Documentation/RelNotes-1.5.3.txt

   1 GIT v1.5.3 Release Notes
   2 ========================
   3
   4 Updates since v1.5.2
   5 --------------------
   6
   7 * The commit walkers other than http are officially deprecated,
   8   but still supported for now.
   9
  10 * The submodule support has Porcelain layer.
  11
  12   Note that the current submodule support is minimal and this is
  13   deliberately so.  A design decision we made is that operations
  14   at the supermodule level do not recurse into submodules by
  15   default.  The expectation is that later we would add a
  16   mechanism to tell git which submodules the user is interested
  17   in, and this information might be used to determine the
  18   recursive behaviour of certain commands (e.g. "git checkout"
  19   and "git diff"), but currently we haven't agreed on what that
  20   mechanism should look like.  Therefore, if you use submodules,
  21   you would probably need "git submodule update" on the
  22   submodules you care about after running a "git checkout" at
  23   the supermodule level.
  24
  25 * There are a handful pack-objects changes to help you cope better
  26   with repositories with pathologically large blobs in them.
  27
  28 * For people who need to import from Perforce, a front-end for
  29   fast-import is in contrib/fast-import/.
  30
  31 * Comes with git-gui 0.8.1.
  32
  33 * Comes with updated gitk.
  34
  35 * New commands and options.
  36
  37   - "git log --date=<format>" can use more formats: iso8601, rfc2822.
  38
  39   - The hunk header output from "git diff" family can be customized
  40     with the attributes mechanism.  See gitattributes(5) for details.
  41
  42   - "git stash" allows you to quickly save away your work in
  43     progress and replay it later on an updated state.
  44
  45   - "git rebase" learned an "interactive" mode that let you
  46     pick and reorder which commits to rebuild.
  47
  48   - "git fsck" can save its findings in $GIT_DIR/lost-found, without a
  49     separate invocation of "git lost-found" command.  The blobs stored by
  50     lost-found are stored in plain format to allow you to grep in them.
  51
  52   - $GIT_WORK_TREE environment variable can be used together with
  53     $GIT_DIR to work in a subdirectory of a working tree that is
  54     not located at "$GIT_DIR/..".
  55
  56   - Giving "--file=<file>" option to "git config" is the same as
  57     running the command with GIT_CONFIG=<file> environment.
  58
  59   - "git log" learned a new option "--follow", to follow
  60     renaming history of a single file.
  61
  62   - "git filter-branch" lets you rewrite the revision history of
  63     specified branches. You can specify a number of filters to
  64     modify the commits, files and trees.
  65
  66   - "git cvsserver" learned new options (--base-path, --export-all,
  67     --strict-paths) inspired by "git daemon".
  68
  69   - "git daemon --base-path-relaxed" can help migrating a repository URL
  70     that did not use to use --base-path to use --base-path.
  71
  72   - "git commit" can use "-t templatefile" option and commit.template
  73     configuration variable to prime the commit message given to you in the
  74     editor.
  75
  76   - "git submodule" command helps you manage the projects from
  77     the superproject that contain them.
  78
  79   - In addition to core.compression configuration option,
  80     core.loosecompression and pack.compression options can
  81     independently tweak zlib compression levels used for loose
  82     and packed objects.
  83
  84   - "git ls-tree -l" shows size of blobs pointed at by the
  85     tree entries, similar to "/bin/ls -l".
  86
  87   - "git rev-list" learned --regexp-ignore-case and
  88     --extended-regexp options to tweak its matching logic used
  89     for --grep fitering.
  90
  91   - "git describe --contains" is a handier way to call more
  92     obscure command "git name-rev --tags".
  93
  94   - "git gc --aggressive" tells the command to spend more cycles
  95     to optimize the repository harder.
  96
  97   - "git repack" learned a "window-memory" limit which
  98     dynamically reduces the window size to stay within the
  99     specified memory usage.
 100
 101   - "git repack" can be told to split resulting packs to avoid
 102     exceeding limit specified with "--max-pack-size".
 103
 104   - "git fsck" gained --verbose option.  This is really really
 105     verbose but it might help you identify exact commit that is
 106     corrupt in your repository.
 107
 108   - "git format-patch" learned --numbered-files option.  This
 109     may be useful for MH users.
 110
 111   - "git format-patch" learned format.subjectprefix configuration
 112     variable, which serves the same purpose as "--subject-prefix"
 113     option.
 114
 115   - "git tag -n -l" shows tag annotations while listing tags.
 116
 117   - "git cvsimport" can optionally use the separate-remote layout.
 118
 119   - "git blame" can be told to see through commits that change
 120     whitespaces and indentation levels with "-w" option.
 121
 122   - "git send-email" can be told not to thread the messages when
 123     sending out more than one patches.
 124
 125   - "git config" learned NUL terminated output format via -z to
 126     help scripts.
 127
 128   - "git add" learned "--refresh <paths>..." option to selectively refresh
 129     the cached stat information.
 130
 131   - "git init -q" makes the command quieter.
 132
 133   - "git -p command" now has a cousin of opposite sex, "git --no-pager
 134     command".
 135
 136 * Updated behavior of existing commands.
 137
 138   - "gitweb" can offer multiple snapshot formats.
 139
 140     ***NOTE*** Unfortunately, this changes the format of the
 141     $feature{snapshot}{default} entry in the per-site
 142     configuration file 'gitweb_config.perl'.  It used to be a
 143     three-element tuple that describe a single format; with the
 144     new configuration item format, you only have to say the name
 145     of the format ('tgz', 'tbz2' or 'zip').  Please update the
 146     your configuration file accordingly.
 147
 148   - "git clone" uses -l (hardlink files under .git) by default when
 149     cloning locally.
 150
 151   - "git bundle create" can now create a bundle without negative refs,
 152     i.e. "everything since the beginning up to certain points".
 153
 154   - "git diff" (but not the plumbing level "git diff-tree") now
 155     recursively descends into trees by default.
 156
 157   - "git diff" does not show differences that come only from
 158     stat-dirtiness in the form of "diff --git" header anymore.  When
 159     generating a textual diff, it shows a warning message at the end.
 160
 161   - The editor to use with many interactive commands can be
 162     overridden with GIT_EDITOR environment variable, or if it
 163     does not exist, with core.editor configuration variable.  As
 164     before, if you have neither, environment variables VISUAL
 165     and EDITOR are consulted in this order, and then finally we
 166     fall back on "vi".
 167
 168   - "git rm --cached" does not complain when removing a newly
 169     added file from the index anymore.
 170
 171   - Options to "git log" to affect how --grep/--author options look for
 172     given strings now have shorter abbreviations.  -i is for ignore case,
 173     and -E is for extended regexp.
 174
 175   - "git log" learned --log-size to show the number of bytes in
 176     the log message part of the output to help qgit.
 177
 178   - "git svn dcommit" retains local merge information.
 179
 180   - "git svnimport" allows an empty string to be specified as the
 181     trunk/ directory.  This is necessary to suck data from a SVN
 182     repository that doe not have trunk/ branches/ and tags/ organization
 183     at all.
 184
 185   - "git config" to set values also honors type flags like --bool
 186     and --int.
 187
 188   - core.quotepath configuration can be used to make textual git
 189     output to emit most of the characters in the path literally.
 190
 191   - "git mergetool" chooses its backend more wisely, taking
 192     notice of its environment such as use of X, Gnome/KDE, etc.
 193
 194   - "gitweb" shows merge commits a lot nicer than before.  The
 195     default view uses more compact --cc format, while the UI
 196     allows to choose normal diff with any parent.
 197
 198   - snapshot files "gitweb" creates from a repository at
 199     $path/$project/.git are more useful.  We use $project part
 200     in the filename, which we used to discard.
 201
 202   - "git cvsimport" creates lightweight tags; there is no
 203     interesting information we can record in an annotated tag,
 204     and the handcrafted ones the old code created was not
 205     properly formed anyway.
 206
 207   - "git push" pretends that you immediately fetched back from
 208     the remote by updating corresponding remote tracking
 209     branches if you have any.
 210
 211   - The diffstat given after a merge (or a pull) honors the
 212     color.diff configuration.
 213
 214   - "git commit --amend" is now compatible with various message source
 215     options such as -m/-C/-c/-F.
 216
 217   - "git apply --whitespace=strip" removes blank lines added at
 218     the end of the file.
 219
 220   - "git fetch" over git native protocols with "-v" option shows
 221     connection status, and the IP address of the other end, to
 222     help diagnosing problems.
 223
 224   - We used to have core.legacyheaders configuration, when
 225     set to false, allowed git to write loose objects in a format
 226     that mimicks the format used by objects stored in packs.  It
 227     turns out that this was not so useful.  Although we will
 228     continue to read objects written in that format, we do not
 229     honor that configuration anymore and create loose objects in
 230     the legacy/traditional format.
 231
 232   - "--find-copies-harder" option to diff family can now be
 233     spelled as "-C -C" for brevity.
 234
 235   - "git mailsplit" (hence "git am") can read from Maildir
 236     formatted mailboxes.
 237
 238   - "git cvsserver" does not barf upon seeing "cvs login"
 239     request.
 240
 241   - "pack-objects" honors "delta" attribute set in
 242     .gitattributes.  It does not attempt to deltify blobs that
 243     come from paths with delta attribute set to false.
 244
 245   - "new-workdir" script (in contrib) can now be used with a
 246     bare repository.
 247
 248   - "git mergetool" learned to use gvimdiff.
 249
 250   - "gitview" (in contrib) has a better blame interface.
 251
 252   - "git log" and friends did not handle a commit log message
 253     that is larger than 16kB; they do now.
 254
 255   - "--pretty=oneline" output format for "git log" and friends
 256     deals with "malformed" commit log messages that have more
 257     than one lines in the first paragraph better.  We used to
 258     show the first line, cutting the title at mid-sentence; we
 259     concatenate them into a single line and treat the result as
 260     "oneline".
 261
 262   - "git p4import" has been demoted to contrib status.  For
 263     a superior option, checkout the "git p4" front end to
 264     "git fast-import" (also in contrib).  The man page and p4
 265     rpm have been removed as well.
 266
 267   - "git mailinfo" (hence "am") now tries to see if the message
 268     is in utf-8 first, instead of assuming iso-8859-1, if
 269     incoming e-mail does not say what encoding it is in.
 270
 271 * Builds
 272
 273   - old-style function definitions (most notably, a function
 274     without parameter defined with "func()", not "func(void)")
 275     have been eradicated.
 276
 277   - "git tag" and "git verify-tag" have been rewritten in C.
 278
 279 * Performance Tweaks
 280
 281   - "git pack-objects" avoids re-deltification cost by caching
 282     small enough delta results it creates while looking for the
 283     best delta candidates.
 284
 285   - "git pack-objects" learned a new heuristcs to prefer delta
 286     that is shallower in depth over the smallest delta
 287     possible.  This improves both overall packfile access
 288     performance and packfile density.
 289
 290   - diff-delta code that is used for packing has been improved
 291     to work better on big files.
 292
 293   - when there are more than one pack files in the repository,
 294     the runtime used to try finding an object always from the
 295     newest packfile; it now tries the same packfile as we found
 296     the object requested the last time, which exploits the
 297     locality of references.
 298
 299   - verifying pack contents done by "git fsck --full" got boost
 300     by carefully choosing the order to verify objects in them.
 301
 302   - "git read-tree -m" to read into an already populated index
 303     has been optimized vastly.  The effect of this can be seen
 304     when switching branches that have differences in only a
 305     handful paths.
 306
 307   - "git commit paths..." has also been optimized.
 308
 309
 310 Fixes since v1.5.2
 311 ------------------
 312
 313 All of the fixes in v1.5.2 maintenance series are included in
 314 this release, unless otherwise noted.
 315
 316 * Bugfixes
 317
 318   - "gitweb" had trouble handling non UTF-8 text with older
 319     Encode.pm Perl module.
 320
 321 --
 322 exec >/var/tmp/1
 323 O=v1.5.3-rc6
 324 echo O=`git describe refs/heads/master`
 325 git shortlog --no-merges $O..refs/heads/master ^refs/heads/maint