1 Git v1.8.3 Release Notes
2 ========================
4 Backward compatibility notes (for Git 2.0)
5 ------------------------------------------
7 When "git push [$there]" does not say what to push, we have used the
8 traditional "matching" semantics so far (all your branches were sent
9 to the remote as long as there already are branches of the same name
10 over there). In Git 2.0, the default will change to the "simple"
11 semantics that pushes the current branch to the branch with the same
12 name, only when the current branch is set to integrate with that
13 remote branch. There is a user preference configuration variable
14 "push.default" to change this. If you are an old-timer who is used
15 to the "matching" semantics, you can set it to "matching" to keep the
16 traditional behaviour. If you want to live in the future early,
17 you can set it to "simple" today without waiting for Git 2.0.
19 When "git add -u" and "git add -A", that does not specify what paths
20 to add on the command line is run from inside a subdirectory, these
21 commands will operate on the entire tree in Git 2.0 for consistency
22 with "git commit -a" and other commands. Because there will be no
23 mechanism to make "git add -u" behave as if "git add -u .", it is
24 important for those who are used to "git add -u" (without pathspec)
25 updating the index only for paths in the current subdirectory to start
26 training their fingers to explicitly say "git add -u ." when they mean
27 it before Git 2.0 comes.
33 UI, Workflows & Features
35 * A triangular "pull from one place, push to another place" workflow
36 is supported better by new remote.pushdefault (overrides the
37 "origin" thing) and branch.*.pushremote (overrides the
38 branch.*.remote) configuration variables.
40 * "git status" learned to report that you are in the middle of a
41 revert session, just like it does for a cherry-pick and a bisect
44 * The handing by "git branch --set-upstream-to" against various forms
45 of errorneous inputs was suboptimal and has been improved.
47 * When the interactive access to git-shell is not enabled, it issues
48 a message meant to help the system admininstrator to enable it.
49 An explicit way to help the end users who connect to the service by
50 issuing custom messages to refuse such an access has been added.
52 * In addition to the case where the user edits the log message with
53 the "e)dit" option of "am -i", replace the "Applying: this patch"
54 message with the final log message contents after applymsg hook
57 * "git status" suggests users to look into using --untracked=no option
58 when it takes too long.
60 * "git status" shows a bit more information to "git status" during a
61 rebase/bisect session.
63 * "git fetch" learned to fetch a commit at the tip of an unadvertised
64 ref by specifying a raw object name from the command line when the
65 server side supports this feature.
67 * "git count-objects -v" learned to report leftover temporary
68 packfiles and other garbage in the object store.
70 * A new read-only credential helper (in contrib/) to interact with
71 the .netrc/.authinfo files has been added.
73 * "git send-email" can be used with the credential helper system.
75 * There was no Porcelain way to say "I no longer am interested in
76 this submodule", once you express your interest in a submodule with
77 "submodule init". "submodule deinit" is the way to do so.
79 * "git pull --rebase" learned to pass "-v/-q" options to underlying
82 * The new "--follow-tags" option tells "git push" to push relevant
83 annotated tags when pushing branches out.
85 * "git merge" and "git pull" can optionally be told to inspect and
86 reject when merging a commit that does not carry a trusted GPG
89 * "git mergetool" now feeds files to the "p4merge" backend in the
90 order that matches the p4 convention, where "theirs" is usually
91 shown on the left side, which is the opposite from other backend
94 * "show/log" now honors gpg.program configuration just like other
95 parts of the code that use GnuPG.
97 * "git log" that shows the difference between the parent and the
98 child has been optimized somewhat.
100 * "git difftool" allows the user to write into the temporary files
101 being shown; if the user makes changes to the working tree at the
102 same time, one of the changes has to be lost in such a case, but it
103 tells the user what happened and refrains from overwriting the copy
106 * There was no good way to ask "I have a random string that came from
107 outside world. I want to turn it into a 40-hex object name while
108 making sure such an object exists". A new peeling suffix ^{object}
109 can be used for that purpose, together with "rev-parse --verify".
112 Performance, Internal Implementation, etc.
114 * Updates for building under msvc.
116 * The code to enforce permission bits on files in $GIT_DIR/ for
117 shared repositories have been simplified.
119 * A few codepaths knew how much data they need to put in the
120 hashtables they use upfront, but still started from a small table
121 repeatedly growing and rehashing.
123 * The API to walk reflog entries from the latest to older, which was
124 necessary for operations such as "git checkout -", was cumbersome
125 to use correctly and also inefficient.
127 * Codepaths that inspect log-message-to-be and decide when to add a
128 new Signed-off-by line in various commands have been consolidated.
130 * The pkt-line API, implementation and its callers have been cleaned
131 up to make them more robust.
133 * Cygwin port has a faster-but-lying lstat(2) emulation whose
134 incorrectness does not matter in practice except for a few
135 codepaths, and setting permission bits to directories is a codepath
136 that needs to use a more correct one.
138 * "git checkout" had repeated pathspec matches on the same paths,
139 which have been consolidated. Also a bug in "git checkout dir/"
140 that is started from an unmerged index has been fixed.
143 Also contains minor documentation updates and code clean-ups.
149 Unless otherwise noted, all the fixes since v1.8.2 in the maintenance
150 track are contained in this release (see release notes to them for
153 * When used with "-d temporary-directory" option, "git filter-branch"
154 failed to come back to the original working tree to perform the
155 final clean-up procedure.
156 (merge 9727601 jk/filter-branch-come-back-to-original later to maint).
158 * "git merge $(git rev-parse v1.8.2)" behaved quite differently from
159 "git merge v1.8.2", as if v1.8.2 were written as v1.8.2^0 and did
160 not pay much attention to the annotated tag payload. Make the code
161 notice the type of the tag object, in addition to the dwim_ref()
162 based classification the current code uses (i.e. the name appears
163 in refs/tags/) to decide when to special case merging of tags.
164 (merge a38d3d7 jc/merge-tag-object later to maint).
166 * Fix 1.8.1.x regression that stopped matching "dir" (without
167 trailing slash) to a directory "dir".
168 (merge efa5f82 jc/directory-attrs-regression-fix later to maint-1.8.1).
170 * "git apply --whitespace=fix" was not prepared to see a line getting
171 longer after fixing whitespaces (e.g. tab-in-indent aka Python).
172 (merge 329b26e jc/apply-ws-fix-tab-in-indent later to maint-1.8.1).
174 * The prompt string generator (in contrib/completion/) did not notice
175 when we are in a middle of a "git revert" session.
176 (merge 3ee4452 rr/prompt-revert-head later to maint).
178 * "submodule summary --summary-limit" option did not support
179 "--option=value" form.
180 (merge 862ae6c rs/submodule-summary-limit later to maint).
182 * "index-pack --fix-thin" used uninitialize value to compute delta
183 depths of objects it appends to the resulting pack.
184 (merge 57165db jk/index-pack-correct-depth-fix later to maint).
186 * "index-pack --verify-stat" used a few counters outside protection
187 of mutex, possibly showing incorrect numbers.
188 (merge 8f82aad nd/index-pack-threaded-fixes later to maint).
190 * The code to keep track of what directory names are known to Git on
191 platforms with case insensitive filesystems can get confused upon a
192 hash collision between these pathnames and looped forever.
194 * Annotated tags outside refs/tags/ hierarchy were not advertised
195 correctly to the ls-remote and fetch with recent version of Git.
197 * Recent optimization broke shallow clones.
198 (merge f59de5d jk/peel-ref later to maint).
200 * "git cmd -- ':(top'" was not diagnosed as an invalid syntax, and
201 instead the parser kept reading beyond the end of the string.
203 * "git tag -f <tag>" always said "Updated tag '<tag>'" even when
204 creating a new tag (i.e. not overwriting nor updating).
206 * "git p4" did not behave well when the path to the root of the P4
207 client was not its real path.
208 (merge bbd8486 pw/p4-symlinked-root later to maint).
210 * "git archive" reports a failure when asked to create an archive out
211 of an empty tree. It would be more intuitive to give an empty
212 archive back in such a case.
214 * When "format-patch" quoted a non-ascii strings on the header files,
215 it incorrectly applied rfc2047 and chopped a single character in
218 * An aliased command spawned from a bare repository that does not say
219 it is bare with "core.bare = yes" is treated as non-bare by mistake.
221 * In "git reflog expire", REACHABLE bit was not cleared from the
224 * The logic used by "git diff -M --stat" to shorten the names of
225 files before and after a rename did not work correctly when the
226 common prefix and suffix between the two filenames overlapped.
228 * The "--match=<pattern>" option of "git describe", when used with
229 "--all" to allow refs that are not annotated tags to be used as a
230 base of description, did not restrict the output from the command
231 to those that match the given pattern.
233 * Clarify in the documentation "what" gets pushed to "where" when the
234 command line to "git push" does not say these explicitly.
236 * The "--color=<when>" argument to the commands in the diff family
237 was described poorly.
239 * The arguments given to pre-rebase hook were not documented.
241 * The v4 index format was not documented.
243 * The "--match=<pattern>" argument "git describe" takes uses glob
244 pattern but it wasn't obvious from the documentation.
246 * Some sources failed to compile on systems that lack NI_MAXHOST in
247 their system header (e.g. z/OS).
249 * Add an example use of "--env-filter" in "filter-branch"
252 * "git bundle verify" did not say "records a complete history" for a
253 bundle that does not have any prerequisites.
255 * In the v1.8.0 era, we changed symbols that do not have to be global
256 to file scope static, but a few functions in graph.c were used by
257 CGit from sideways bypassing the entry points of the API the
260 * "git update-index -h" did not do the usual "-h(elp)" thing.
262 * "git index-pack" had a buffer-overflow while preparing an
263 informational message when the translated version of it was too
266 * 'git commit -m "$msg"' used to add an extra newline even when
267 $msg already ended with one.
269 * The SSL peer verification done by "git imap-send" did not ask for
270 Server Name Indication (RFC 4366), failing to connect SSL/TLS
271 sites that serve multiple hostnames on a single IP.
273 * perl/Git.pm::cat_blob slurped everything in core only to write it
274 out to a file descriptor, which was not a very smart thing to do.
276 * "git branch" did not bother to check nonsense command line
277 parameters and issue errors in many cases.
279 * Verification of signed tags were not done correctly when not in C
282 * Some platforms and users spell UTF-8 differently; retry with the
283 most official "UTF-8" when the system does not understand the
284 user-supplied encoding name that are the common alternative
287 * When export-subst is used, "zip" output recorded incorrect
290 * "git am $maildir/" applied messages in an unexpected order; sort
291 filenames read from the maildir/ in a way that is more likely to
292 sort messages in the order the writing MUA meant to, by sorting
293 numeric segment in numeric order and non-numeric segment in
296 * "git submodule update", when recursed into sub-submodules, did not
297 acccumulate the prefix paths.