1 Git v1.8.4 Release Notes
2 ========================
7 Foreign interfaces and ports.
9 * MediaWiki remote helper (in contrib/) has been updated to use the
10 credential helper interface from Git.pm.
12 * Update build for Cygwin 1.[57]. Torsten Bögershausen reports that
13 this is fine with Cygwin 1.7 ($gmane/225824) so let's try moving it
16 * The credential helper to talk to keychain on OS X (in contrib/) has
17 been updated to kick in not just when talking http/https but also
20 * Remote transport helper has been updated to report errors and
21 maintain ref hierarchy used to keep track of its own state better.
23 * With "export" remote-helper protocol, (1) a push that tries to
24 update a remote ref whose name is different from the pushing side
25 does not work yet, and (2) the helper may not know how to do
26 --dry-run; these problematic cases are disabled for now.
28 * git-remote-hg/bzr (in contrib/) updates.
30 * git-remote-mw (in contrib/) hints users to check the certificate,
31 when https:// connection failed.
34 UI, Workflows & Features
36 * "git cmd <name>", when <name> happens to be a 40-hex string,
37 directly uses the 40-hex string as an object name, even if a ref
38 "refs/<some hierarchy>/<name>" exists. This disambiguation order
39 is unlikely to change, but we should warn about the ambiguity just
40 like we warn when more than one refs/ hierachies share the same
43 * "git rebase" learned "--[no-]autostash" option to save local
44 changes instead of refusing to run (to which people's normal
45 response was to stash them and re-run).
47 * Instead of typing four capital letters "HEAD", you can say "@" now,
50 * "check-ignore" (new feature since 1.8.2) has been updated to work
51 more like "check-attr" over bidi-pipes.
53 * "git describe" learned "--first-parent" option to limit its closest
54 tagged commit search to the first-parent chain.
56 * "git merge foo" that might have meant "git merge origin/foo" is
57 diagnosed with a more informative error message.
59 * "git log -L<line>,<range>:<filename>" has been added. This may
60 still have leaks and rough edges, though.
62 * We used the approxidate() parser for "--expire=<timestamp>" options
63 of various commands, but it is better to treat --expire=all and
64 --expire=now a bit more specially than using the current timestamp.
65 "git gc" and "git reflog" have been updated with a new parsing
66 function for expiry dates.
68 * Updates to completion (both bash and zsh) helpers.
70 * The behaviour of the "--chain-reply-to" option of "git send-email"
71 have changed at 1.7.0, and we added a warning/advice message to
72 help users adjust to the new behaviour back then, but we kept it
73 around for too long. The message has finally been removed.
75 * "git fetch origin master" unlike "git fetch origin" or "git fetch"
76 did not update "refs/remotes/origin/master"; this was an early
77 design decision to keep the update of remote tracking branches
78 predictable, but in practice it turns out that people find it more
79 convenient to opportunistically update them whenever we have a
80 chance, and we have been updating them when we run "git push" which
81 already breaks the original "predictability" anyway.
83 * The configuration variable core.checkstat was advertised in the
84 documentation but the code expected core.statinfo instead.
85 For now, we accept both core.checkstat and core.statinfo, but the
86 latter will be removed in the longer term.
89 Performance, Internal Implementation, etc.
91 * Memory ownership and lifetime rules for what for-each-ref feeds to
92 its callbacks have been clarified (in short, "you do not own it, so
93 make a copy if you want to keep it").
95 * The revision traversal logic to improve culling of irrelevant
96 parents while traversing a mergy history has been updated.
98 * Some leaks in unpack-trees (used in merge, cherry-pick and other
99 codepaths) have been plugged.
101 * The codepath to read from marks files in fast-import/export did not
102 have to accept anything but 40-hex representation of the object
103 name. Further, fast-export did not need full in-core object
104 representation to have parsed wen reading from them. These
105 codepaths have been optimized by taking advantage of these access
108 * Object lookup logic, when the object hashtable starts to become
109 crowded, has been optimized.
111 * When TEST_OUTPUT_DIRECTORY setting is used, it was handled somewhat
112 inconsistently between the test framework and t/Makefile, and logic
113 to summarize the results looked at a wrong place.
115 * "git clone" uses a lighter-weight implementation when making sure
116 that the history behind refs are complete.
118 * Many warnings from sparse source checker in compat/ area has been
121 * The code to reading and updating packed-refs file has been updated,
122 correcting corner case bugs.
125 Also contains various documentation updates and code clean-ups.
131 Unless otherwise noted, all the fixes since v1.8.3 in the maintenance
132 track are contained in this release (see release notes to them for
135 * Logic used by git-send-email to suppress cc mishandled names like
136 "A U. Thor" <author@example.xz>, where the human readable part
137 needs to be quoted (the user input may not have the double quotes
138 around the name, and comparison was done between quoted and
140 (merge 1495266 mt/send-email-cc-match-fix later to maint).
142 * "gitweb" forgot to clear a global variable $search_regexp upon each
143 request, mistakenly carrying over the previous search to a new one
144 when used as a persistent CGI.
145 (merge ca7a5dc cm/gitweb-project-list-persistent-cgi-fix later to maint).
147 * The wildmatch engine did not honor WM_CASEFOLD option correctly.
148 (merge b79c0c3 ar/wildmatch-foldcase later to maint).
150 * "git log -c --follow $path" segfaulted upon hitting the commit that
151 renamed the $path being followed.
152 (merge 46ec510 cb/log-follow-with-combined later to maint).
154 * When a reflog notation is used for implicit "current branch", we
155 did not say which branch and worse said "branch ''".
156 (merge 305ebea rr/die-on-missing-upstream later to maint).
158 * "difftool --dir-diff" did not copy back changes made by the
159 end-user in the diff tool backend to the working tree in some
161 (merge 32eaf1d ks/difftool-dir-diff-copy-fix later to maint).
163 * "git push $there HEAD:branch" did not resolve HEAD early enough, so
164 it was easy to flip it around while push is still going on and push
165 out a branch that the user did not originally intended when the
167 (merge 0f075b2 rr/push-head later to maint).
169 * The bash prompt code (in contrib/) displayed the name of the branch
170 being rebased when "rebase -i/-m/-p" modes are in use, but not the
171 plain vanilla "rebase".
172 (merge 1306321 fc/show-branch-in-rebase-am later to maint).
174 * Handling of negative exclude pattern for directories "!dir" was
175 broken in the update to v1.8.3.
176 (merge c3c327d kb/status-ignored-optim-2 later to maint).
178 * zsh prompt script that borrowed from bash prompt script did not
179 work due to slight differences in array variable notation between
181 (merge d0583da tg/maint-zsh-svn-remote-prompt later to maint).
183 * An entry for "file://" scheme in the enumeration of URL types Git
184 can take in the HTML documentation was made into a clickable link
186 (merge 4c32e36 nd/urls-doc-no-file-hyperlink-fix later to maint).
188 * "git push --[no-]verify" was not documented.
189 (merge 90d32d1 tr/push-no-verify-doc later to maint).
191 * Stop installing the git-remote-testpy script that is only used for
193 (merge 416fda6 fc/makefile later to maint).
195 * "git commit --allow-empty-message -m ''" should not start an
197 (merge 2520677 rs/commit-m-no-edit later to maint).
199 * "git merge @{-1}~22" was rewritten to "git merge frotz@{1}~22"
200 incorrectly when your previous branch was "frotz" (it should be
201 rewritten to "git merge frotz~22" instead).
202 (merge 84cf246 jc/strbuf-branchname-fix later to maint).
204 * "git diff -c -p" was not showing a deleted line from a hunk when
205 another hunk immediately begins where the earlier one ends.
206 (merge aac3857 mk/combine-diff-context-horizon-fix later to maint).
208 * "git log --ancestry-path A...B" did not work as expected, as it did
209 not pay attention to the fact that the merge base between A and B
210 was the bottom of the range being specified.
211 (merge a765499 kb/ancestry-path-threedots later to maint).
213 * Mac OS X does not like to write(2) more than INT_MAX number of
214 bytes; work it around by chopping write(2) into smaller pieces.
215 (merge 6c642a8 fc/macos-x-clipped-write later to maint).
217 * Newer MacOS X encourages the programs to compile and link with
218 their CommonCrypto, not with OpenSSL.
219 (merge be4c828 da/darwin later to maint).
221 * "git clone foo/bar:baz" cannot be a request to clone from a remote
222 over git-over-ssh specified in the scp style. This case is now
223 detected and clones from a local repository at "foo/bar:baz".
224 (merge 6000334 nd/clone-local-with-colon later to maint).
226 * When $HOME is misconfigured to point at an unreadable directory, we
227 used to complain and die. Loosen the check.
228 (merge 4698c8f jn/config-ignore-inaccessible later to maint).
230 * "git subtree" (in contrib/) had one codepath with loose error
231 checks to lose data at the remote side.
232 (merge 3212d56 jk/subtree-do-not-push-if-split-fails later to maint).
234 * "git fetch" into a shallow repository from a repository that does
235 not know about the shallow boundary commits (e.g. a different fork
236 from the repository the current shallow repository was cloned from)
237 did not work correctly.
238 (merge 71d5f93 mh/fetch-into-shallow later to maint).
240 * "git checkout foo" DWIMs the intended "upstream" and turns it into
241 "git checkout -t -b foo remotes/origin/foo". This codepath has been
242 updated to correctly take existing remote definitions into account.
243 (merge 229177a jh/checkout-auto-tracking later to maint).