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 0.8.2.
  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 filtering.
  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 send-email" can also be told how to find whom to cc the
 126     message to for each message via --cc-cmd.
 127
 128   - "git config" learned NUL terminated output format via -z to
 129     help scripts.
 130
 131   - "git add" learned "--refresh <paths>..." option to selectively refresh
 132     the cached stat information.
 133
 134   - "git init -q" makes the command quieter.
 135
 136   - "git -p command" now has a cousin of opposite sex, "git --no-pager
 137     command".
 138
 139 * Updated behavior of existing commands.
 140
 141   - "gitweb" can offer multiple snapshot formats.
 142
 143     ***NOTE*** Unfortunately, this changes the format of the
 144     $feature{snapshot}{default} entry in the per-site
 145     configuration file 'gitweb_config.perl'.  It used to be a
 146     three-element tuple that describe a single format; with the
 147     new configuration item format, you only have to say the name
 148     of the format ('tgz', 'tbz2' or 'zip').  Please update the
 149     your configuration file accordingly.
 150
 151   - "git clone" uses -l (hardlink files under .git) by default when
 152     cloning locally.
 153
 154   - URL used for "git clone" and friends can specify nonstandard SSH port
 155     by using ssh://host:port/path/to/repo syntax.
 156
 157   - "git bundle create" can now create a bundle without negative refs,
 158     i.e. "everything since the beginning up to certain points".
 159
 160   - "git diff" (but not the plumbing level "git diff-tree") now
 161     recursively descends into trees by default.
 162
 163   - "git diff" does not show differences that come only from
 164     stat-dirtiness in the form of "diff --git" header anymore.
 165     It runs "update-index --refresh" silently as needed.
 166
 167   - "git tag -l" used to match tags by globbing its parameter as if it
 168     has wildcard '*' on both ends, which made "git tag -l gui" to match
 169     tag 'gitgui-0.7.0'; this was very annoying.  You now have to add
 170     asterisk on the sides you want to wildcard yourself.
 171
 172   - The editor to use with many interactive commands can be
 173     overridden with GIT_EDITOR environment variable, or if it
 174     does not exist, with core.editor configuration variable.  As
 175     before, if you have neither, environment variables VISUAL
 176     and EDITOR are consulted in this order, and then finally we
 177     fall back on "vi".
 178
 179   - "git rm --cached" does not complain when removing a newly
 180     added file from the index anymore.
 181
 182   - Options to "git log" to affect how --grep/--author options look for
 183     given strings now have shorter abbreviations.  -i is for ignore case,
 184     and -E is for extended regexp.
 185
 186   - "git log" learned --log-size to show the number of bytes in
 187     the log message part of the output to help qgit.
 188
 189   - "git log --name-status" does not require you to give "-r" anymore.
 190     As a general rule, Porcelain commands should recurse when showing
 191     diff.
 192
 193   - "git format-patch --root A" can be used to format everything
 194     since the beginning up to A.  This was supported with
 195     "git format-patch --root A A" for a long time, but was not
 196     properly documented.
 197
 198   - "git svn dcommit" retains local merge information.
 199
 200   - "git svnimport" allows an empty string to be specified as the
 201     trunk/ directory.  This is necessary to suck data from a SVN
 202     repository that doe not have trunk/ branches/ and tags/ organization
 203     at all.
 204
 205   - "git config" to set values also honors type flags like --bool
 206     and --int.
 207
 208   - core.quotepath configuration can be used to make textual git
 209     output to emit most of the characters in the path literally.
 210
 211   - "git mergetool" chooses its backend more wisely, taking
 212     notice of its environment such as use of X, Gnome/KDE, etc.
 213
 214   - "gitweb" shows merge commits a lot nicer than before.  The
 215     default view uses more compact --cc format, while the UI
 216     allows to choose normal diff with any parent.
 217
 218   - snapshot files "gitweb" creates from a repository at
 219     $path/$project/.git are more useful.  We use $project part
 220     in the filename, which we used to discard.
 221
 222   - "git cvsimport" creates lightweight tags; there is no
 223     interesting information we can record in an annotated tag,
 224     and the handcrafted ones the old code created was not
 225     properly formed anyway.
 226
 227   - "git push" pretends that you immediately fetched back from
 228     the remote by updating corresponding remote tracking
 229     branches if you have any.
 230
 231   - The diffstat given after a merge (or a pull) honors the
 232     color.diff configuration.
 233
 234   - "git commit --amend" is now compatible with various message source
 235     options such as -m/-C/-c/-F.
 236
 237   - "git apply --whitespace=strip" removes blank lines added at
 238     the end of the file.
 239
 240   - "git fetch" over git native protocols with "-v" option shows
 241     connection status, and the IP address of the other end, to
 242     help diagnosing problems.
 243
 244   - We used to have core.legacyheaders configuration, when
 245     set to false, allowed git to write loose objects in a format
 246     that mimics the format used by objects stored in packs.  It
 247     turns out that this was not so useful.  Although we will
 248     continue to read objects written in that format, we do not
 249     honor that configuration anymore and create loose objects in
 250     the legacy/traditional format.
 251
 252   - "--find-copies-harder" option to diff family can now be
 253     spelled as "-C -C" for brevity.
 254
 255   - "git mailsplit" (hence "git am") can read from Maildir
 256     formatted mailboxes.
 257
 258   - "git cvsserver" does not barf upon seeing "cvs login"
 259     request.
 260
 261   - "pack-objects" honors "delta" attribute set in
 262     .gitattributes.  It does not attempt to deltify blobs that
 263     come from paths with delta attribute set to false.
 264
 265   - "new-workdir" script (in contrib) can now be used with a
 266     bare repository.
 267
 268   - "git mergetool" learned to use gvimdiff.
 269
 270   - "gitview" (in contrib) has a better blame interface.
 271
 272   - "git log" and friends did not handle a commit log message
 273     that is larger than 16kB; they do now.
 274
 275   - "--pretty=oneline" output format for "git log" and friends
 276     deals with "malformed" commit log messages that have more
 277     than one lines in the first paragraph better.  We used to
 278     show the first line, cutting the title at mid-sentence; we
 279     concatenate them into a single line and treat the result as
 280     "oneline".
 281
 282   - "git p4import" has been demoted to contrib status.  For
 283     a superior option, checkout the "git p4" front end to
 284     "git fast-import" (also in contrib).  The man page and p4
 285     rpm have been removed as well.
 286
 287   - "git mailinfo" (hence "am") now tries to see if the message
 288     is in utf-8 first, instead of assuming iso-8859-1, if
 289     incoming e-mail does not say what encoding it is in.
 290
 291 * Builds
 292
 293   - old-style function definitions (most notably, a function
 294     without parameter defined with "func()", not "func(void)")
 295     have been eradicated.
 296
 297   - "git tag" and "git verify-tag" have been rewritten in C.
 298
 299 * Performance Tweaks
 300
 301   - "git pack-objects" avoids re-deltification cost by caching
 302     small enough delta results it creates while looking for the
 303     best delta candidates.
 304
 305   - "git pack-objects" learned a new heuristic to prefer delta
 306     that is shallower in depth over the smallest delta
 307     possible.  This improves both overall packfile access
 308     performance and packfile density.
 309
 310   - diff-delta code that is used for packing has been improved
 311     to work better on big files.
 312
 313   - when there are more than one pack files in the repository,
 314     the runtime used to try finding an object always from the
 315     newest packfile; it now tries the same packfile as we found
 316     the object requested the last time, which exploits the
 317     locality of references.
 318
 319   - verifying pack contents done by "git fsck --full" got boost
 320     by carefully choosing the order to verify objects in them.
 321
 322   - "git read-tree -m" to read into an already populated index
 323     has been optimized vastly.  The effect of this can be seen
 324     when switching branches that have differences in only a
 325     handful paths.
 326
 327   - "git add paths..." and "git commit paths..." has also been
 328     heavily optimized.
 329
 330 Fixes since v1.5.2
 331 ------------------
 332
 333 All of the fixes in v1.5.2 maintenance series are included in
 334 this release, unless otherwise noted.
 335
 336 * Bugfixes
 337
 338   - "gitweb" had trouble handling non UTF-8 text with older
 339     Encode.pm Perl module.
 340
 341   - "git svn" misparsed the data from the commits in the repository when
 342     the user had "color.diff = true" in the configuration.  This has been
 343     fixed.
 344
 345   - There was a case where "git svn dcommit" clobbered changes made on the
 346     SVN side while committing multiple changes.
 347
 348   - "git-write-tree" had a bad interaction with racy-git avoidance and
 349     gitattributes mechanisms.
 350
 351   - "git --bare command" overrode existing GIT_DIR setting and always
 352     made it treat the current working directory as GIT_DIR.
 353
 354   - "git ls-files --error-unmatch" does not complain if you give the
 355     same path pattern twice by mistake.
 356
 357   - "git init" autodetected core.filemode but not core.symlinks, which
 358     made a new directory created automatically by "git clone" cumbersome
 359     to use on filesystems that require these configurations to be set.
 360
 361   - "git log" family of commands behaved differently when run as "git
 362     log" (no pathspec) and as "git log --" (again, no pathspec).  This
 363     inconsistency was introduced somewhere in v1.3.0 series but now has
 364     been corrected.
 365
 366   - "git rebase -m" incorrectly displayed commits that were skipped.