1.8.1

Git v1.8.1 Release Notes ========================

Backward compatibility notes ----------------------------

In the next major release (not this one), we will change the behavior of the "git push" command.

When "git push [$there]" does not say what to push, we have used the traditional "matching" semantics so far (all your branches were sent to the remote as long as there already are branches of the same name over there). We will use the "simple" semantics that pushes the current branch to the branch with the same name, only when the current branch is set to integrate with that remote branch. There is a user preference configuration variable "push.default" to change this, and "git push" will warn about the upcoming change until you set this variable in this release.

"git branch --set-upstream" is deprecated and may be removed in a relatively distant future. "git branch [-u|--set-upstream-to]" has been introduced with a saner order of arguments to replace it.

Updates since v1.8.0 --------------------

UI, Workflows & Features

• Command-line completion scripts for tcsh and zsh have been added.

• "git-prompt" scriptlet (in contrib/completion) can be told to paint pieces of the hints in the prompt string in colors.

• Some documentation pages that used to ship only in the plain text format are now formatted in HTML as well.

• We used to have a workaround for a bug in ancient "less" that causes it to exit without any output when the terminal is resized. The bug has been fixed in "less" version 406 (June 2007), and the workaround has been removed in this release.

• When "git checkout" checks out a branch, it tells the user how far behind (or ahead) the new branch is relative to the remote tracking branch it builds upon. The message now also advises how to sync them up by pushing or pulling. This can be disabled with the advice.statusHints configuration variable.

• "git config --get" used to diagnose presence of multiple definitions of the same variable in the same configuration file as an error, but it now applies the "last one wins" rule used by the internal configuration logic. Strictly speaking, this may be an API regression but it is expected that nobody will notice it in practice.

• A new configuration variable "diff.context" can be used to give the default number of context lines in the patch output, to override the hardcoded default of 3 lines.

• "git format-patch" learned the "--notes=<ref>" option to give notes for the commit after the three-dash lines in its output.

• "git log -p -S<string>" now looks for the <string> after applying the textconv filter (if defined); earlier it inspected the contents of the blobs without filtering.

• "git log --grep=<pcre>" learned to honor the "grep.patterntype" configuration set to "perl".

• "git replace -d <object>" now interprets <object> as an extended SHA-1 (e.g. HEAD~4 is allowed), instead of only accepting full hex object name.

• "git rm $submodule" used to punt on removing a submodule working tree to avoid losing the repository embedded in it. Because recent git uses a mechanism to separate the submodule repository from the submodule working tree, "git rm" learned to detect this case and removes the submodule working tree when it is safe to do so.

• "git send-email" used to prompt for the sender address, even when the committer identity is well specified (e.g. via user.name and user.email configuration variables). The command no longer gives this prompt when not necessary.

• "git send-email" did not allow non-address garbage strings to appear after addresses on Cc: lines in the patch files (and when told to pick them up to find more recipients), e.g.

Cc: Stable Kernel <stable@k.org> # for v3.2 and up

The command now strips " # for v3.2 and up" part before adding the
remainder of this line to the list of recipients.

• "git submodule add" learned to add a new submodule at the same path as the path where an unrelated submodule was bound to in an existing revision via the "--name" option.

• "git submodule sync" learned the "--recursive" option.

• "diff.submodule" configuration variable can be used to give custom default value to the "git diff --submodule" option.

• "git symbolic-ref" learned the "-d $symref" option to delete the named symbolic ref, which is more intuitive way to spell it than "update-ref -d --no-deref $symref".

Foreign Interface

• "git cvsimport" can be told to record timezones (other than GMT) per-author via its author info file.

• The remote helper interface to interact with subversion repositories (one of the GSoC 2012 projects) has been merged.

• A new remote-helper interface for Mercurial has been added to contrib/remote-helpers.

• The documentation for git(1) was pointing at a page at an external site for the list of authors that no longer existed. The link has been updated to point at an alternative site.

Performance, Internal Implementation, etc.

• Compilation on Cygwin with newer header files are supported now.

• A couple of low-level implementation updates on MinGW.

• The logic to generate the initial advertisement from "upload-pack" (i.e. what is invoked by "git fetch" on the other side of the connection) to list what refs are available in the repository has been optimized.

• The logic to find set of attributes that match a given path has been optimized.

• Use preloadindex in "git diff-index" and "git update-index", which has a nice speedup on systems with slow stat calls (and even on Linux).

Also contains minor documentation updates and code clean-ups.

Fixes since v1.8.0 ------------------

Unless otherwise noted, all the fixes since v1.8.0 in the maintenance track are contained in this release (see release notes to them for details).

• The configuration parser had an unnecessary hardcoded limit on variable names that was not checked consistently.

• The "say" function in the test scaffolding incorrectly allowed "echo" to interpret "a" as if it were a C-string asking for a BEL output.

• "git mergetool" feeds /dev/null as a common ancestor when dealing with an add/add conflict, but p4merge backend cannot handle it. Work it around by passing a temporary empty file.

• "git log -F -E --grep=’<ere>’" failed to use the given <ere> pattern as extended regular expression, and instead looked for the string literally.

• "git grep -e pattern <tree>" asked the attribute system to read "<tree>:.gitattributes" file in the working tree, which was nonsense.

• A symbolic ref refs/heads/SYM was not correctly removed with "git branch -d SYM"; the command removed the ref pointed by SYM instead.

• Update "remote tracking branch" in the documentation to "remote-tracking branch".

• "git pull --rebase" run while the HEAD is detached tried to find the upstream branch of the detached HEAD (which by definition does not exist) and emitted unnecessary error messages.

• The refs/replace hierarchy was not mentioned in the repository-layout docs.

• Various rfc2047 quoting issues around a non-ASCII name on the From: line in the output from format-patch have been corrected.

• Sometimes curl_multi_timeout() function suggested a wrong timeout value when there is no file descriptor to wait on and the http transport ended up sleeping for minutes in select(2) system call. A workaround has been added for this.

• For a fetch refspec (or the result of applying wildcard on one), we always want the RHS to map to something inside "refs/" hierarchy, but the logic to check it was not exactly right. (merge 5c08c1f jc/maint-fetch-tighten-refname-check later to maint).

• "git diff -G<pattern>" did not honor textconv filter when looking for changes.

• Some HTTP servers ask for auth only during the actual packing phase (not in ls-remote phase); this is not really a recommended configuration, but the clients used to fail to authenticate with such servers. (merge 2e736fd jk/maint-http-half-auth-fetch later to maint).

• "git p4" used to try expanding malformed "$keyword$" that spans across multiple lines.

• Syntax highlighting in "gitweb" was not quite working.

• RSS feed from "gitweb" had a xss hole in its title output.

• "git config --path $key" segfaulted on "[section] key" (a boolean "true" spelled without "=", not "[section] key = true").

• "git checkout -b foo" while on an unborn branch did not say "Switched to a new branch ’foo’" like other cases.

• Various codepaths have workaround for a common misconfiguration to spell "UTF-8" as "utf8", but it was not used uniformly. Most notably, mailinfo (which is used by "git am") lacked this support.

• We failed to mention a file without any content change but whose permission bit was modified, or (worse yet) a new file without any content in the "git diff --stat" output.

• When "--stat-count" hides a diffstat for binary contents, the total number of added and removed lines at the bottom was computed incorrectly.

• When "--stat-count" hides a diffstat for unmerged paths, the total number of affected files at the bottom of the "diff --stat" output was computed incorrectly.

• "diff --shortstat" miscounted the total number of affected files when there were unmerged paths.

• "update-ref -d --deref SYM" to delete a ref through a symbolic ref that points to it did not remove it correctly.