1.7.5

Git v1.7.5 Release Notes ========================

Updates since v1.7.4 --------------------

• Various MinGW portability fixes.

• Various git-p4 enhancements (in contrib).

• Various vcs-svn, git-svn and gitk enhancements and fixes.

• Various git-gui updates (0.14.0).

• Update to more modern HP-UX port.

• The codebase is getting prepared for i18n/l10n; no translated strings nor translation mechanism in the code yet, but the strings are being marked for l10n.

• The bash completion script can now complete symmetric difference for "git diff" command, e.g. "git diff …bra<TAB>".

• The default minimum length of abbreviated and unique object names can now be configured by setting the core.abbrev configuration variable.

• "git apply -v" reports offset lines when the patch does not apply at the exact location recorded in the diff output.

• "git config" used to be also known as "git repo-config", but the old name is now officially deprecated.

• "git checkout --detach <commit>" is a more user friendly synonym for "git checkout <commit>^0".

• "git checkout" performed on detached HEAD gives a warning and advice when the commit being left behind will become unreachable from any branch or tag.

• "git cherry-pick" and "git revert" can be told to use a custom merge strategy, similar to "git rebase".

• "git cherry-pick" remembers which commit failed to apply when it is stopped by conflicts, making it unnecessary to use "commit -c $commit" to conclude it.

• "git cvsimport" bails out immediately when the cvs server cannot be reached, without spewing unnecessary error messages that complain about the server response it never got.

• "git fetch" vs "git upload-pack" transfer learned ’no-done’ protocol extension to save one round-trip after the content negotiation is done. This saves one HTTP RPC, reducing the overall latency for a trivial fetch.

• "git fetch" can be told to recursively fetch submodules on-demand.

• "git grep -f <filename>" learned to treat "-" as "read from the standard input stream".

• "git grep --no-index" did not honor pathspecs correctly, returning paths outside the specified area.

• "git init" learned the --separate-git-dir option to allow the git directory for a new repository created elsewhere and linked via the gitdir mechanism. This is primarily to help submodule support later to switch between a branch of superproject that has the submodule and another that does not.

• "git log" type commands now understand globbing pathspecs. You can say "git log — ’*.txt’" for example.

• "git log" family of commands learned --cherry and --cherry-mark options that can be used to view two diverged branches while omitting or highlighting equivalent changes that appear on both sides of a symmetric difference (e.g. "log --cherry A…B").

• A lazy "git merge" that didn’t say what to merge used to be an error. When run on a branch that has an upstream defined, however, the command now merges from the configured upstream.

• "git mergetool" learned how to drive "beyond compare 3" as well.

• "git rerere forget" without pathspec used to forget all the saved conflicts that relate to the current merge; it now requires you to give it pathspecs.

• "git rev-list --objects $revs — $pathspec" now limits the objects listed in its output properly with the pathspec, in preparation for narrow clones.

• "git push" with no parameters gives better advice messages when "tracking" is used as the push.default semantics or there is no remote configured yet.

• A possible value to the "push.default" configuration variable, ’tracking’, gained a synonym that more naturally describes what it does, ’upstream’.

• "git rerere" learned a new subcommand "remaining" that is similar to "status" and lists the paths that had conflicts which are known to rerere, but excludes the paths that have already been marked as resolved in the index from its output. "git mergetool" has been updated to use this facility.

Also contains various documentation updates.

Fixes since v1.7.4 ------------------

All of the fixes in the v1.7.4.X maintenance series are included in this release, unless otherwise noted.

• "git fetch" from a client that is mostly following the remote needlessly told all of its refs to the server for both sides to compute the set of objects that need to be transferred efficiently, instead of stopping when the server heard enough. In a project with many tags, this turns out to be extremely wasteful, especially over the smart HTTP transport (sp/maint-{upload,fetch}-pack-stop-early~1).

• "git fetch" run from a repository that uses the same repository as its alternate object store as the repository it is fetching from did not tell the server that it already has access to objects reachable from the refs in their common alternate object store, causing it to fetch unnecessary objects (jc/maint-fetch-alt).

• "git remote add --mirror" created a configuration that is suitable for doing both a mirror fetch and a mirror push at the same time, which made little sense. We now warn and require the command line to specify either --mirror=fetch or --mirror=push.