Documentation/RelNotes-1.6.1.txt

   1 GIT v1.6.1 Release Notes
   2 ========================
   3
   4 Updates since v1.6.0
   5 --------------------
   6
   7 When some commands (e.g. "git log", "git diff") spawn pager internally, we
   8 used to make the pager the parent process of the git command that produces
   9 output.  This meant that the exit status of the whole thing comes from the
  10 pager, not the underlying git command.  We swapped the order of the
  11 processes around and you will see the exit code from the command from now
  12 on.
  13
  14 (subsystems)
  15
  16 * gitk can call out to git-gui to view "git blame" output; git-gui in turn
  17   can run gitk from its blame view.
  18
  19 * Various git-gui updates including updated translations.
  20
  21 * Various gitweb updates from repo.or.cz installation.
  22
  23 * Updates to emacs bindings.
  24
  25 (portability)
  26
  27 * A few test scripts used nonportable "grep" that did not work well on
  28   some platforms, e.g. Solaris.
  29
  30 * Sample pre-auto-gc script has OS X support.
  31
  32 * Makefile has support for (ancient) FreeBSD 4.9.
  33
  34 (performance)
  35
  36 * Many operations that are lstat(3) heavy can be told to pre-execute
  37   necessary lstat(3) in parallel before their main operations, which
  38   potentially gives much improved performance for cold-cache cases or in
  39   environments with weak metadata caching (e.g. NFS).
  40
  41 * The underlying diff machinery to produce textual output has been
  42   optimized, which would result in faster "git blame" processing.
  43
  44 * Most of the test scripts (but not the ones that try to run servers)
  45   can be run in parallel.
  46
  47 * Bash completion of refnames in a repository with massive number of
  48   refs has been optimized.
  49
  50 * Cygwin port uses native stat/lstat implementations when applicable,
  51   which leads to improved performance.
  52
  53 * "git push" pays attention to alternate repositories to avoid sending
  54   unnecessary objects.
  55
  56 * "git svn" can rebuild an out-of-date rev_map file.
  57
  58 (usability, bells and whistles)
  59
  60 * When you mistype a command name, git helpfully suggests what it guesses
  61   you might have meant to say.  help.autocorrect configuration can be set
  62   to a non-zero value to accept the suggestion when git can uniquely
  63   guess.
  64
  65 * The packfile machinery hopefully is more robust when dealing with
  66   corrupt packs if redundant objects involved in the corruption are
  67   available elsewhere.
  68
  69 * "git add -N path..." adds the named paths as an empty blob, so that
  70   subsequent "git diff" will show a diff as if they are creation events.
  71
  72 * "git add" gained a built-in synonym for people who want to say "stage
  73   changes" instead of "add contents to the staging area" which amounts
  74   to the same thing.
  75
  76 * "git apply" learned --include=paths option, similar to the existing
  77   --exclude=paths option.
  78
  79 * "git bisect" is careful about a user mistake and suggests testing of
  80   merge base first when good is not a strict ancestor of bad.
  81
  82 * "git bisect skip" can take a range of commits.
  83
  84 * "git blame" re-encodes the commit metainfo to UTF-8 from i18n.commitEncoding
  85   by default.
  86
  87 * "git check-attr --stdin" can check attributes for multiple paths.
  88
  89 * "git checkout --track origin/hack" used to be a syntax error.  It now
  90   DWIMs to create a corresponding local branch "hack", i.e. acts as if you
  91   said "git checkout --track -b hack origin/hack".
  92
  93 * "git checkout --ours/--theirs" can be used to check out one side of a
  94   conflicting merge during conflict resolution.
  95
  96 * "git checkout -m" can be used to recreate the initial conflicted state
  97   during conflict resolution.
  98
  99 * "git cherry-pick" can also utilize rerere for conflict resolution.
 100
 101 * "git clone" learned to be verbose with -v
 102
 103 * "git commit --author=$name" can look up author name from existing
 104   commits.
 105
 106 * output from "git commit" has been reworded in a more concise and yet
 107   more informative way.
 108
 109 * "git count-objects" reports the on-disk footprint for packfiles and
 110   their corresponding idx files.
 111
 112 * "git daemon" learned --max-connections=<count> option.
 113
 114 * "git daemon" exports REMOTE_ADDR to record client address, so that
 115   spawned programs can act differently on it.
 116
 117 * "git describe --tags" favours closer lightweight tags than farther
 118   annotated tags now.
 119
 120 * "git diff" learned to mimic --suppress-blank-empty from GNU diff via a
 121   configuration option.
 122
 123 * "git diff" learned to put more sensible hunk headers for Python,
 124   HTML and ObjC contents.
 125
 126 * "git diff" learned to vary the a/ vs b/ prefix depending on what are
 127   being compared, controlled by diff.mnemonicprefix configuration.
 128
 129 * "git diff" learned --dirstat-by-file to count changed files, not number
 130   of lines, when summarizing the global picture.
 131
 132 * "git diff" learned "textconv" filters --- a binary or hard-to-read
 133   contents can be munged into human readable form and the difference
 134   between the results of the conversion can be viewed (obviously this
 135   cannot produce a patch that can be applied, so this is disabled in
 136   format-patch among other things).
 137
 138 * "--cached" option to "git diff has an easier to remember synonym "--staged",
 139   to ask "what is the difference between the given commit and the
 140   contents staged in the index?"
 141
 142 * "git for-each-ref" learned "refname:short" token that gives an
 143   unambiguously abbreviated refname.
 144
 145 * Auto-numbering of the subject lines is the default for "git
 146   format-patch" now.
 147
 148 * "git grep" learned to accept -z similar to GNU grep.
 149
 150 * "git help" learned to use GIT_MAN_VIEWER environment variable before
 151   using "man" program.
 152
 153 * "git imap-send" can optionally talk SSL.
 154
 155 * "git index-pack" is more careful against disk corruption while
 156   completing a thin pack.
 157
 158 * "git log --check" and "git log --exit-code" passes their underlying diff
 159   status with their exit status code.
 160
 161 * "git log" learned --simplify-merges, a milder variant of --full-history;
 162   "gitk --simplify-merges" is easier to view than with --full-history.
 163
 164 * "git log" learned "--source" to show what ref each commit was reached
 165   from.
 166
 167 * "git log" also learned "--simplify-by-decoration" to show the
 168   birds-eye-view of the topology of the history.
 169
 170 * "git log --pretty=format:" learned "%d" format element that inserts
 171   names of tags that point at the commit.
 172
 173 * "git merge --squash" and "git merge --no-ff" into an unborn branch are
 174   noticed as user errors.
 175
 176 * "git merge -s $strategy" can use a custom built strategy if you have a
 177   command "git-merge-$strategy" on your $PATH.
 178
 179 * "git pull" (and "git fetch") can be told to operate "-v"erbosely or
 180   "-q"uietly.
 181
 182 * "git push" can be told to reject deletion of refs with receive.denyDeletes
 183   configuration.
 184
 185 * "git rebase" honours pre-rebase hook; use --no-verify to bypass it.
 186
 187 * "git rebase -p" uses interactive rebase machinery now to preserve the merges.
 188
 189 * "git reflog expire branch" can be used in place of "git reflog expire
 190   refs/heads/branch".
 191
 192 * "git remote show $remote" lists remote branches one-per-line now.
 193
 194 * "git send-email" can be given revision range instead of files and
 195   maildirs on the command line, and automatically runs format-patch to
 196   generate patches for the given revision range.
 197
 198 * "git submodule foreach" subcommand allows you to iterate over checked
 199   out submodules.
 200
 201 * "git submodule sync" subcommands allows you to update the origin URL
 202   recorded in submodule directories from the toplevel .gitmodules file.
 203
 204 * "git svn branch" can create new branches on the other end.
 205
 206 * "gitweb" can use more saner PATH_INFO based URL.
 207
 208 (internal)
 209
 210 * "git hash-object" learned to lie about the path being hashed, so that
 211   correct gitattributes processing can be done while hashing contents
 212   stored in a temporary file.
 213
 214 * various callers of git-merge-recursive avoid forking it as an external
 215   process.
 216
 217 * Git class defined in "Git.pm" can be subclasses a bit more easily.
 218
 219 * We used to link GNU regex library as a compatibility layer for some
 220   platforms, but it turns out it is not necessary on most of them.
 221
 222 * Some path handling routines used fixed number of buffers used alternately
 223   but depending on the call depth, this arrangement led to hard to track
 224   bugs.  This issue is being addressed.
 225
 226
 227 Fixes since v1.6.0
 228 ------------------
 229
 230 All of the fixes in v1.6.0.X maintenance series are included in this
 231 release, unless otherwise noted.
 232
 233 * Porcelains implemented as shell scripts were utterly confused when you
 234   entered to a subdirectory of a work tree from sideways, following a
 235   symbolic link (this may need to be backported to older releases later).
 236
 237 * Tracking symbolic links would work better on filesystems whose lstat()
 238   returns incorrect st_size value for them.
 239
 240 * "git add" and "git update-index" incorrectly allowed adding S/F when S
 241   is a tracked symlink that points at a directory D that has a path F in
 242   it (we still need to fix a similar nonsense when S is a submodule and F
 243   is a path in it).
 244
 245 * "git am" after stopping at a broken patch lost --whitespace, -C, -p and
 246   --3way options given from the command line initially.
 247
 248 * "git diff --stdin" used to take two trees on a line and compared them,
 249   but we dropped support for such a use case long time ago.  This has
 250   been resurrected.
 251
 252 * "git filter-branch" failed to rewrite a tag name with slashes in it.
 253
 254 * "git http-push" did not understand URI scheme other than opaquelocktoken
 255   when acquiring a lock from the server (this may need to be backported to
 256   older releases later).
 257
 258 * After "git rebase -p" stopped with conflicts while replaying a merge,
 259  "git rebase --continue" did not work (may need to be backported to older
 260   releases).
 261
 262 * "git revert" records relative to which parent a revert was made when
 263   reverting a merge.  Together with new documentation that explains issues
 264   around reverting a merge and merging from the updated branch later, this
 265   hopefully will reduce user confusion (this may need to be backported to
 266   older releases later).
 267
 268 * "git rm --cached" used to allow an empty blob that was added earlier to
 269   be removed without --force, even when the file in the work tree has
 270   since been modified.
 271
 272 * "git push --tags --all $there" failed with generic usage message without
 273   telling saying these two options are incompatible.
 274
 275 * "git log --author/--committer" match used to potentially match the
 276   timestamp part, exposing internal implementation detail.  Also these did
 277   not work with --fixed-strings match at all.
 278
 279 * "gitweb" did not mark non-ASCII characters imported from external HTML fragments
 280   correctly.
 281
 282 --
 283 exec >/var/tmp/1
 284 O=v1.6.1-rc3-74-gf66bc5f
 285 echo O=$(git describe master)
 286 git shortlog --no-merges $O..master ^maint