1 Git v1.8.2 Release Notes
2 ========================
4 Backward compatibility notes
5 ----------------------------
7 In the upcoming major release (tentatively called 1.8.2), we will
8 change the 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.
22 UI, Workflows & Features
24 * Initial ports to QNX and z/OS UNIX System Services have started.
26 * Output from the tests is coloured using "green is okay, yellow is
27 questionable, red is bad and blue is informative" scheme.
29 * In bare repositories, "git shortlog" and other commands now read
30 mailmap files from the tip of the history, to help running these
31 tools in server settings.
33 * Color specifiers, e.g. "%C(blue)Hello%C(reset)", used in the
34 "--format=" option of "git log" and friends can be disabled when
35 the output is not sent to a terminal by prefixing them with
36 "auto,", e.g. "%C(auto,blue)Hello%C(auto,reset)".
38 * Scripts can ask Git that wildcard patterns in pathspecs they give do
39 not have any significance, i.e. take them as literal strings.
41 * The pathspec code learned to grok "foo/**/bar" as a pattern that
42 matches "bar" in 0-or-more levels of subdirectory in "foo".
44 * "git blame" (and "git diff") learned the "--no-follow" option.
46 * "git cherry-pick" can be used to replay a root commit to an unborn
49 * "git fetch --mirror" and fetch that uses other forms of refspec
50 with wildcard used to attempt to update a symbolic ref that match
51 the wildcard on the receiving end, which made little sense (the
52 real ref that is pointed at by the symbolic ref would be updated
53 anyway). Symbolic refs no longer are affected by such a fetch.
55 * "git format-patch" now detects more cases in which a whole branch
56 is being exported, and uses the description for the branch, when
57 asked to write a cover letter for the series.
59 * "git format-patch" learned "-v $count" option, and prepends a
60 string "v$count-" to the names of its output files, and also
61 automatically sets the subject prefix to "PATCH v$count". This
62 allows patches from rerolled series to be stored under different
63 names and makes it easier to reuse cover letter messsages.
65 * "git push" now requires "-f" to update a tag, even if it is a
66 fast-forward, as tags are meant to be fixed points.
68 * When "git rebase" fails to generate patches to be applied (e.g. due
69 to oom), it failed to detect the failure and instead behaved as if
70 there were nothing to do. A workaround to use a temporary file has
71 been applied, but we probably would want to revisit this later, as
72 it hurts the common case of not failing at all.
74 * "git submodule" started learning a new mode to integrate with the
75 tip of the remote branch (as opposed to integrating with the commit
76 recorded in the superproject's gitlink).
81 * "git fast-export" has been updated for its use in the context of
82 the remote helper interface.
84 * A new remote helper to interact with bzr has been added to contrib/.
87 Performance, Internal Implementation, etc.
89 * "git fsck" has been taught to be pickier about entries in tree
90 objects that should not be there, e.g. ".", ".git", and "..".
92 * Matching paths with common forms of pathspecs that contain wildcard
93 characters has been optimized further.
95 * The implementation of "imap-send" has been updated to reuse xml
96 quoting code from http-push codepath.
98 * There is a simple-minded checker for the test scripts in t/
99 directory to catch most common mistakes (it is not enabled by
103 Also contains minor documentation updates and code clean-ups.
109 Unless otherwise noted, all the fixes since v1.8.1 in the maintenance
110 track are contained in this release (see release notes to them for
113 * An element on GIT_CEILING_DIRECTORIES list that does not name the
114 real path to a directory (i.e. a symbolic link) could have caused
115 the GIT_DIR discovery logic to escape the ceiling.
116 (merge 059b379 mh/ceiling later to maint).
118 * When attempting to read the XDG-style $HOME/.config/git/config and
119 finding that $HOME/.config/git is a file, we gave a wrong error
120 message, instead of treating the case as "a custom config file does
121 not exist there" and moving on.
122 (merge 8f2bbe4 jn/warn-on-inaccessible-loosen later to maint).
124 * The behaviour visible to the end users was confusing, when they
125 attempt to kill a process spawned in the editor that was in turn
126 launched by Git with SIGINT (or SIGQUIT), as Git would catch that
127 signal and die. We ignore these signals now.
128 (merge 1250857 pf/editor-ignore-sigint later to maint).
130 * A child process that was killed by a signal (e.g. SIGINT) was
131 reported in an inconsistent way depending on how the process was
132 spawned by us, with or without a shell in between.
133 (merge 709ca73 jk/unify-exit-code-by-receiving-signal later to maint).
135 * After failing to create a temporary file using mkstemp(), failing
136 pathname was not reported correctly on some platforms.
137 (merge f7be59b jc/mkstemp-more-careful-error-reporting later to maint).
139 * The attribute mechanism didn't allow limiting attributes to be
140 applied to only a single directory itself with "path/" like the
141 exclude mechanism does.
142 (merge 94bc671 ja/directory-attrs later to maint).
144 * "git apply" misbehaved when fixing whitespace breakages by removing
145 excess trailing blank lines.
146 (merge 5de7166 jc/apply-trailing-blank-removal later to maint).
148 * A tar archive created by "git archive" recorded a directory in a
149 way that made NetBSD's implementation of "tar" sometimes unhappy.
150 (merge 22f0dcd rs/leave-base-name-in-name-field-of-tar later to maint).
152 * "git archive" did not record uncompressed size in the header when
153 streaming a zip archive, which confused some implementations of unzip.
154 (merge 5ea2c84 rs/zip-with-uncompressed-size-in-the-header later to maint).
156 * When "git clone --separate-git-dir=$over_there" is interrupted, it
157 failed to remove the real location of the $GIT_DIR it created.
158 This was most visible when interrupting a submodule update.
159 (merge 9be1980 jl/interrupt-clone-remove-separate-git-dir later to maint).
161 * The way "git svn" asked for password using SSH_ASKPASS and
162 GIT_ASKPASS was not in line with the rest of the system.
163 (merge e9263e4 ss/svn-prompt later to maint).
165 * The --graph code fell into infinite loop when asked to do what the
167 (merge 656197a mk/maint-graph-infinity-loop later to maint).
169 * http transport was wrong to ask for the username when the
170 authentication is done by certificate identity.
171 (merge 75e9a40 rb/http-cert-cred-no-username-prompt later to maint).
173 * "git pack-refs" that ran in parallel to another process that
174 created new refs had a nasty race.
175 (merge b3f1280 jk/repack-ref-racefix later to maint).
177 * After "git add -N" and then writing a tree object out of the
178 index, the cache-tree data structure got corrupted.
179 (merge eec3e7e nd/invalidate-i-t-a-cache-tree later to maint).
181 * "git merge --no-edit" computed who were involved in the work done
182 on the side branch, even though that information is to be discarded
183 without getting seen in the editor.
184 (merge 9bcbb1c jc/maint-fmt-merge-msg-no-edit-lose-credit later to maint).
186 * "git merge" started calling prepare-commit-msg hook like "git
187 commit" does some time ago, but forgot to pay attention to the exit
189 (merge 3e4141d ap/merge-stop-at-prepare-commit-msg-failure later to maint).
191 * When users spell "cc:" in lowercase in the fake "header" in the
192 trailer part, "git send-email" failed to pick up the addresses from
193 there. As e-mail headers field names are case insensitive, this
194 script should follow suit and treat "cc:" and "Cc:" the same way.
195 (merge 6310071 nz/send-email-headers-are-case-insensitive later to maint).
197 * Output from "git status --ignored" showed an unexpected interaction
199 (merge a45fb69 ap/status-ignored-in-ignored-directory later to maint).
201 * "gitweb", when sorting by age to show repositories with new
202 activities first, used to sort repositories with absolutely
203 nothing in it early, which was not very useful.
204 (merge 28dae18 md/gitweb-sort-by-age later to maint).
206 * "gitweb"'s code to sanitize control characters before passing it to
207 "highlight" filter lost known-to-be-safe control characters by
209 (merge 0e901d2 os/gitweb-highlight-uncaptured later to maint).
211 * When a line to be wrapped has a solid run of non space characters
212 whose length exactly is the wrap width, "git shortlog -w" failed
213 to add a newline after such a line.
214 (merge e0db176 sp/shortlog-missing-lf later to maint).
216 * Command line completion leaked an unnecessary error message while
217 looking for possible matches with paths in <tree-ish>.
218 (merge ca87dd6 ds/completion-silence-in-tree-path-probe later to maint).
220 * Command line completion for "tcsh" emitted an unwanted space
221 after completing a single directory name.
222 (merge 92f1c04 mk/complete-tcsh later to maint).
224 * Some shells do not behave correctly when IFS is unset; work it
225 around by explicitly setting it to the default value.
226 (merge 393050c jc/maint-fbsd-sh-ifs-workaround later to maint).
228 * Some scripted programs written in Python did not get updated when
230 (cherry-pick 96a4647fca54031974cd6ad1 later to maint).
232 * When autoconf is used, any build on a different commit always ran
233 "config.status --recheck" even when unnecessary.
234 (merge 1226504 jn/less-reconfigure later to maint).
236 * We have been carrying a translated and long-unmaintained copy of an
237 old version of the tutorial; removed.
238 (merge 0a85441 ta/remove-stale-translated-tut later to maint).
240 * t4014, t9502 and t0200 tests had various portability issues that
242 (merge 27f6342 jc/maint-test-portability later to maint).
244 * t9020 and t3600 tests had various portability issues.
245 (merge 5a02966 jc/test-portability later to maint).
247 * t9200 runs "cvs init" on a directory that already exists, but a
248 platform can configure this fail for the current user (e.g. you
249 need to be in the cvsadmin group on NetBSD 6.0).
250 (merge 8666df0 jc/test-cvs-no-init-in-existing-dir later to maint).
252 * t9020 and t9810 had a few non-portable shell script construct.
253 (merge 2797914 tb/test-t9020-no-which later to maint).
254 (merge 6f4e505 tb/test-t9810-no-sed-i later to maint).