Documentation/RelNotes/1.8.1.txt

   1 Git v1.8.1 Release Notes
   2 ========================
   3
   4 Backward compatibility notes
   5 ----------------------------
   6
   7 In the next major release (not *this* one), we will change the
   8 behavior of the "git push" command.
   9
  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, and
  17 "git push" will warn about the upcoming change until you set this
  18 variable in this release.
  19
  20 "git branch --set-upstream" is deprecated and may be removed in a
  21 relatively distant future.  "git branch [-u|--set-upstream-to]" has
  22 been introduced with a saner order of arguments to replace it.
  23
  24
  25 Updates since v1.8.0
  26 --------------------
  27
  28 UI, Workflows & Features
  29
  30  * Command-line completion scripts for tcsh and zsh have been added.
  31
  32  * "git-prompt" scriptlet (in contrib/completion) can be told to paint
  33    pieces of the hints in the prompt string in colors.
  34
  35  * Some documentation pages that used to ship only in the plain text
  36    format are now formatted in HTML as well.
  37
  38  * We used to have a workaround for a bug in ancient "less" that
  39    causes it to exit without any output when the terminal is resized.
  40    The bug has been fixed in "less" version 406 (June 2007), and the
  41    workaround has been removed in this release.
  42
  43  * When "git checkout" checks out a branch, it tells the user how far
  44    behind (or ahead) the new branch is relative to the remote tracking
  45    branch it builds upon.  The message now also advises how to sync
  46    them up by pushing or pulling.  This can be disabled with the
  47    advice.statusHints configuration variable.
  48
  49  * "git config --get" used to diagnose presence of multiple
  50    definitions of the same variable in the same configuration file as
  51    an error, but it now applies the "last one wins" rule used by the
  52    internal configuration logic.  Strictly speaking, this may be an
  53    API regression but it is expected that nobody will notice it in
  54    practice.
  55
  56  * A new configuration variable "diff.context" can be used to
  57    give the default number of context lines in the patch output, to
  58    override the hardcoded default of 3 lines.
  59
  60  * "git format-patch" learned the "--notes=<ref>" option to give
  61    notes for the commit after the three-dash lines in its output.
  62
  63  * "git log -p -S<string>" now looks for the <string> after applying
  64    the textconv filter (if defined); earlier it inspected the contents
  65    of the blobs without filtering.
  66
  67  * "git log --grep=<pcre>" learned to honor the "grep.patterntype"
  68    configuration set to "perl".
  69
  70  * "git replace -d <object>" now interprets <object> as an extended
  71    SHA-1 (e.g. HEAD~4 is allowed), instead of only accepting full hex
  72    object name.
  73
  74  * "git rm $submodule" used to punt on removing a submodule working
  75    tree to avoid losing the repository embedded in it.  Because
  76    recent git uses a mechanism to separate the submodule repository
  77    from the submodule working tree, "git rm" learned to detect this
  78    case and removes the submodule working tree when it is safe to do so.
  79
  80  * "git send-email" used to prompt for the sender address, even when
  81    the committer identity is well specified (e.g. via user.name and
  82    user.email configuration variables).  The command no longer gives
  83    this prompt when not necessary.
  84
  85  * "git send-email" did not allow non-address garbage strings to
  86    appear after addresses on Cc: lines in the patch files (and when
  87    told to pick them up to find more recipients), e.g.
  88
  89      Cc: Stable Kernel <stable@k.org> # for v3.2 and up
  90
  91    The command now strips " # for v3.2 and up" part before adding the
  92    remainder of this line to the list of recipients.
  93
  94  * "git submodule add" learned to add a new submodule at the same
  95    path as the path where an unrelated submodule was bound to in an
  96    existing revision via the "--name" option.
  97
  98  * "git submodule sync" learned the "--recursive" option.
  99
 100  * "diff.submodule" configuration variable can be used to give custom
 101    default value to the "git diff --submodule" option.
 102
 103  * "git symbolic-ref" learned the "-d $symref" option to delete the
 104    named symbolic ref, which is more intuitive way to spell it than
 105    "update-ref -d --no-deref $symref".
 106
 107
 108 Foreign Interface
 109
 110  * "git cvsimport" can be told to record timezones (other than GMT)
 111    per-author via its author info file.
 112
 113  * The remote helper interface to interact with subversion
 114    repositories (one of the GSoC 2012 projects) has been merged.
 115
 116  * A new remote-helper interface for Mercurial has been added to
 117    contrib/remote-helpers.
 118
 119  * The documentation for git(1) was pointing at a page at an external
 120    site for the list of authors that no longer existed.  The link has
 121    been updated to point at an alternative site.
 122
 123
 124 Performance, Internal Implementation, etc.
 125
 126  * Compilation on Cygwin with newer header files are supported now.
 127
 128  * A couple of low-level implementation updates on MinGW.
 129
 130  * The logic to generate the initial advertisement from "upload-pack"
 131    (i.e. what is invoked by "git fetch" on the other side of the
 132    connection) to list what refs are available in the repository has
 133    been optimized.
 134
 135  * The logic to find set of attributes that match a given path has
 136    been optimized.
 137
 138  * Use preloadindex in "git diff-index" and "git update-index", which
 139    has a nice speedup on systems with slow stat calls (and even on
 140    Linux).
 141
 142
 143 Also contains minor documentation updates and code clean-ups.
 144
 145
 146 Fixes since v1.8.0
 147 ------------------
 148
 149 Unless otherwise noted, all the fixes since v1.8.0 in the maintenance
 150 track are contained in this release (see release notes to them for
 151 details).
 152
 153  * The configuration parser had an unnecessary hardcoded limit on
 154    variable names that was not checked consistently.
 155
 156  * The "say" function in the test scaffolding incorrectly allowed
 157    "echo" to interpret "\a" as if it were a C-string asking for a
 158    BEL output.
 159
 160  * "git mergetool" feeds /dev/null as a common ancestor when dealing
 161    with an add/add conflict, but p4merge backend cannot handle
 162    it. Work it around by passing a temporary empty file.
 163
 164  * "git log -F -E --grep='<ere>'" failed to use the given <ere>
 165    pattern as extended regular expression, and instead looked for the
 166    string literally.
 167
 168  * "git grep -e pattern <tree>" asked the attribute system to read
 169    "<tree>:.gitattributes" file in the working tree, which was
 170    nonsense.
 171
 172  * A symbolic ref refs/heads/SYM was not correctly removed with "git
 173    branch -d SYM"; the command removed the ref pointed by SYM
 174    instead.
 175
 176  * Update "remote tracking branch" in the documentation to
 177    "remote-tracking branch".
 178
 179  * "git pull --rebase" run while the HEAD is detached tried to find
 180    the upstream branch of the detached HEAD (which by definition
 181    does not exist) and emitted unnecessary error messages.
 182
 183  * The refs/replace hierarchy was not mentioned in the
 184    repository-layout docs.
 185
 186  * Various rfc2047 quoting issues around a non-ASCII name on the
 187    From: line in the output from format-patch have been corrected.
 188
 189  * Sometimes curl_multi_timeout() function suggested a wrong timeout
 190    value when there is no file descriptor to wait on and the http
 191    transport ended up sleeping for minutes in select(2) system call.
 192    A workaround has been added for this.
 193
 194  * For a fetch refspec (or the result of applying wildcard on one),
 195    we always want the RHS to map to something inside "refs/"
 196    hierarchy, but the logic to check it was not exactly right.
 197    (merge 5c08c1f jc/maint-fetch-tighten-refname-check later to maint).
 198
 199  * "git diff -G<pattern>" did not honor textconv filter when looking
 200    for changes.
 201
 202  * Some HTTP servers ask for auth only during the actual packing phase
 203    (not in ls-remote phase); this is not really a recommended
 204    configuration, but the clients used to fail to authenticate with
 205    such servers.
 206    (merge 2e736fd jk/maint-http-half-auth-fetch later to maint).
 207
 208  * "git p4" used to try expanding malformed "$keyword$" that spans
 209    across multiple lines.
 210
 211  * Syntax highlighting in "gitweb" was not quite working.
 212
 213  * RSS feed from "gitweb" had a xss hole in its title output.
 214
 215  * "git config --path $key" segfaulted on "[section] key" (a boolean
 216    "true" spelled without "=", not "[section] key = true").
 217
 218  * "git checkout -b foo" while on an unborn branch did not say
 219    "Switched to a new branch 'foo'" like other cases.
 220
 221  * Various codepaths have workaround for a common misconfiguration to
 222    spell "UTF-8" as "utf8", but it was not used uniformly.  Most
 223    notably, mailinfo (which is used by "git am") lacked this support.
 224
 225  * We failed to mention a file without any content change but whose
 226    permission bit was modified, or (worse yet) a new file without any
 227    content in the "git diff --stat" output.
 228
 229  * When "--stat-count" hides a diffstat for binary contents, the total
 230    number of added and removed lines at the bottom was computed
 231    incorrectly.
 232
 233  * When "--stat-count" hides a diffstat for unmerged paths, the total
 234    number of affected files at the bottom of the "diff --stat" output
 235    was computed incorrectly.
 236
 237  * "diff --shortstat" miscounted the total number of affected files
 238    when there were unmerged paths.
 239
 240  * "update-ref -d --deref SYM" to delete a ref through a symbolic ref
 241    that points to it did not remove it correctly.