1 Git v1.7.10 Release Notes
2 =========================
7 * From this release on, the "git merge" command in an interactive
8 session will start an editor when it automatically resolves the
9 merge for the user to explain the resulting commit, just like the
10 "git commit" command does when it wasn't given a commit message.
12 If you have a script that runs "git merge" and keeps its standard
13 input and output attached to the user's terminal, and if you do not
14 want the user to explain the resulting merge commits, you can
15 export GIT_MERGE_AUTOEDIT environment variable set to "no", like
20 export GIT_MERGE_AUTOEDIT
22 to disable this behaviour (if you want your users to explain their
23 merge commits, you do not have to do anything). Alternatively, you
24 can give the "--no-edit" option to individual invocations of the
25 "git merge" command if you know everybody who uses your script has
28 * The "--binary/-b" options to "git am" have been a no-op for quite a
29 while and were deprecated in mid 2008 (v1.6.0). When you give these
30 options to "git am", it will now warn and ask you not to use them.
32 * When you do not tell which branches and tags to push to the "git push"
33 command in any way, the command used "matching refs" rule to update
34 remote branches and tags with branches and tags with the same name you
35 locally have. In future versions of Git, this will change to use the
36 "upstream" rule to update the branch at the remote you would "pull"
37 from into your current branch with your local current branch. The
38 release after 1.7.10 will start issuing a warning about this change,
39 to encourage you to tell the command what to push out, e.g. by setting
40 push.default configuration.
46 UI, Workflows & Features
48 * Teams for localizing the messages from the Porcelain layer of
49 commands are starting to form, thanks to Jiang Xin who volunteered
50 to be the localization coordinator. An initial set of translated
51 messages for simplified chinese is available.
53 * The configuration mechanism learned an "include" facility; an
54 assignment to the include.path pseudo-variable causes the named
55 file to be included in-place when Git looks up configuration
58 * A content filter (clean/smudge) used to be just a way to make the
59 recorded contents "more useful", and allowed to fail; a filter can
60 now optionally be marked as "required".
62 * Options whose names begin with "--no-" (e.g. the "--no-verify"
63 option of the "git commit" command) can be negated by omitting
64 "no-" from its name, e.g. "git commit --verify".
66 * "git am" learned to pass "-b" option to underlying "git mailinfo", so
67 that a bracketed string other than "PATCH" at the beginning can be kept.
69 * "git clone" learned "--single-branch" option to limit cloning to a
70 single branch (surprise!); tags that do not point into the history
71 of the branch are not fetched.
73 * "git clone" learned to detach the HEAD in the resulting repository
74 when the user specifies a tag with "--branch" (e.g., "--branch=v1.0").
75 Clone also learned to print the usual "detached HEAD" advice in such
76 a case, similar to "git checkout v1.0".
78 * When showing a patch while ignoring whitespace changes, the context
79 lines are taken from the postimage, in order to make it easier to
82 * "git diff --stat" learned to adjust the width of the output on
83 wider terminals, and give more columns to pathnames as needed.
85 * "diff-highlight" filter (in contrib/) was updated to produce more
86 aesthetically pleasing output.
88 * "fsck" learned "--no-dangling" option to omit dangling object
91 * "git log -G" and "git log -S" learned to pay attention to the "-i"
92 option. With "-i", "log -G" ignores the case when finding patch
93 hunks that introduce or remove a string that matches the given
94 pattern. Similarly with "-i", "log -S" ignores the case when
95 finding the commit the given block of text appears or disappears
98 * "git merge" in an interactive session learned to spawn the editor
99 by default to let the user edit the auto-generated merge message,
100 to encourage people to explain their merges better. Legacy scripts
101 can export GIT_MERGE_AUTOEDIT=no to retain the historical behavior.
102 Both "git merge" and "git pull" can be given --no-edit from the
103 command line to accept the auto-generated merge message.
105 * The advice message given when the user didn't give enough clue on
106 what to merge to "git pull" and "git merge" has been updated to
107 be more concise and easier to understand.
109 * "git push" learned the "--prune" option, similar to "git fetch".
111 * The whole directory that houses a top-level superproject managed by
112 "git submodule" can be moved to another place.
114 * "git symbolic-ref" learned the "--short" option to abbreviate the
115 refname it shows unambiguously.
117 * "git tag --list" can be given "--points-at <object>" to limit its
118 output to those that point at the given object.
120 * "gitweb" allows intermediate entries in the directory hierarchy
121 that leads to a project to be clicked, which in turn shows the
122 list of projects inside that directory.
124 * "gitweb" learned to read various pieces of information for the
125 repositories lazily, instead of reading everything that could be
126 needed (including the ones that are not necessary for a specific
129 * Project search in "gitweb" shows the substring that matched in the
130 project name and description highlighted.
132 * A new script "diffall" is added to contrib/; it drives an
133 external tool to perform a directory diff of two Git revisions
134 in one go, unlike "difftool" that compares one file at a time.
138 * Improved handling of views, labels and branches in "git-p4" (in contrib).
140 * "git-p4" (in contrib) suffered from unnecessary merge conflicts when
141 p4 expanded the embedded $RCS$-like keywords; it can be now told to
144 * Some "git-svn" updates.
146 * "vcs-svn"/"svn-fe" learned to read dumps with svn-deltas and
147 support incremental imports.
149 * "git difftool/mergetool" learned to drive DeltaWalker.
153 * Unnecessary calls to parse_object() "git upload-pack" makes in
154 response to "git fetch", have been eliminated, to help performance
155 in repositories with excessive number of refs.
157 Internal Implementation (please report possible regressions)
159 * Recursive call chains in "git index-pack" to deal with long delta
160 chains have been flattened, to reduce the stack footprint.
162 * Use of add_extra_ref() API is now gone, to make it possible to
163 cleanly restructure the overall refs API.
165 * The command line parser of "git pack-objects" now uses parse-options
168 * The test suite supports the new "test_pause" helper function.
170 * Parallel to the test suite, there is a beginning of performance
171 benchmarking framework.
173 * t/Makefile is adjusted to prevent newer versions of GNU make from
174 running tests in seemingly random order.
176 * The code to check if a path points at a file beyond a symbolic link
177 has been restructured to be thread-safe.
179 * When pruning directories that has become empty during "git prune"
180 and "git prune-packed", call closedir() that iterates over a
181 directory before rmdir() it.
183 Also contains minor documentation updates and code clean-ups.
189 Unless otherwise noted, all the fixes since v1.7.9 in the maintenance
190 releases are contained in this release (see release notes to them for
193 * Build with NO_PERL_MAKEMAKER was broken and Git::I18N did not work
194 with versions of Perl older than 5.8.3.
195 (merge 5eb660e ab/perl-i18n later to maint).
197 * "git fast-import" accepted "ls" command with an empty path by
199 (merge 178e1de jn/maint-fast-import-empty-ls later to maint).
201 * The "remaining" subcommand to "git rerere" was not documented.
202 (merge 3e7a1df ph/rerere-doc later to maint).
204 * "git tag -s" honored "gpg.program" configuration variable since
205 1.7.9, but "git tag -v" and "git verify-tag" didn't.
206 (merge a2c2506 az/verify-tag-use-gpg-config later to maint).
208 * When "git config" diagnoses an error in a configuration file and
209 shows the line number for the offending line, it miscounted if the
210 error was at the end of line.
211 (merge 4b34059 ms/maint-config-error-at-eol-linecount later to maint).
213 * "configure" script learned to take "--sane-tool-path" from the
214 command line to record SANE_TOOL_PATH (used to avoid broken
215 platform tools in /usr/bin) in config.mak-autogen. This may be useful
216 for people on Solaris who have saner tools outside /usr/xpg[46]/bin.
218 * zsh port of bash completion script needed another workaround.
220 * "gitweb" used to drop warnings in the log file when "heads" view is
221 accessed in a repository whose HEAD does not point at a valid
226 O=v1.7.10-rc1-32-geb2c67c
227 echo O=$(git describe)
228 git log --first-parent --oneline ^maint $O..
230 git shortlog --no-merges ^maint $O..