix needs to be backported to
 249    'maint';
 250
 251  * git-mv used to lose the distinction between changes that are staged
 252    and that are only in the working tree, by staging both in the index
 253    after moving such a path.
 254
 255  * "git-rebase -i -p" rewrote the parents to wrong ones when amending
 256    (either edit or squash) was involved, and did not work correctly
 257    when fast forwarding.
 258