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1 Git v1.8.1 Release Notes
2 ========================
4 Backward compatibility notes
5 ----------------------------
7 In the next major release (not *this* one), we will change the
8 behavior of the "git push" command.
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.
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.
25 Updates since v1.8.0
26 --------------------
28 UI, Workflows & Features
30 * Command-line completion scripts for tcsh and zsh have been added.
32 * A new remote-helper interface for Mercurial has been added to
33 contrib/remote-helpers.
35 * We used to have a workaround for a bug in ancient "less" that
36 causes it to exit without any output when the terminal is resized.
37 The bug has been fixed in "less" version 406 (June 2007), and the
38 workaround has been removed in this release.
40 * Some documentation pages that used to ship only in the plain text
41 format are now formatted in HTML as well.
43 * "git-prompt" scriptlet (in contrib/completion) can be told to paint
44 pieces of the hints in the prompt string in colors.
46 * A new configuration variable "diff.context" can be used to
47 give the default number of context lines in the patch output, to
48 override the hardcoded default of 3 lines.
50 * When "git checkout" checks out a branch, it tells the user how far
51 behind (or ahead) the new branch is relative to the remote tracking
52 branch it builds upon. The message now also advises how to sync
53 them up by pushing or pulling. This can be disabled with the
54 advice.statusHints configuration variable.
56 * "git config --get" used to diagnose presence of multiple
57 definitions of the same variable in the same configuration file as
58 an error, but it now applies the "last one wins" rule used by the
59 internal configuration logic. Strictly speaking, this may be an
60 API regression but it is expected that nobody will notice it in
61 practice.
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.
67 * "git format-patch" learned the "--notes=<ref>" option to give
68 notes for the commit after the three-dash lines in its output.
70 * "git log --grep=<pcre>" learned to honor the "grep.patterntype"
71 configuration set to "perl".
73 * "git replace -d <object>" now interprets <object> as an extended
74 SHA-1 (e.g. HEAD~4 is allowed), instead of only accepting full hex
75 object name.
77 * "git rm $submodule" used to punt on removing a submodule working
78 tree to avoid losing the repository embedded in it. Because
79 recent git uses a mechanism to separate the submodule repository
80 from the submodule working tree, "git rm" learned to detect this
81 case and removes the submodule working tree when it is safe to do so.
83 * "git send-email" used to prompt for the sender address, even when
84 the committer identity is well specified (e.g. via user.name and
85 user.email configuration variables). The command no longer gives
86 this prompt when not necessary.
88 * "git send-email" did not allow non-address garbage strings to
89 appear after addresses on Cc: lines in the patch files (and when
90 told to pick them up to find more recipients), e.g.
92 Cc: Stable Kernel <stable@k.org> # for v3.2 and up
94 The command now strips " # for v3.2 and up" part before adding the
95 remainder of this line to the list of recipients.
97 * "git submodule add" learned to add a new submodule at the same
98 path as the path where an unrelated submodule was bound to in an
99 existing revision via the "--name" option.
101 * "git submodule sync" learned the "--recursive" option.
103 * "diff.submodule" configuration variable can be used to give custom
104 default value to the "git diff --submodule" option.
106 * "git symbolic-ref" learned the "-d $symref" option to delete the
107 named symbolic ref, which is more intuitive way to spell it than
108 "update-ref -d --no-deref $symref".
111 Foreign Interface
113 * "git cvsimport" can be told to record timezones (other than GMT)
114 per-author via its author info file.
116 * The remote helper interface to interact with subversion
117 repositories (one of the GSoC 2012 projects) has been merged.
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.
124 Performance, Internal Implementation, etc.
126 * Compilation on Cygwin with newer header files are supported now.
128 * A couple of low-level implementation updates on MinGW.
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.
135 * The logic to find set of attributes that match a given path has
136 been optimized.
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).
143 Also contains minor documentation updates and code clean-ups.
146 Fixes since v1.8.0
147 ------------------
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).
153 * The configuration parser had an unnecessary hardcoded limit on
154 variable names that was not checked consistently.
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.
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.
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.
168 * "git grep -e pattern <tree>" asked the attribute system to read
169 "<tree>:.gitattributes" file in the working tree, which was
170 nonsense.
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.
176 * Update "remote tracking branch" in the documentation to
177 "remote-tracking branch".
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.
183 * The refs/replace hierarchy was not mentioned in the
184 repository-layout docs.
186 * Various rfc2047 quoting issues around a non-ASCII name on the
187 From: line in the output from format-patch have been corrected.
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.
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).
199 * "git diff -G<pattern>" did not honor textconv filter when looking
200 for changes.
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).
208 * "git p4" used to try expanding malformed "$keyword$" that spans
209 across multiple lines.
211 * Syntax highlighting in "gitweb" was not quite working.
213 * RSS feed from "gitweb" had a xss hole in its title output.
215 * "git config --path $key" segfaulted on "[section] key" (a boolean
216 "true" spelled without "=", not "[section] key = true").
218 * "git checkout -b foo" while on an unborn branch did not say
219 "Switched to a new branch 'foo'" like other cases.
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.
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.
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.
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.
237 * "diff --shortstat" miscounted the total number of affected files
238 when there were unmerged paths.
240 * "update-ref -d --deref SYM" to delete a ref through a symbolic ref
241 that points to it did not remove it correctly.