1 Git v1.8.4 Release Notes
2 ========================
7 Foreign interfaces, subsystems and ports.
9 * Git-gui has been updated to its 0.18.0 version.
11 * MediaWiki remote helper (in contrib/) has been updated to use the
12 credential helper interface from Git.pm.
14 * Update build for Cygwin 1.[57]. Torsten Bögershausen reports that
15 this is fine with Cygwin 1.7 ($gmane/225824) so let's try moving it
18 * The credential helper to talk to keychain on OS X (in contrib/) has
19 been updated to kick in not just when talking http/https but also
22 * Remote transport helper has been updated to report errors and
23 maintain ref hierarchy used to keep track of its own state better.
25 * With "export" remote-helper protocol, (1) a push that tries to
26 update a remote ref whose name is different from the pushing side
27 does not work yet, and (2) the helper may not know how to do
28 --dry-run; these problematic cases are disabled for now.
30 * git-remote-hg/bzr (in contrib/) updates.
32 * git-remote-mw (in contrib/) hints users to check the certificate,
33 when https:// connection failed.
36 UI, Workflows & Features
38 * "git rm" gives a single message followed by list of paths to report
39 multiple paths that cannot be removed.
41 * "git rebase" can be told with ":/look for this string" syntax commits
42 to replay the changes onto and where the work to be replayed begins.
44 * Many tutorials teach users to set "color.ui" to "auto" as the first
45 thing after you set "user.name/email" to introduce yourselves to
46 Git. Now the variable defaults to "auto".
48 * On Cygwin, "cygstart" is now recognised as a possible way to start
49 a web browser (used in "help -w" and "instaweb" among others).
51 ### * "git status" learned status.branch and status.short configuration
52 ### variables to use --branch and --short options by default (override
53 ### with --no-branch and --no-short options from the command line).
55 * "git cmd <name>", when <name> happens to be a 40-hex string,
56 directly uses the 40-hex string as an object name, even if a ref
57 "refs/<some hierarchy>/<name>" exists. This disambiguation order
58 is unlikely to change, but we should warn about the ambiguity just
59 like we warn when more than one refs/ hierachies share the same
62 * "git rebase" learned "--[no-]autostash" option to save local
63 changes instead of refusing to run (to which people's normal
64 response was to stash them and re-run). This introduced a corner
65 case breakage to "git am --abort" but it has been fixed.
67 * Instead of typing four capital letters "HEAD", you can say "@" now,
70 * "check-ignore" (new feature since 1.8.2) has been updated to work
71 more like "check-attr" over bidi-pipes.
73 * "git describe" learned "--first-parent" option to limit its closest
74 tagged commit search to the first-parent chain.
76 * "git merge foo" that might have meant "git merge origin/foo" is
77 diagnosed with a more informative error message.
79 * "git log -L<line>,<range>:<filename>" has been added. This may
80 still have leaks and rough edges, though.
82 * We used the approxidate() parser for "--expire=<timestamp>" options
83 of various commands, but it is better to treat --expire=all and
84 --expire=now a bit more specially than using the current timestamp.
85 "git gc" and "git reflog" have been updated with a new parsing
86 function for expiry dates.
88 * Updates to completion (both bash and zsh) helpers.
90 * The behaviour of the "--chain-reply-to" option of "git send-email"
91 have changed at 1.7.0, and we added a warning/advice message to
92 help users adjust to the new behaviour back then, but we kept it
93 around for too long. The message has finally been removed.
95 * "git fetch origin master" unlike "git fetch origin" or "git fetch"
96 did not update "refs/remotes/origin/master"; this was an early
97 design decision to keep the update of remote tracking branches
98 predictable, but in practice it turns out that people find it more
99 convenient to opportunistically update them whenever we have a
100 chance, and we have been updating them when we run "git push" which
101 already breaks the original "predictability" anyway.
103 * The configuration variable core.checkstat was advertised in the
104 documentation but the code expected core.statinfo instead.
105 For now, we accept both core.checkstat and core.statinfo, but the
106 latter will be removed in the longer term.
109 Performance, Internal Implementation, etc.
111 * Uses of the platform fnmatch(3) function (many places in the code,
112 matching pathspec, .gitignore and .gitattributes to name a few)
113 have been replaced with wildmatch, allowing "foo/**/bar" that would
114 match foo/bar, foo/a/bar, foo/a/b/bar, etc.
116 * Memory ownership and lifetime rules for what for-each-ref feeds to
117 its callbacks have been clarified (in short, "you do not own it, so
118 make a copy if you want to keep it").
120 * The revision traversal logic to improve culling of irrelevant
121 parents while traversing a mergy history has been updated.
123 * Some leaks in unpack-trees (used in merge, cherry-pick and other
124 codepaths) have been plugged.
126 * The codepath to read from marks files in fast-import/export did not
127 have to accept anything but 40-hex representation of the object
128 name. Further, fast-export did not need full in-core object
129 representation to have parsed wen reading from them. These
130 codepaths have been optimized by taking advantage of these access
133 * Object lookup logic, when the object hashtable starts to become
134 crowded, has been optimized.
136 * When TEST_OUTPUT_DIRECTORY setting is used, it was handled somewhat
137 inconsistently between the test framework and t/Makefile, and logic
138 to summarize the results looked at a wrong place.
140 * "git clone" uses a lighter-weight implementation when making sure
141 that the history behind refs are complete.
143 * Many warnings from sparse source checker in compat/ area has been
146 * The code to reading and updating packed-refs file has been updated,
147 correcting corner case bugs.
150 Also contains various documentation updates and code clean-ups.
156 Unless otherwise noted, all the fixes since v1.8.3 in the maintenance
157 track are contained in this release (see release notes to them for
160 * "git apply" parsed patches that add new files, generated by
161 programs other than Git, incorrectly. This is an old breakage in
162 v1.7.11 and will need to be merged down to the maintanance tracks.
163 (merge 212eb96 tr/maint-apply-non-git-patch-parsefix later to maint).
165 * Older cURL wanted piece of memory we call it with to be stable, but
166 we updated the auth material after handing it to a call.
167 (merge a94cf2c bc/http-keep-memory-given-to-curl later to maint).
169 * "git pull" into nothing trashed "local changes" that were in the
170 index, and this avoids it.
171 (merge b4dc085 jk/pull-into-dirty-unborn later to maint).
173 * Many "git submodule" operations do not work on a submodule at a
174 path whose name is not in ASCII.
175 (merge bed9470 fg/submodule-non-ascii-path later to maint).
177 * "cherry-pick" had a small leak in an error codepath.
178 (merge 706728a fc/sequencer-plug-leak later to maint).
180 * Logic used by git-send-email to suppress cc mishandled names like
181 "A U. Thor" <author@example.xz>, where the human readable part
182 needs to be quoted (the user input may not have the double quotes
183 around the name, and comparison was done between quoted and
184 unquoted strings). It also mishandled names that need RFC2047
186 (merge 1495266 mt/send-email-cc-match-fix later to maint).
188 * Call to discard_cache/discard_index (used when we use different
189 contents of the index in-core, in many operations like commit,
190 apply, and merge) used to leak memory that held the array of index
191 entries, which has been plugged.
192 (merge a0fc4db rs/discard-index-discard-array later to maint).
194 * "gitweb" forgot to clear a global variable $search_regexp upon each
195 request, mistakenly carrying over the previous search to a new one
196 when used as a persistent CGI.
197 (merge ca7a5dc cm/gitweb-project-list-persistent-cgi-fix later to maint).
199 * The wildmatch engine did not honor WM_CASEFOLD option correctly.
200 (merge b79c0c3 ar/wildmatch-foldcase later to maint).
202 * "git log -c --follow $path" segfaulted upon hitting the commit that
203 renamed the $path being followed.
204 (merge 46ec510 cb/log-follow-with-combined later to maint).
206 * When a reflog notation is used for implicit "current branch", we
207 did not say which branch and worse said "branch ''".
208 (merge 305ebea rr/die-on-missing-upstream later to maint).
210 * "difftool --dir-diff" did not copy back changes made by the
211 end-user in the diff tool backend to the working tree in some
213 (merge 32eaf1d ks/difftool-dir-diff-copy-fix later to maint).
215 * "git push $there HEAD:branch" did not resolve HEAD early enough, so
216 it was easy to flip it around while push is still going on and push
217 out a branch that the user did not originally intended when the
219 (merge 0f075b2 rr/push-head later to maint).
221 * The bash prompt code (in contrib/) displayed the name of the branch
222 being rebased when "rebase -i/-m/-p" modes are in use, but not the
223 plain vanilla "rebase".
224 (merge 1306321 fc/show-branch-in-rebase-am later to maint).
226 * Handling of negative exclude pattern for directories "!dir" was
227 broken in the update to v1.8.3.
228 (merge c3c327d kb/status-ignored-optim-2 later to maint).
230 * zsh prompt script that borrowed from bash prompt script did not
231 work due to slight differences in array variable notation between
233 (merge d0583da tg/maint-zsh-svn-remote-prompt later to maint).
235 * An entry for "file://" scheme in the enumeration of URL types Git
236 can take in the HTML documentation was made into a clickable link
238 (merge 4c32e36 nd/urls-doc-no-file-hyperlink-fix later to maint).
240 * "git push --[no-]verify" was not documented.
241 (merge 90d32d1 tr/push-no-verify-doc later to maint).
243 * Stop installing the git-remote-testpy script that is only used for
245 (merge 416fda6 fc/makefile later to maint).
247 * "git commit --allow-empty-message -m ''" should not start an
249 (merge 2520677 rs/commit-m-no-edit later to maint).
251 * "git merge @{-1}~22" was rewritten to "git merge frotz@{1}~22"
252 incorrectly when your previous branch was "frotz" (it should be
253 rewritten to "git merge frotz~22" instead).
254 (merge 84cf246 jc/strbuf-branchname-fix later to maint).
256 * "git diff -c -p" was not showing a deleted line from a hunk when
257 another hunk immediately begins where the earlier one ends.
258 (merge aac3857 mk/combine-diff-context-horizon-fix later to maint).
260 * "git log --ancestry-path A...B" did not work as expected, as it did
261 not pay attention to the fact that the merge base between A and B
262 was the bottom of the range being specified.
263 (merge a765499 kb/ancestry-path-threedots later to maint).
265 * Mac OS X does not like to write(2) more than INT_MAX number of
266 bytes; work it around by chopping write(2) into smaller pieces.
267 (merge 6c642a8 fc/macos-x-clipped-write later to maint).
269 * Newer MacOS X encourages the programs to compile and link with
270 their CommonCrypto, not with OpenSSL.
271 (merge be4c828 da/darwin later to maint).
273 * "git clone foo/bar:baz" cannot be a request to clone from a remote
274 over git-over-ssh specified in the scp style. This case is now
275 detected and clones from a local repository at "foo/bar:baz".
276 (merge 6000334 nd/clone-local-with-colon later to maint).
278 * When $HOME is misconfigured to point at an unreadable directory, we
279 used to complain and die. Loosen the check.
280 (merge 4698c8f jn/config-ignore-inaccessible later to maint).
282 * "git subtree" (in contrib/) had one codepath with loose error
283 checks to lose data at the remote side.
284 (merge 3212d56 jk/subtree-do-not-push-if-split-fails later to maint).
286 * "git fetch" into a shallow repository from a repository that does
287 not know about the shallow boundary commits (e.g. a different fork
288 from the repository the current shallow repository was cloned from)
289 did not work correctly.
290 (merge 71d5f93 mh/fetch-into-shallow later to maint).
292 * "git checkout foo" DWIMs the intended "upstream" and turns it into
293 "git checkout -t -b foo remotes/origin/foo". This codepath has been
294 updated to correctly take existing remote definitions into account.
295 (merge 229177a jh/checkout-auto-tracking later to maint).