1.8.2.txt

Git v1.8.2 Release Notes
========================

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

In the upcoming major release (tentatively called 1.8.2), 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.

"git push $there tag v1.2.3" used to allow replacing a tag v1.2.3
that already exists in the repository $there, if the rewritten tag
you are pushing points at a commit that is a decendant of a commit
that the old tag v1.2.3 points at.  This was found to be error prone
and starting with this release, any attempt to update an existing
ref under refs/tags/ hierarchy will fail, without "--force".


Updates since v1.8.1
--------------------

UI, Workflows & Features

 * Initial ports to QNX and z/OS UNIX System Services have started.

 * Output from the tests is coloured using "green is okay, yellow is
   questionable, red is bad and blue is informative" scheme.

 * In bare repositories, "git shortlog" and other commands now read
   mailmap files from the tip of the history, to help running these
   tools in server settings.

 * Color specifiers, e.g. "%C(blue)Hello%C(reset)", used in the
   "--format=" option of "git log" and friends can be disabled when
   the output is not sent to a terminal by prefixing them with
   "auto,", e.g. "%C(auto,blue)Hello%C(auto,reset)".

 * Scripts can ask Git that wildcard patterns in pathspecs they give do
   not have any significance, i.e. take them as literal strings.

 * The patterns in .gitignore and .gitattributes files can have **/,
   as a pattern that matches 0 or more levels of subdirectory.
   E.g. "foo/**/bar" matches "bar" in "foo" itself or in a
   subdirectory of "foo".

 * "git blame" (and "git diff") learned the "--no-follow" option.

 * "git check-ignore" command to help debugging .gitignore files has
   been added.

 * "git cherry-pick" can be used to replay a root commit to an unborn
   branch.

 * "git commit" can be told to use --cleanup=whitespace by setting the
   configuration variable commit.cleanup to 'whitespace'.

 * "git fetch --mirror" and fetch that uses other forms of refspec
   with wildcard used to attempt to update a symbolic ref that match
   the wildcard on the receiving end, which made little sense (the
   real ref that is pointed at by the symbolic ref would be updated
   anyway).  Symbolic refs no longer are affected by such a fetch.

 * "git format-patch" now detects more cases in which a whole branch
   is being exported, and uses the description for the branch, when
   asked to write a cover letter for the series.

 * "git format-patch" learned "-v $count" option, and prepends a
   string "v$count-" to the names of its output files, and also
   automatically sets the subject prefix to "PATCH v$count". This
   allows patches from rerolled series to be stored under different
   names and makes it easier to reuse cover letter messsages.

 * "git log" and friends can be told with --use-mailmap option to
   rewrite the names and email addresses of people using the mailmap
   mechanism.

 * "git push" now requires "-f" to update a tag, even if it is a
   fast-forward, as tags are meant to be fixed points.

 * "git push" will stop without doing anything if the new "pre-push"
   hook exists and exits with a failure.

 * When "git rebase" fails to generate patches to be applied (e.g. due
   to oom), it failed to detect the failure and instead behaved as if
   there were nothing to do.  A workaround to use a temporary file has
   been applied, but we probably would want to revisit this later, as
   it hurts the common case of not failing at all.

 * Input and preconditions to "git reset" has been loosened where
   appropriate.  "git reset $fromtree Makefile" requires $fromtree to
   be any tree (it used to require it to be a commit), for example.
   "git reset" (without options or parameters) used to error out when
   you do not have any commits in your history, but it now gives you
   an empty index (to match non-existent commit you are not even on).

 * "git submodule" started learning a new mode to integrate with the
   tip of the remote branch (as opposed to integrating with the commit
   recorded in the superproject's gitlink).


Foreign Interface

 * "git fast-export" has been updated for its use in the context of
   the remote helper interface.

 * A new remote helper to interact with bzr has been added to contrib/.

 * "git p4" got various bugfixes around its branch handling.

 * The remote helper to interact with Hg in contrib/ has seen a few
   fixes.


Performance, Internal Implementation, etc.

 * "git fsck" has been taught to be pickier about entries in tree
   objects that should not be there, e.g. ".", ".git", and "..".

 * Matching paths with common forms of pathspecs that contain wildcard
   characters has been optimized further.

 * "git reset" internals has been reworked and should be faster in
   general. We tried to be careful not to break any behaviour but
   there could be corner cases, especially when running the command
   from a conflicted state, that we may have missed.

 * The implementation of "imap-send" has been updated to reuse xml
   quoting code from http-push codepath, and lost a lot of unused
   code.

 * There is a simple-minded checker for the test scripts in t/
   directory to catch most common mistakes (it is not enabled by
   default).

 * You can build with USE_WILDMATCH=YesPlease to use a replacement
   implementation of pattern matching logic used for pathname-like
   things, e.g. refnames and paths in the repository.  This new
   implementation is not expected change the existing behaviour of Git
   in this release, except for "git for-each-ref" where you can now
   say "refs/**/master" and match with both refs/heads/master and
   refs/remotes/origin/master.  We plan to use this new implementation
   in wider places (e.g. "git ls-files '**/Makefile' may find Makefile
   at the top-level, and "git log '**/t*.sh'" may find commits that
   touch a shell script whose name begins with "t" at any level) in
   future versions of Git, but we are not there yet.  By building with
   USE_WILDMATCH, using the resulting Git daily and reporting when you
   find breakages, you can help us get closer to that goal.


Also contains minor documentation updates and code clean-ups.


Fixes since v1.8.1
------------------

Unless otherwise noted, all the fixes since v1.8.1 in the maintenance
track are contained in this release (see release notes to them for
details).

 * An element on GIT_CEILING_DIRECTORIES list that does not name the
   real path to a directory (i.e. a symbolic link) could have caused
   the GIT_DIR discovery logic to escape the ceiling.
   (merge 059b379 mh/ceiling later to maint).

 * When attempting to read the XDG-style $HOME/.config/git/config and
   finding that $HOME/.config/git is a file, we gave a wrong error
   message, instead of treating the case as "a custom config file does
   not exist there" and moving on.
   (merge 8f2bbe4 jn/warn-on-inaccessible-loosen later to maint).

 * The behaviour visible to the end users was confusing, when they
   attempt to kill a process spawned in the editor that was in turn
   launched by Git with SIGINT (or SIGQUIT), as Git would catch that
   signal and die.  We ignore these signals now.
   (merge 1250857 pf/editor-ignore-sigint later to maint).

 * A child process that was killed by a signal (e.g. SIGINT) was
   reported in an inconsistent way depending on how the process was
   spawned by us, with or without a shell in between.
   (merge 709ca73 jk/unify-exit-code-by-receiving-signal later to maint).

 * After failing to create a temporary file using mkstemp(), failing
   pathname was not reported correctly on some platforms.
   (merge f7be59b jc/mkstemp-more-careful-error-reporting later to maint).

 * The attribute mechanism didn't allow limiting attributes to be
   applied to only a single directory itself with "path/" like the
   exclude mechanism does.  The initial implementation of this that
   was merged to 'maint' and 1.8.1.2 was with a severe performance
   degradations and needs to merge a fix-up topic.
   (merge 9db9eec nd/fix-directory-attrs-off-by-one later to maint).

 * "git apply" misbehaved when fixing whitespace breakages by removing
   excess trailing blank lines.
   (merge 5de7166 jc/apply-trailing-blank-removal later to maint).

 * A tar archive created by "git archive" recorded a directory in a
   way that made NetBSD's implementation of "tar" sometimes unhappy.
   (merge 22f0dcd rs/leave-base-name-in-name-field-of-tar later to maint).

 * "git archive" did not record uncompressed size in the header when
   streaming a zip archive, which confused some implementations of unzip.
   (merge 5ea2c84 rs/zip-with-uncompressed-size-in-the-header later to maint).

 * "git clean" showed what it was going to do, but sometimes end up
   finding that it was not allowed to do so, which resulted in a
   confusing output (e.g. after saying that it will remove an
   untracked directory, it found an embedded git repository there
   which it is not allowed to remove).  It now performs the actions
   and then reports the outcome more faithfully.
   (merge f538a91 zk/clean-report-failure later to maint).

 * When "git clone --separate-git-dir=$over_there" is interrupted, it
   failed to remove the real location of the $GIT_DIR it created.
   This was most visible when interrupting a submodule update.
   (merge 9be1980 jl/interrupt-clone-remove-separate-git-dir later to maint).

 * The way "git svn" asked for password using SSH_ASKPASS and
   GIT_ASKPASS was not in line with the rest of the system.
   (merge e9263e4 ss/svn-prompt later to maint).

 * The --graph code fell into infinite loop when asked to do what the
   code did not expect.
   (merge 656197a mk/maint-graph-infinity-loop later to maint).

 * http transport was wrong to ask for the username when the
   authentication is done by certificate identity.
   (merge 75e9a40 rb/http-cert-cred-no-username-prompt later to maint).

 * "git pack-refs" that ran in parallel to another process that
   created new refs had a nasty race.
   (merge b3f1280 jk/repack-ref-racefix later to maint).

 * After "git add -N" and then writing a tree object out of the
   index, the cache-tree data structure got corrupted.
   (merge eec3e7e nd/invalidate-i-t-a-cache-tree later to maint).

 * "git clone" used to allow --bare and --separate-git-dir=$there
   options at the same time, which was nonsensical.
   (merge 95b63f1 nd/clone-no-separate-git-dir-with-bare later to maint).

 * "git rebase --preserve-merges" lost empty merges in recent versions
   of Git.
   (merge 9869778 ph/rebase-preserve-all-merges later to maint).

 * "git merge --no-edit" computed who were involved in the work done
   on the side branch, even though that information is to be discarded
   without getting seen in the editor.
   (merge 9bcbb1c jc/maint-fmt-merge-msg-no-edit-lose-credit later to maint).

 * "git merge" started calling prepare-commit-msg hook like "git
   commit" does some time ago, but forgot to pay attention to the exit
   status of the hook.
   (merge 3e4141d ap/merge-stop-at-prepare-commit-msg-failure later to maint).

 * When users spell "cc:" in lowercase in the fake "header" in the
   trailer part, "git send-email" failed to pick up the addresses from
   there. As e-mail headers field names are case insensitive, this
   script should follow suit and treat "cc:" and "Cc:" the same way.
   (merge 6310071 nz/send-email-headers-are-case-insensitive later to maint).

 * Output from "git status --ignored" showed an unexpected interaction
   with "--untracked".
   (merge a45fb69 ap/status-ignored-in-ignored-directory later to maint).

 * "gitweb", when sorting by age to show repositories with new
   activities first, used to sort repositories with absolutely
   nothing in it early, which was not very useful.
   (merge 28dae18 md/gitweb-sort-by-age later to maint).

 * "gitweb"'s code to sanitize control characters before passing it to
   "highlight" filter lost known-to-be-safe control characters by
   mistake.
   (merge 0e901d2 os/gitweb-highlight-uncaptured later to maint).

 * When a line to be wrapped has a solid run of non space characters
   whose length exactly is the wrap width, "git shortlog -w" failed
   to add a newline after such a line.
   (merge e0db176 sp/shortlog-missing-lf later to maint).

 * Command line completion leaked an unnecessary error message while
   looking for possible matches with paths in <tree-ish>.
   (merge ca87dd6 ds/completion-silence-in-tree-path-probe later to maint).

 * Command line completion for "tcsh" emitted an unwanted space
   after completing a single directory name.
   (merge 92f1c04 mk/complete-tcsh later to maint).

 * Some shells do not behave correctly when IFS is unset; work it
   around by explicitly setting it to the default value.
   (merge 393050c jc/maint-fbsd-sh-ifs-workaround later to maint).

 * Some scripted programs written in Python did not get updated when
   PYTHON_PATH changed.
   (cherry-pick 96a4647fca54031974cd6ad1 later to maint).

 * When autoconf is used, any build on a different commit always ran
   "config.status --recheck" even when unnecessary.
   (merge 1226504 jn/less-reconfigure later to maint).

 * We have been carrying a translated and long-unmaintained copy of an
   old version of the tutorial; removed.
   (merge 0a85441 ta/remove-stale-translated-tut later to maint).

 * t4014, t9502 and t0200 tests had various portability issues that
   broke on OpenBSD.
   (merge 27f6342 jc/maint-test-portability later to maint).

 * t9020 and t3600 tests had various portability issues.
   (merge 5a02966 jc/test-portability later to maint).

 * t9200 runs "cvs init" on a directory that already exists, but a
   platform can configure this fail for the current user (e.g. you
   need to be in the cvsadmin group on NetBSD 6.0).
   (merge 8666df0 jc/test-cvs-no-init-in-existing-dir later to maint).

 * t9020 and t9810 had a few non-portable shell script construct.
   (merge 2797914 tb/test-t9020-no-which later to maint).
   (merge 6f4e505 tb/test-t9810-no-sed-i later to maint).