1 GIT v1.5.3 Release Notes
2 ========================
7 * The commit walkers other than http are officially deprecated,
8 but still supported for now.
10 * The submodule support has Porcelain layer.
12 Note that the current submodule support is minimal and this is
13 deliberately so. A design decision we made is that operations
14 at the supermodule level do not recurse into submodules by
15 default. The expectation is that later we would add a
16 mechanism to tell git which submodules the user is interested
17 in, and this information might be used to determine the
18 recursive behaviour of certain commands (e.g. "git checkout"
19 and "git diff"), but currently we haven't agreed on what that
20 mechanism should look like. Therefore, if you use submodules,
21 you would probably need "git submodule update" on the
22 submodules you care about after running a "git checkout" at
23 the supermodule level.
25 * There are a handful pack-objects changes to help you cope better
26 with repositories with pathologically large blobs in them.
28 * For people who need to import from Perforce, a front-end for
29 fast-import is in contrib/fast-import/.
31 * Comes with git-gui 0.8.2.
33 * Comes with updated gitk.
35 * New commands and options.
37 - "git log --date=<format>" can use more formats: iso8601, rfc2822.
39 - The hunk header output from "git diff" family can be customized
40 with the attributes mechanism. See gitattributes(5) for details.
42 - "git stash" allows you to quickly save away your work in
43 progress and replay it later on an updated state.
45 - "git rebase" learned an "interactive" mode that let you
46 pick and reorder which commits to rebuild.
48 - "git fsck" can save its findings in $GIT_DIR/lost-found, without a
49 separate invocation of "git lost-found" command. The blobs stored by
50 lost-found are stored in plain format to allow you to grep in them.
52 - $GIT_WORK_TREE environment variable can be used together with
53 $GIT_DIR to work in a subdirectory of a working tree that is
54 not located at "$GIT_DIR/..".
56 - Giving "--file=<file>" option to "git config" is the same as
57 running the command with GIT_CONFIG=<file> environment.
59 - "git log" learned a new option "--follow", to follow
60 renaming history of a single file.
62 - "git filter-branch" lets you rewrite the revision history of
63 specified branches. You can specify a number of filters to
64 modify the commits, files and trees.
66 - "git cvsserver" learned new options (--base-path, --export-all,
67 --strict-paths) inspired by "git daemon".
69 - "git daemon --base-path-relaxed" can help migrating a repository URL
70 that did not use to use --base-path to use --base-path.
72 - "git commit" can use "-t templatefile" option and commit.template
73 configuration variable to prime the commit message given to you in the
76 - "git submodule" command helps you manage the projects from
77 the superproject that contain them.
79 - In addition to core.compression configuration option,
80 core.loosecompression and pack.compression options can
81 independently tweak zlib compression levels used for loose
84 - "git ls-tree -l" shows size of blobs pointed at by the
85 tree entries, similar to "/bin/ls -l".
87 - "git rev-list" learned --regexp-ignore-case and
88 --extended-regexp options to tweak its matching logic used
91 - "git describe --contains" is a handier way to call more
92 obscure command "git name-rev --tags".
94 - "git gc --aggressive" tells the command to spend more cycles
95 to optimize the repository harder.
97 - "git repack" learned a "window-memory" limit which
98 dynamically reduces the window size to stay within the
99 specified memory usage.
101 - "git repack" can be told to split resulting packs to avoid
102 exceeding limit specified with "--max-pack-size".
104 - "git fsck" gained --verbose option. This is really really
105 verbose but it might help you identify exact commit that is
106 corrupt in your repository.
108 - "git format-patch" learned --numbered-files option. This
109 may be useful for MH users.
111 - "git format-patch" learned format.subjectprefix configuration
112 variable, which serves the same purpose as "--subject-prefix"
115 - "git tag -n -l" shows tag annotations while listing tags.
117 - "git cvsimport" can optionally use the separate-remote layout.
119 - "git blame" can be told to see through commits that change
120 whitespaces and indentation levels with "-w" option.
122 - "git send-email" can be told not to thread the messages when
123 sending out more than one patches.
125 - "git config" learned NUL terminated output format via -z to
128 - "git add" learned "--refresh <paths>..." option to selectively refresh
129 the cached stat information.
131 - "git init -q" makes the command quieter.
133 - "git -p command" now has a cousin of opposite sex, "git --no-pager
136 * Updated behavior of existing commands.
138 - "gitweb" can offer multiple snapshot formats.
140 ***NOTE*** Unfortunately, this changes the format of the
141 $feature{snapshot}{default} entry in the per-site
142 configuration file 'gitweb_config.perl'. It used to be a
143 three-element tuple that describe a single format; with the
144 new configuration item format, you only have to say the name
145 of the format ('tgz', 'tbz2' or 'zip'). Please update the
146 your configuration file accordingly.
148 - "git clone" uses -l (hardlink files under .git) by default when
151 - "git bundle create" can now create a bundle without negative refs,
152 i.e. "everything since the beginning up to certain points".
154 - "git diff" (but not the plumbing level "git diff-tree") now
155 recursively descends into trees by default.
157 - "git diff" does not show differences that come only from
158 stat-dirtiness in the form of "diff --git" header anymore. When
159 generating a textual diff, it shows a warning message at the end.
161 - The editor to use with many interactive commands can be
162 overridden with GIT_EDITOR environment variable, or if it
163 does not exist, with core.editor configuration variable. As
164 before, if you have neither, environment variables VISUAL
165 and EDITOR are consulted in this order, and then finally we
168 - "git rm --cached" does not complain when removing a newly
169 added file from the index anymore.
171 - Options to "git log" to affect how --grep/--author options look for
172 given strings now have shorter abbreviations. -i is for ignore case,
173 and -E is for extended regexp.
175 - "git log" learned --log-size to show the number of bytes in
176 the log message part of the output to help qgit.
178 - "git log --name-status" does not require you to give "-r" anymore.
179 As a general rule, Porcelain commands should recurse when showing
182 - "git format-patch --root A" can be used to format everything
183 since the beginning up to A. This was supported with
184 "git format-patch --root A A" for a long time, but was not
187 - "git svn dcommit" retains local merge information.
189 - "git svnimport" allows an empty string to be specified as the
190 trunk/ directory. This is necessary to suck data from a SVN
191 repository that doe not have trunk/ branches/ and tags/ organization
194 - "git config" to set values also honors type flags like --bool
197 - core.quotepath configuration can be used to make textual git
198 output to emit most of the characters in the path literally.
200 - "git mergetool" chooses its backend more wisely, taking
201 notice of its environment such as use of X, Gnome/KDE, etc.
203 - "gitweb" shows merge commits a lot nicer than before. The
204 default view uses more compact --cc format, while the UI
205 allows to choose normal diff with any parent.
207 - snapshot files "gitweb" creates from a repository at
208 $path/$project/.git are more useful. We use $project part
209 in the filename, which we used to discard.
211 - "git cvsimport" creates lightweight tags; there is no
212 interesting information we can record in an annotated tag,
213 and the handcrafted ones the old code created was not
214 properly formed anyway.
216 - "git push" pretends that you immediately fetched back from
217 the remote by updating corresponding remote tracking
218 branches if you have any.
220 - The diffstat given after a merge (or a pull) honors the
221 color.diff configuration.
223 - "git commit --amend" is now compatible with various message source
224 options such as -m/-C/-c/-F.
226 - "git apply --whitespace=strip" removes blank lines added at
229 - "git fetch" over git native protocols with "-v" option shows
230 connection status, and the IP address of the other end, to
231 help diagnosing problems.
233 - We used to have core.legacyheaders configuration, when
234 set to false, allowed git to write loose objects in a format
235 that mimicks the format used by objects stored in packs. It
236 turns out that this was not so useful. Although we will
237 continue to read objects written in that format, we do not
238 honor that configuration anymore and create loose objects in
239 the legacy/traditional format.
241 - "--find-copies-harder" option to diff family can now be
242 spelled as "-C -C" for brevity.
244 - "git mailsplit" (hence "git am") can read from Maildir
247 - "git cvsserver" does not barf upon seeing "cvs login"
250 - "pack-objects" honors "delta" attribute set in
251 .gitattributes. It does not attempt to deltify blobs that
252 come from paths with delta attribute set to false.
254 - "new-workdir" script (in contrib) can now be used with a
257 - "git mergetool" learned to use gvimdiff.
259 - "gitview" (in contrib) has a better blame interface.
261 - "git log" and friends did not handle a commit log message
262 that is larger than 16kB; they do now.
264 - "--pretty=oneline" output format for "git log" and friends
265 deals with "malformed" commit log messages that have more
266 than one lines in the first paragraph better. We used to
267 show the first line, cutting the title at mid-sentence; we
268 concatenate them into a single line and treat the result as
271 - "git p4import" has been demoted to contrib status. For
272 a superior option, checkout the "git p4" front end to
273 "git fast-import" (also in contrib). The man page and p4
274 rpm have been removed as well.
276 - "git mailinfo" (hence "am") now tries to see if the message
277 is in utf-8 first, instead of assuming iso-8859-1, if
278 incoming e-mail does not say what encoding it is in.
282 - old-style function definitions (most notably, a function
283 without parameter defined with "func()", not "func(void)")
284 have been eradicated.
286 - "git tag" and "git verify-tag" have been rewritten in C.
290 - "git pack-objects" avoids re-deltification cost by caching
291 small enough delta results it creates while looking for the
292 best delta candidates.
294 - "git pack-objects" learned a new heuristcs to prefer delta
295 that is shallower in depth over the smallest delta
296 possible. This improves both overall packfile access
297 performance and packfile density.
299 - diff-delta code that is used for packing has been improved
300 to work better on big files.
302 - when there are more than one pack files in the repository,
303 the runtime used to try finding an object always from the
304 newest packfile; it now tries the same packfile as we found
305 the object requested the last time, which exploits the
306 locality of references.
308 - verifying pack contents done by "git fsck --full" got boost
309 by carefully choosing the order to verify objects in them.
311 - "git read-tree -m" to read into an already populated index
312 has been optimized vastly. The effect of this can be seen
313 when switching branches that have differences in only a
316 - "git add paths..." and "git commit paths..." has also been
322 All of the fixes in v1.5.2 maintenance series are included in
323 this release, unless otherwise noted.
327 - "gitweb" had trouble handling non UTF-8 text with older
328 Encode.pm Perl module.
330 - "git-write-tree" had a bad interaction with racy-git avoidance and
331 gitattributes mechanisms.
333 - "git --bare command" overrode existing GIT_DIR setting and always
334 made it treat the current working directory as GIT_DIR.
336 - "git ls-files --error-unmatch" does not complain if you give the
337 same path pattern twice by mistake.
339 - "git init" autodetected core.filemode but not core.symlinks, which
340 made a new directory created automatically by "git clone" cumbersome
341 to use on filesystems that require these configurations to be set.
343 - "git log" family of commands behaved differently when run as "git
344 log" (no pathspec) and as "git log --" (again, no pathspec). This
345 inconsistency was introduced somewhere in v1.3.0 series but now has
350 O=v1.5.3-rc7-15-ga65f200
351 echo O=`git describe refs/heads/master`
352 git shortlog --no-merges $O..refs/heads/master ^refs/heads/maint