1 Git v1.7.12 Release Notes
2 =========================
7 UI, Workflows & Features
9 * Git can be told to normalize pathnames it read from readdir(3) and
10 all arguments it got from the command line into precomposed UTF-8
11 (assuming that they come as decomposed UTF-8), in order to work
12 around issues on Mac OS.
14 I think there still are other places that need conversion
15 (e.g. paths that are read from stdin for some commands), but this
16 should be a good first step in the right direction.
18 * Per-user $HOME/.gitconfig file can optionally be stored in
19 $HOME/.config/git/config instead, which is in line with XDG.
21 * The value of core.attributesfile and core.excludesfile default to
22 $HOME/.config/git/attributes and $HOME/.config/git/ignore respectively
23 when these files exist.
25 * Logic to disambiguate abbreviated object names have been taught to
26 take advantage of object types that are expected in the context,
27 e.g. XXXXXX in the "git describe" output v1.2.3-gXXXXXX must be a
28 commit object, not a blob nor a tree. This will help us prolong
29 the lifetime of abbreviated object names.
31 * "git apply" learned to wiggle the base version and perform three-way
32 merge when a patch does not exactly apply to the version you have.
34 * Scripted Porcelain writers now have access to the credential API via
35 the "git credential" plumbing command.
37 * "git help" used to always default to "man" format even on platforms
38 where "man" viewer is not widely available.
40 * "git clone --local $path" started its life as an experiment to
41 optionally use link/copy when cloning a repository on the disk, but
42 we didn't deprecate it after we made the option a no-op to always
43 use the optimization. The command learned "--no-local" option to
44 turn this off, as a more explicit alternative over use of file://
47 * "git fetch" and friends used to say "remote side hung up
48 unexpectedly" when they failed to get response they expect from the
49 other side, but one common reason why they don't get expected
50 response is that the remote repository does not exist or cannot be
51 read. The error message in this case was updated to give better
54 * git native protocol agents learned to show software version over
55 the wire, so that the server log can be examined to see the vintage
56 distribution of clients.
58 * "git help -w $cmd" can show HTML version of documentation for
59 "git-$cmd" by setting help.htmlpath to somewhere other than the
60 default location where the build procedure installs them locally;
61 the variable can even point at a http:// URL.
63 * "git rebase [-i] --root $tip" can now be used to rewrite all the
64 history leading to "$tip" down to the root commit.
66 * "git rebase -i" learned "-x <cmd>" to insert "exec <cmd>" after
67 each commit in the resulting history.
69 * "git status" gives finer classification to various states of paths
70 in conflicted state and offer advice messages in its output.
72 * "git submodule" learned to deal with nested submodule structure
73 where a module is contained within a module whose origin is
74 specified as a relative URL to its superproject's origin.
76 * A rather heavy-ish "git completion" script has been split to create
77 a separate "git prompting" script, to help lazy-autoloading of the
78 completion part while making prompting part always available.
80 * "gitweb" pays attention to various forms of credits that are
81 similar to "Signed-off-by:" lines in the commit objects and
82 highlights them accordingly.
87 * "mediawiki" remote helper (in contrib/) learned to handle file
90 * "git p4" now uses "Jobs:" and "p4 move" when appropriate.
92 * vcs-svn has been updated to clean-up compilation, lift 32-bit
96 Performance, Internal Implementation, etc. (please report possible regressions)
98 * Some tests showed false failures caused by a bug in ecryptofs.
100 * We no longer use AsciiDoc7 syntax in our documentation and favor a
103 * "git am --rebasing" codepath was taught to grab authorship, log
104 message and the patch text directly out of existing commits. This
105 will help rebasing commits that have confusing "diff" output in
108 * "git index-pack" and "git pack-objects" use streaming API to read
109 from the object store to avoid having to hold a large blob object
110 in-core while they are doing their thing.
112 * Code to match paths with exclude patterns learned to avoid calling
113 fnmatch() by comparing fixed leading substring literally when
116 * "git log -n 1 -- rarely-touched-path" was spending unnecessary
117 cycles after showing the first change to find the next one, only to
121 Also contains minor documentation updates and code clean-ups.
127 Unless otherwise noted, all the fixes since v1.7.11 in the maintenance
128 releases are contained in this release (see release notes to them for
131 * "git mergetool" did not support --tool-help option to give the list
132 of supported backends, like "git difftool" does.
133 (merge 109859e jc/mergetool-tool-help later to maint).
135 * "$GIT_DIR/COMMIT_EDITMSG" file that is used to hold the commit log
136 message user edits was not documented.
137 (merge 41f597d jk/maint-commit-document-editmsg later to maint).
139 * "git commit --amend" let the user edit the log message and then died
140 when the human-readable committer name was given insufficiently by
142 (merge f20f387 jk/maint-commit-check-committer-early later to maint).
144 * The advise() function did not use varargs correctly to format
146 (merge 447b99c jk/maint-advise-vaddf later to maint).
148 * "git commit-tree" learned a more natural "-p <parent> <tree>" order
149 of arguments long time ago, but recently forgot it by mistake.
150 (merge 4b7518a kk/maint-commit-tree later to maint).
152 * "git diff --no-ext-diff" did not output anything for a typechange
153 filepair when GIT_EXTERNAL_DIFF is in effect.
154 (merge c12f82a jv/maint-no-ext-diff later to maint).
156 * When "git am" failed, old timers knew to check .git/rebase-apply/patch
157 to see what went wrong, but we never told the users about it.
158 (merge 14bf2d5 pg/maint-1.7.9-am-where-is-patch later to maint).
160 * When "git submodule add" clones a submodule repository, it can get
161 confused where to store the resulting submodule repository in the
162 superproject's .git/ directory when there is a symbolic link in the
163 path to the current directory.
164 (merge 6eafa6d jl/maint-1.7.10-recurse-submodules-with-symlink later to maint).
166 * In 1.7.9 era, we taught "git rebase" about the raw timestamp format
167 but we did not teach the same trick to "filter-branch", which rolled
168 a similar logic on its own.
169 (merge 44b85e89 jc/maint-filter-branch-epoch-date later to maint).