Documentation/RelNotes/1.7.10.txt

   1 Git v1.7.10 Release Notes
   2 =========================
   3
   4 Compatibility Notes
   5 -------------------
   6
   7  * From this release on, the "git merge" command in an interactive
   8    session will start an editor when it automatically resolves the
   9    merge for the user to explain the resulting commit, just like the
  10    "git commit" command does when it wasn't given a commit message.
  11
  12    If you have a script that runs "git merge" and keeps its standard
  13    input and output attached to the user's terminal, and if you do not
  14    want the user to explain the resulting merge commits, you can
  15    export GIT_MERGE_AUTOEDIT environment variable set to "no", like
  16    this:
  17
  18         #!/bin/sh
  19         GIT_MERGE_AUTOEDIT=no
  20         export GIT_MERGE_AUTOEDIT
  21
  22    to disable this behavior (if you want your users to explain their
  23    merge commits, you do not have to do anything).  Alternatively, you
  24    can give the "--no-edit" option to individual invocations of the
  25    "git merge" command if you know everybody who uses your script has
  26    Git v1.7.8 or newer.
  27
  28  * The "--binary/-b" options to "git am" have been a no-op for quite a
  29    while and were deprecated in mid 2008 (v1.6.0).  When you give these
  30    options to "git am", it will now warn and ask you not to use them.
  31
  32  * When you do not tell which branches and tags to push to the "git
  33    push" command in any way, the command used "matching refs" rule to
  34    update remote branches and tags with branches and tags with the
  35    same name you locally have.  In future versions of Git, this will
  36    change to push out only your current branch according to either the
  37    "upstream" or the "current" rule.  Although "upstream" may be more
  38    powerful once the user understands Git better, the semantics
  39    "current" gives is simpler and easier to understand for beginners
  40    and may be a safer and better default option.  We haven't decided
  41    yet which one to switch to.
  42
  43
  44 Updates since v1.7.9
  45 --------------------
  46
  47 UI, Workflows & Features
  48
  49  * various "gitk" updates.
  50    - show the path to the top level directory in the window title
  51    - update preference edit dialog
  52    - display file list correctly when directories are given on command line
  53    - make "git-describe" output in the log message into a clickable link
  54    - avoid matching the UNIX timestamp part when searching all fields
  55    - give preference to symbolic font names like sans & monospace
  56    - allow comparing two commits using a mark
  57    - "gitk" honors log.showroot configuration.
  58
  59  * Teams for localizing the messages from the Porcelain layer of
  60    commands are starting to form, thanks to Jiang Xin who volunteered
  61    to be the localization coordinator.  Translated messages for
  62    simplified Chinese, Swedish and Portuguese are available.
  63
  64  * The configuration mechanism learned an "include" facility; an
  65    assignment to the include.path pseudo-variable causes the named
  66    file to be included in-place when Git looks up configuration
  67    variables.
  68
  69  * A content filter (clean/smudge) used to be just a way to make the
  70    recorded contents "more useful", and allowed to fail; a filter can
  71    now optionally be marked as "required".
  72
  73  * Options whose names begin with "--no-" (e.g. the "--no-verify"
  74    option of the "git commit" command) can be negated by omitting
  75    "no-" from its name, e.g. "git commit --verify".
  76
  77  * "git am" learned to pass "-b" option to underlying "git mailinfo", so
  78    that a bracketed string other than "PATCH" at the beginning can be kept.
  79
  80  * "git clone" learned "--single-branch" option to limit cloning to a
  81    single branch (surprise!); tags that do not point into the history
  82    of the branch are not fetched.
  83
  84  * "git clone" learned to detach the HEAD in the resulting repository
  85    when the user specifies a tag with "--branch" (e.g., "--branch=v1.0").
  86    Clone also learned to print the usual "detached HEAD" advice in such
  87    a case, similar to "git checkout v1.0".
  88
  89  * When showing a patch while ignoring whitespace changes, the context
  90    lines are taken from the postimage, in order to make it easier to
  91    view the output.
  92
  93  * "git diff --stat" learned to adjust the width of the output on
  94    wider terminals, and give more columns to pathnames as needed.
  95
  96  * "diff-highlight" filter (in contrib/) was updated to produce more
  97    aesthetically pleasing output.
  98
  99  * "fsck" learned "--no-dangling" option to omit dangling object
 100    information.
 101
 102  * "git log -G" and "git log -S" learned to pay attention to the "-i"
 103    option.  With "-i", "log -G" ignores the case when finding patch
 104    hunks that introduce or remove a string that matches the given
 105    pattern.  Similarly with "-i", "log -S" ignores the case when
 106    finding the commit the given block of text appears or disappears
 107    from the file.
 108
 109  * "git merge" in an interactive session learned to spawn the editor
 110    by default to let the user edit the auto-generated merge message,
 111    to encourage people to explain their merges better. Legacy scripts
 112    can export GIT_MERGE_AUTOEDIT=no to retain the historical behavior.
 113    Both "git merge" and "git pull" can be given --no-edit from the
 114    command line to accept the auto-generated merge message.
 115
 116  * The advice message given when the user didn't give enough clue on
 117    what to merge to "git pull" and "git merge" has been updated to
 118    be more concise and easier to understand.
 119
 120  * "git push" learned the "--prune" option, similar to "git fetch".
 121
 122  * The whole directory that houses a top-level superproject managed by
 123    "git submodule" can be moved to another place.
 124
 125  * "git symbolic-ref" learned the "--short" option to abbreviate the
 126    refname it shows unambiguously.
 127
 128  * "git tag --list" can be given "--points-at <object>" to limit its
 129    output to those that point at the given object.
 130
 131  * "gitweb" allows intermediate entries in the directory hierarchy
 132    that leads to a project to be clicked, which in turn shows the
 133    list of projects inside that directory.
 134
 135  * "gitweb" learned to read various pieces of information for the
 136    repositories lazily, instead of reading everything that could be
 137    needed (including the ones that are not necessary for a specific
 138    task).
 139
 140  * Project search in "gitweb" shows the substring that matched in the
 141    project name and description highlighted.
 142
 143  * HTTP transport learned to authenticate with a proxy if needed.
 144
 145  * A new script "diffall" is added to contrib/; it drives an
 146    external tool to perform a directory diff of two Git revisions
 147    in one go, unlike "difftool" that compares one file at a time.
 148
 149 Foreign Interface
 150
 151  * Improved handling of views, labels and branches in "git-p4" (in contrib).
 152
 153  * "git-p4" (in contrib) suffered from unnecessary merge conflicts when
 154    p4 expanded the embedded $RCS$-like keywords; it can be now told to
 155    unexpand them.
 156
 157  * Some "git-svn" updates.
 158
 159  * "vcs-svn"/"svn-fe" learned to read dumps with svn-deltas and
 160    support incremental imports.
 161
 162  * "git difftool/mergetool" learned to drive DeltaWalker.
 163
 164 Performance
 165
 166  * Unnecessary calls to parse_object() "git upload-pack" makes in
 167    response to "git fetch", have been eliminated, to help performance
 168    in repositories with excessive number of refs.
 169
 170 Internal Implementation (please report possible regressions)
 171
 172  * Recursive call chains in "git index-pack" to deal with long delta
 173    chains have been flattened, to reduce the stack footprint.
 174
 175  * Use of add_extra_ref() API is now gone, to make it possible to
 176    cleanly restructure the overall refs API.
 177
 178  * The command line parser of "git pack-objects" now uses parse-options
 179    API.
 180
 181  * The test suite supports the new "test_pause" helper function.
 182
 183  * Parallel to the test suite, there is a beginning of performance
 184    benchmarking framework.
 185
 186  * t/Makefile is adjusted to prevent newer versions of GNU make from
 187    running tests in seemingly random order.
 188
 189  * The code to check if a path points at a file beyond a symbolic link
 190    has been restructured to be thread-safe.
 191
 192  * When pruning directories that has become empty during "git prune"
 193    and "git prune-packed", call closedir() that iterates over a
 194    directory before rmdir() it.
 195
 196 Also contains minor documentation updates and code clean-ups.
 197
 198
 199 Fixes since v1.7.9
 200 ------------------
 201
 202 Unless otherwise noted, all the fixes since v1.7.9 in the maintenance
 203 releases are contained in this release (see release notes to them for
 204 details).
 205
 206  * Build with NO_PERL_MAKEMAKER was broken and Git::I18N did not work
 207    with versions of Perl older than 5.8.3.
 208    (merge 5eb660e ab/perl-i18n later to maint).
 209
 210  * "git tag -s" honored "gpg.program" configuration variable since
 211    1.7.9, but "git tag -v" and "git verify-tag" didn't.
 212    (merge a2c2506 az/verify-tag-use-gpg-config later to maint).
 213
 214  * "configure" script learned to take "--with-sane-tool-path" from the
 215    command line to record SANE_TOOL_PATH (used to avoid broken platform
 216    tools in /usr/bin) in config.mak.autogen.  This may be useful for
 217    people on Solaris who have saner tools outside /usr/xpg[46]/bin.
 218
 219  * zsh port of bash completion script needed another workaround.