1.7.6

Git v1.7.6 Release Notes ========================

Updates since v1.7.5 --------------------

• Various git-svn updates.

• Updates the way content tags are handled in gitweb. Also adds a UI to choose common timezone for displaying the dates.

• Similar to branch names, tagnames that begin with "-" are now disallowed.

• Clean-up of the C part of i18n (but not l10n---please wait) continues.

• The scripting part of the codebase is getting prepared for i18n/l10n.

• Pushing and pulling from a repository with large number of refs that point to identical commits are optimized by not listing the same commit during the common ancestor negotiation exchange with the other side.

• Adding a file larger than core.bigfilethreshold (defaults to 1/2 Gig) using "git add" will send the contents straight to a packfile without having to hold it and its compressed representation both at the same time in memory.

• Processes spawned by "[alias] <name> = !process" in the configuration can inspect GIT_PREFIX environment variable to learn where in the working tree the original command was invoked.

• A magic pathspec ":/" tells a command that limits its operation to the current directory when ran from a subdirectory to work on the entire working tree. In general, ":/path/to/file" would be relative to the root of the working tree hierarchy.

After "git reset --hard; edit Makefile; cd t/", "git add -u" would
be a no-op, but "git add -u :/" would add the updated contents of
the Makefile at the top level. If you want to name a path in the
current subdirectory whose unusual name begins with ":/", you can
name it by "./:/that/path" or by "\:/that/path".

• "git blame" learned "--abbrev[=<n>]" option to control the minimum number of hexdigits shown for commit object names.

• "git blame" learned "--line-porcelain" that is less efficient but is easier to parse.

• Aborting "git commit --interactive" discards updates to the index made during the interactive session.

• "git commit" learned a "--patch" option to directly jump to the per-hunk selection UI of the interactive mode.

• "git diff" and its family of commands learned --dirstat=0 to show directories that contribute less than 0.1% of changes.

• "git diff" and its family of commands learned --dirstat=lines mode to assess damage to the directory based on number of lines in the patch output, not based on the similarity numbers.

• "git format-patch" learned "--quiet" option to suppress the output of the names of generated files.

• "git format-patch" quotes people’s names when it has RFC822 special characters in it, e.g. "Junio C. Hamano" <jch@example.com>. Earlier it was up to the user to do this when using its output.

• "git format-patch" can take an empty --subject-prefix now.

• "git grep" learned the "-P" option to take pcre regular expressions.

• "git log" and friends learned a new "--notes" option to replace the "--show-notes" option. Unlike "--show-notes", "--notes=<ref>" does not imply showing the default notes.

• They also learned a log.abbrevCommit configuration variable to augment the --abbrev-commit command line option.

• "git ls-remote" learned "--exit-code" option to consider it a different kind of error when no remote ref to be shown.

• "git merge" learned "-" as a short-hand for "the previous branch", just like the way "git checkout -" works.

• "git merge" uses "merge.ff" configuration variable to decide to always create a merge commit (i.e. --no-ff, aka merge.ff=no), refuse to create a merge commit (i.e. --ff-only, aka merge.ff=only). Setting merge.ff=yes (or not setting it at all) restores the default behaviour of allowing fast-forward to happen when possible.

• p4-import (from contrib) learned a new option --preserve-user.

• "git read-tree -m" learned "--dry-run" option that reports if a merge would fail without touching the index nor the working tree.

• "git rebase" that does not specify on top of which branch to rebase the current branch now uses @{upstream} of the current branch.

• "git rebase" finished either normally or with --abort did not update the reflog for HEAD to record the event to come back to where it started from.

• "git remote add -t only-this-branch --mirror=fetch" is now allowed. Earlier a fetch-mode mirror meant mirror everything, but now it only means refs are not renamed.

• "git rev-list --count" used with "--cherry-mark" counts the cherry-picked commits separately, producing more a useful output.

• "git submodule update" learned "--force" option to get rid of local changes in submodules and replace them with the up-to-date version.

• "git status" and friends ignore .gitmodules file while the file is still in a conflicted state during a merge, to avoid using information that is not final and possibly corrupt with conflict markers.

Also contains various documentation updates and minor miscellaneous changes.

Fixes since v1.7.5 ------------------

Unless otherwise noted, all the fixes in 1.7.5.X maintenance track are included in this release.

• "git config" used to choke with an insanely long line. (merge ef/maint-strbuf-init later)

• "git diff --quiet" did not work well with --diff-filter. (merge jk/diff-not-so-quick later)

• "git status -z" did not default to --porcelain output format. (merge bc/maint-status-z-to-use-porcelain later)