Git v1.9 Release Notes ====================== Backward compatibility notes ---------------------------- "git submodule foreach $cmd $args" used to treat "$cmd $args" the same way "ssh" did, concatenating them into a single string and letting the shell unquote. Careless users who forget to sufficiently quote $args gets their argument split at $IFS whitespaces by the shell, and got unexpected results due to this. Starting from this release, the command line is passed directly to the shell, if it has an argument. Read-only support for experimental loose-object format, in which users could optionally choose to write in their loose objects for a short while between v1.4.3 to v1.5.3 era, has been dropped. The meanings of "--tags" option to "git fetch" has changed; the command fetches tags _in addition to_ what are fetched by the same command line without the option. The way "git push $there $what" interprets $what part given on the command line, when it does not have a colon that explicitly tells us what ref at the $there repository is to be updated, has been enhanced. A handful of ancient commands that have long been deprecated are finally gone (repo-config, tar-tree, lost-found, and peek-remote). Backward compatibility notes (for Git 2.0) ------------------------------------------ When "git push [$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). In Git 2.0, the default will change to the "simple" semantics, which pushes: - only the current branch to the branch with the same name, and only when the current branch is set to integrate with that remote branch, if you are pushing to the same remote as you fetch from; or - only the current branch to the branch with the same name, if you are pushing to a remote that is not where you usually fetch from. Use the user preference configuration variable "push.default" to change this. If you are an old-timer who is used to the "matching" semantics, you can set the variable to "matching" to keep the traditional behaviour. If you want to live in the future early, you can set it to "simple" today without waiting for Git 2.0. When "git add -u" (and "git add -A") is run inside a subdirectory and does not specify which paths to add on the command line, it will operate on the entire tree in Git 2.0 for consistency with "git commit -a" and other commands. There will be no mechanism to make plain "git add -u" behave like "git add -u .". Current users of "git add -u" (without a pathspec) should start training their fingers to explicitly say "git add -u ." before Git 2.0 comes. A warning is issued when these commands are run without a pathspec and when you have local changes outside the current directory, because the behaviour in Git 2.0 will be different from today's version in such a situation. In Git 2.0, "git add " will behave as "git add -A ", so that "git add dir/" will notice paths you removed from the directory and record the removal. Versions before Git 2.0, including this release, will keep ignoring removals, but the users who rely on this behaviour are encouraged to start using "git add --ignore-removal " now before 2.0 is released. The default prefix for "git svn" will change in Git 2.0. For a long time, "git svn" created its remote-tracking branches directly under refs/remotes, but it will place them under refs/remotes/origin/ unless it is told otherwise with its --prefix option. Updates since v1.8.5 -------------------- Foreign interfaces, subsystems and ports. * The HTTP transport, when talking GSS-Negotiate, uses "100 Continue" response to avoid having to rewind and resend a large payload, which may not be always doable. * Various bugfixes to remote-bzr and remote-hg (in contrib/). * The build procedure is aware of MirBSD now. UI, Workflows & Features * Two-level configuration variable names in "branch.*" and "remote.*" hierarchies, whose variables are predominantly three-level, were not completed by hitting a in bash and zsh completions. * Fetching 'frotz' branch with "git fetch", while 'frotz/nitfol' remote-tracking branch from an earlier fetch was still there, would error out, primarily because the command was not told that it is allowed to lose any information on our side. "git fetch --prune" now can be used to remove 'frotz/nitfol' to make room to fetch and store 'frotz' remote-tracking branch. * "diff.orderfile=" configuration variable can be used to pretend as if the "-O" option were given from the command line of "git diff", etc. * The negative pathspec syntax allows "git log -- . ':!dir'" to tell us "I am interested in everything but 'dir' directory". * "git difftool" shows how many different paths there are in total, and how many of them have been shown so far, to indicate progress. * "git push origin master" used to push our 'master' branch to update the 'master' branch at the 'origin' repository. This has been enhanced to use the same ref mapping "git push origin" would use to determine what ref at the 'origin' to be updated with our 'master'. For example, with this configuration [remote "origin"] push = refs/heads/*:refs/review/* that would cause "git push origin" to push out our local branches to corresponding refs under refs/review/ hierarchy at 'origin', "git push origin master" would update 'refs/review/master' over there. Alternatively, if push.default is set to 'upstream' and our 'master' is set to integrate with 'topic' from the 'origin' branch, running "git push origin" while on our 'master' would update their 'topic' branch, and running "git push origin master" while on any of our branches does the same. * "gitweb" learned to treat ref hierarchies other than refs/heads as if they are additional branch namespaces (e.g. refs/changes/ in Gerrit). * "git for-each-ref --format=..." learned a few formatting directives; e.g. "%(color:red)%(HEAD)%(color:reset) %(refname:short) %(subject)". * The command string given to "git submodule foreach" is passed directly to the shell, without being eval'ed. This is a backward incompatible change that may break existing users. * "git log" and friends learned the "--exclude=" option, to allow people to say "list history of all branches except those that match this pattern" with "git log --exclude='*/*' --branches". * "git rev-parse --parseopt" learned a new "--stuck-long" option to help scripts parse options with an optional parameter. * The "--tags" option to "git fetch" no longer tells the command to fetch _only_ the tags. It instead fetches tags _in addition to_ what are fetched by the same command line without the option. Performance, Internal Implementation, etc. * The naming convention of the packfiles has been updated; it used to be based on the enumeration of names of the objects that are contained in the pack, but now it also depends on how the packed result is represented---packing the same set of objects using different settings (or delta order) would produce a pack with different name. * "git diff --no-index" mode used to unnecessarily attempt to read the index when there is one. * The deprecated parse-options macro OPT_BOOLEAN has been removed; use OPT_BOOL or OPT_COUNTUP in new code. * A few duplicate implementations of prefix/suffix string comparison functions have been unified to starts_with() and ends_with(). * The new PERLLIB_EXTRA makefile variable can be used to specify additional directories Perl modules (e.g. the ones necessary to run git-svn) are installed on the platform when building. * "git merge-base" learned the "--fork-point" mode, that implements the same logic used in "git pull --rebase" to find a suitable fork point out of the reflog entries for the remote-tracking branch the work has been based on. "git rebase" has the same logic that can be triggered with the "--fork-point" option. * A third-party "receive-pack" (the responder to "git push") can advertise the "no-thin" capability to tell "git push" not to use the thin-pack optimization. Our receive-pack has always been capable of accepting and fattening a thin-pack, and will continue not to ask "git push" to use a non-thin pack. Also contains various documentation updates and code clean-ups. Fixes since v1.8.5 ------------------ Unless otherwise noted, all the fixes since v1.8.5 in the maintenance track are contained in this release (see the maintenance releases' notes for details). * The "--[no-]informative-errors" options to "git daemon" were parsed a bit too loosely, allowing any other string after these option names. (merge 82246b7 nd/daemon-informative-errors-typofix later to maint). * There is no reason to have a hardcoded upper limit of the number of parents for an octopus merge, created via the graft mechanism, but there was. (merge e228c17 js/lift-parent-count-limit later to maint). * The basic test used to leave unnecessary trash directories in the t/ directory. (merge 738a8be jk/test-framework-updates later to maint). * "git merge-base --octopus" used to leave cleaning up suboptimal result to the caller, but now it does the clean-up itself. (merge 8f29299 bm/merge-base-octopus-dedup later to maint). * A "gc" process running as a different user should be able to stop a new "gc" process from starting, but it didn't. (merge ed7eda8 km/gc-eperm later to maint). * An earlier "clean-up" introduced an unnecessary memory leak. (merge e1c1a32 jk/credential-plug-leak later to maint). * "git add -A" (no other arguments) in a totally empty working tree used to emit an error. (merge 64ed07c nd/add-empty-fix later to maint). * "git log --decorate" did not handle a tag pointed by another tag nicely. (merge 5e1361c bc/log-decoration later to maint). * When we figure out how many file descriptors to allocate for keeping packfiles open, a system with non-working getrlimit() could cause us to die(), but because we make this call only to get a rough estimate of how many is available and we do not even attempt to use up all file descriptors available ourselves, it is nicer to fall back to a reasonable low value rather than dying. (merge 491a8de jh/rlimit-nofile-fallback later to maint). * read_sha1_file(), that is the workhorse to read the contents given an object name, honoured object replacements, but there was no corresponding mechanism to sha1_object_info() that was used to obtain the metainfo (e.g. type & size) about the object. This led callers to weird inconsistencies. (merge 663a856 cc/replace-object-info later to maint). * "git cat-file --batch=", an admittedly useless command, did not behave very well. (merge 6554dfa jk/cat-file-regression-fix later to maint). * "git rev-parse -- " did not implement the usual disambiguation rules the commands in the "git log" family used in the same way. (merge 62f162f jk/rev-parse-double-dashes later to maint). * "git mv A B/", when B does not exist as a directory, should error out, but it didn't. (merge c57f628 mm/mv-file-to-no-such-dir-with-slash later to maint). * A workaround to an old bug in glibc prior to glibc 2.17 has been retired; this would remove a side effect of the workaround that corrupts system error messages in non-C locales. * SSL-related options were not passed correctly to underlying socket layer in "git send-email". (merge 5508f3e tr/send-email-ssl later to maint). * "git commit -v" appends the patch to the log message before editing, and then removes the patch when the editor returned control. However, the patch was not stripped correctly when the first modified path was a submodule. (merge 1a72cfd jl/commit-v-strip-marker later to maint). * "git fetch --depth=0" was a no-op, and was silently ignored. Diagnose it as an error. (merge 5594bca nd/transport-positive-depth-only later to maint). * Remote repository URL expressed in scp-style host:path notation are parsed more carefully (e.g. "foo/bar:baz" is local, "[::1]:/~user" asks to connect to user's home directory on host at address ::1. (merge a2036d7 tb/clone-ssh-with-colon-for-port later to maint). * "git diff -- ':(icase)makefile'" was unnecessarily rejected at the command line parser. (merge 887c6c1 nd/magic-pathspec later to maint). * "git cat-file --batch-check=ok" did not check the existence of the named object. (merge 4ef8d1d sb/sha1-loose-object-info-check-existence later to maint). * "git am --abort" sometimes complained about not being able to write a tree with an 0{40} object in it. (merge 77b43ca jk/two-way-merge-corner-case-fix later to maint). * Two processes creating loose objects at the same time could have failed unnecessarily when the name of their new objects started with the same byte value, due to a race condition. (merge b2476a6 jh/loose-object-dirs-creation-race later to maint).