1.6.5

GIT v1.6.5 Release Notes ========================

In git 1.7.0, which was planned to be the release after 1.6.5, "git push" into a branch that is currently checked out will be refused by default.

You can choose what should happen upon such a push by setting the configuration variable receive.denyCurrentBranch in the receiving repository.

Also, "git push $there :$killed" to delete the branch $killed in a remote repository $there, when $killed branch is the current branch pointed at by its HEAD, will be refused by default.

You can choose what should happen upon such a push by setting the configuration variable receive.denyDeleteCurrent in the receiving repository.

To ease the transition plan, the receiving repository of such a push running this release will issue a big warning when the configuration variable is missing. Please refer to:

https://archive.kernel.org/oldwiki/git.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/GitFaq.html#non-bare
https://lore.kernel.org/git/7vbptlsuyv.fsf@gitster.siamese.dyndns.org/

for more details on the reason why this change is needed and the transition plan.

Updates since v1.6.4 --------------------

(subsystems)

• various updates to gitk, git-svn and gitweb.

(portability)

• more improvements on mingw port.

• mingw will also give FRSX as the default value for the LESS environment variable when the user does not have one.

• initial support to compile git on Windows with MSVC.

(performance)

• On major platforms, the system can be compiled to use with Linus’s block-sha1 implementation of the SHA-1 hash algorithm, which outperforms the default fallback implementation we borrowed from Mozilla.

• Unnecessary inefficiency in deepening of a shallow repository has been removed.

• "git clone" does not grab objects that it does not need (i.e. referenced only from refs outside refs/heads and refs/tags hierarchy) anymore.

• The "git" main binary used to link with libcurl, which then dragged in a large number of external libraries. When using basic plumbing commands in scripts, this unnecessarily slowed things down. We now implement http/https/ftp transfer as a separate executable as we used to.

• "git clone" run locally hardlinks or copies the files in .git/ to newly created repository. It used to give new mtime to copied files, but this delayed garbage collection to trigger unnecessarily in the cloned repository. We now preserve mtime for these files to avoid this issue.

(usability, bells and whistles)

• Human writable date format to various options, e.g. --since=yesterday, master@{2000.09.17}, are taught to infer some omitted input properly.

• A few programs gave verbose "advice" messages to help uninitiated people when issuing error messages. An infrastructure to allow users to squelch them has been introduced, and a few such messages can be silenced now.

• refs/replace/ hierarchy is designed to be usable as a replacement of the "grafts" mechanism, with the added advantage that it can be transferred across repositories.

• "git am" learned to optionally ignore whitespace differences.

• "git am" handles input e-mail files that has CRLF line endings sensibly.

• "git am" learned "--scissors" option to allow you to discard early part of an incoming e-mail.

• "git archive -o output.zip" works without being told what format to use with an explicit "--format=zip".option.

• "git checkout", "git reset" and "git stash" learned to pick and choose to use selected changes you made, similar to "git add -p".

• "git clone" learned a "-b" option to pick a HEAD to check out different from the remote’s default branch.

• "git clone" learned --recursive option.

• "git clone" from a local repository on a different filesystem used to copy individual object files without preserving the old timestamp, giving them extra lifetime in the new repository until they gc’ed.

• "git commit --dry-run $args" is a new recommended way to ask "what would happen if I try to commit with these arguments."

• "git commit --dry-run" and "git status" shows conflicted paths in a separate section to make them easier to spot during a merge.

• "git cvsimport" now supports password-protected pserver access even when the password is not taken from ~/.cvspass file.

• "git fast-export" learned --no-data option that can be useful when reordering commits and trees without touching the contents of blobs.

• "git fast-import" has a pair of new front-end in contrib/ area.

• "git init" learned to mkdir/chdir into a directory when given an extra argument (i.e. "git init this").

• "git instaweb" optionally can use mongoose as the web server.

• "git log --decorate" can optionally be told with --decorate=full to give the reference name in full.

• "git merge" issued an unnecessarily scary message when it detected that the merge may have to touch the path that the user has local uncommitted changes to. The message has been reworded to make it clear that the command aborted, without doing any harm.

• "git push" can be told to be --quiet.

• "git push" pays attention to url.$base.pushInsteadOf and uses a URL that is derived from the URL used for fetching.

• informational output from "git reset" that lists the locally modified paths is made consistent with that of "git checkout $another_branch".

• "git submodule" learned to give submodule name to scripts run with "foreach" subcommand.

• various subcommands to "git submodule" learned --recursive option.

• "git submodule summary" learned --files option to compare the work tree vs the commit bound at submodule path, instead of comparing the index.

• "git upload-pack", which is the server side support for "git clone" and "git fetch", can call a new post-upload-pack hook for statistics purposes.

(developers)

• With GIT_TEST_OPTS="--root=/p/a/t/h", tests can be run outside the source directory; using tmpfs may give faster turnaround.

• With NO_PERL_MAKEMAKER set, DESTDIR= is now honoured, so you can build for one location, and install into another location to tar it up.

Fixes since v1.6.4 ------------------

All of the fixes in v1.6.4.X maintenance series are included in this release, unless otherwise noted.