1.7.9

Git v1.7.9 Release Notes ========================

Updates since v1.7.8 --------------------

• gitk updates accumulated since early 2011.

• git-gui updated to 0.16.0.

• git-p4 (in contrib/) updates.

• Git uses gettext to translate its most common interface messages into the user’s language if translations are available and the locale is appropriately set. Distributors can drop new PO files in po/ to add new translations.

• The code to handle username/password for HTTP transactions used in "git push" & "git fetch" learned to talk "credential API" to external programs to cache or store them, to allow integration with platform native keychain mechanisms.

• The input prompts in the terminal use our own getpass() replacement when possible. HTTP transactions used to ask for the username without echoing back what was typed, but with this change you will see it as you type.

• The internals of "revert/cherry-pick" have been tweaked to prepare building more generic "sequencer" on top of the implementation that drives them.

• "git rev-parse FETCH_HEAD" after "git fetch" without specifying what to fetch from the command line will now show the commit that would be merged if the command were "git pull".

• "git add" learned to stream large files directly into a packfile instead of writing them into individual loose object files.

• "git checkout -B <current branch> <elsewhere>" is a more intuitive way to spell "git reset --keep <elsewhere>".

• "git checkout" and "git merge" learned "--no-overwrite-ignore" option to tell Git that untracked and ignored files are not expendable.

• "git commit --amend" learned "--no-edit" option to say that the user is amending the tree being recorded, without updating the commit log message.

• "git commit" and "git reset" re-learned the optimization to prime the cache-tree information in the index, which makes it faster to write a tree object out after the index entries are updated.

• "git commit" detects and rejects an attempt to stuff NUL byte in the commit log message.

• "git commit" learned "-S" to GPG-sign the commit; this can be shown with the "--show-signature" option to "git log".

• fsck and prune are relatively lengthy operations that still go silent while making the end-user wait. They learned to give progress output like other slow operations.

• The set of built-in function-header patterns for various languages knows MATLAB.

• "git log --format=’<format>’" learned new %g[nNeE] specifiers to show information from the reflog entries when walking the reflog (i.e. with "-g").

• "git pull" can be used to fetch and merge an annotated/signed tag, instead of the tip of a topic branch. The GPG signature from the signed tag is recorded in the resulting merge commit for later auditing.

• "git log" learned "--show-signature" option to show the signed tag that was merged that is embedded in the merge commit. It also can show the signature made on the commit with "git commit -S".

• "git branch --edit-description" can be used to add descriptive text to explain what a topic branch is about.

• "git fmt-merge-msg" learned to take the branch description into account when preparing a merge summary that "git merge" records when merging a local branch.

• "git request-pull" has been updated to convey more information useful for integrators to decide if a topic is worth merging and what is pulled is indeed what the requestor asked to pull, including:

• the tip of the branch being requested to be merged;

• the branch description describing what the topic is about;

• the contents of the annotated tag, when requesting to pull a tag.

• "git pull" learned to notice ’pull.rebase’ configuration variable, which serves as a global fallback for setting ’branch.<name>.rebase’ configuration variable per branch.

• "git tag" learned "--cleanup" option to control how the whitespaces and empty lines in tag message are cleaned up.

• "gitweb" learned to show side-by-side diff.

Also contains minor documentation updates and code clean-ups.

Fixes since v1.7.8 ------------------

Unless otherwise noted, all the fixes since v1.7.8 in the maintenance releases are contained in this release (see release notes to them for details).