Git 1.7.5

Updates since v1.6.4
-----

(subsystems)

* various updates to gitk, git-svn and gitweb.

(portability)

* more improvements on mingw port.

* mingw will also give FRSX as the default value for the LESS
environment variable when the user does not have one.

* initial support to compile git on Windows with MSVC.

(performance)

* On major platforms, the system can be compiled to use with Linus's
block-sha1 implementation of the SHA-1 hash algorithm, which
outperforms the default fallback implementation we borrowed from
Mozilla.

* Unnecessary inefficiency in deepening of a shallow repository has
been removed.

* "git clone" does not grab objects that it does not need (i.e.
referenced only from refs outside refs/heads and refs/tags
hierarchy) anymore.

* The "git" main binary used to link with libcurl, which then dragged
in a large number of external libraries. When using basic plumbing
commands in scripts, this unnecessarily slowed things down. We now
implement http/https/ftp transfer as a separate executable as we
used to.

* "git clone" run locally hardlinks or copies the files in .git/ to
newly created repository. It used to give new mtime to copied files,
but this delayed garbage collection to trigger unnecessarily in the
cloned repository. We now preserve mtime for these files to avoid
this issue.

(usability, bells and whistles)

* Human writable date format to various options, e.g. --since=yesterday,
master@{2000.09.17}, are taught to infer some omitted input properly.

* A few programs gave verbose "advice" messages to help uninitiated
people when issuing error messages. An infrastructure to allow
users to squelch them has been introduced, and a few such messages
can be silenced now.

* refs/replace/ hierarchy is designed to be usable as a replacement
of the "grafts" mechanism, with the added advantage that it can be
transferred across repositories.

* "git am" learned to optionally ignore whitespace differences.

* "git am" handles input e-mail files that has CRLF line endings sensibly.

* "git am" learned "--scissors" option to allow you to discard early part
of an incoming e-mail.

* "git archive -o output.zip" works without being told what format to
use with an explicit "--format=zip".option.

* "git checkout", "git reset" and "git stash" learned to pick and
choose to use selected changes you made, similar to "git add -p".

* "git clone" learned a "-b" option to pick a HEAD to check out
different from the remote's default branch.

* "git clone" learned --recursive option.

* "git clone" from a local repository on a different filesystem used to
copy individual object files without preserving the old timestamp, giving
them extra lifetime in the new repository until they gc'ed.

* "git commit --dry-run $args" is a new recommended way to ask "what would
happen if I try to commit with these arguments."

* "git commit --dry-run" and "git status" shows conflicted paths in a
separate section to make them easier to spot during a merge.

* "git cvsimport" now supports password-protected pserver access even
when the password is not taken from ~/.cvspass file.

* "git fast-export" learned --no-data option that can be useful when
reordering commits and trees without touching the contents of
blobs.

* "git fast-import" has a pair of new front-end in contrib/ area.

* "git init" learned to mkdir/chdir into a directory when given an
extra argument (i.e. "git init this").

* "git instaweb" optionally can use mongoose as the web server.

* "git log --decorate" can optionally be told with --decorate=full to
give the reference name in full.

* "git merge" issued an unnecessarily scary message when it detected
that the merge may have to touch the path that the user has local
uncommitted changes to. The message has been reworded to make it
clear that the command aborted, without doing any harm.

* "git push" can be told to be --quiet.

* "git push" pays attention to url.$base.pushInsteadOf and uses a URL
that is derived from the URL used for fetching.

* informational output from "git reset" that lists the locally modified
paths is made consistent with that of "git checkout $another_branch".

* "git submodule" learned to give submodule name to scripts run with
"foreach" subcommand.

* various subcommands to "git submodule" learned --recursive option.

* "git submodule summary" learned --files option to compare the work
tree vs the commit bound at submodule path, instead of comparing
the index.

* "git upload-pack", which is the server side support for "git clone" and
"git fetch", can call a new post-upload-pack hook for statistics purposes.

(developers)

* With GIT_TEST_OPTS="--root=/p/a/t/h", tests can be run outside the
source directory; using tmpfs may give faster turnaround.

* With NO_PERL_MAKEMAKER set, DESTDIR= is now honoured, so you can
build for one location, and install into another location to tar it
up.

=====

Notes on behaviour change
-----

* "git push" into a branch that is currently checked out (i.e. pointed at by
HEAD in a repository that is not bare) is refused by default.

Similarly, "git push $there :$killed" to delete the branch $killed
in a remote repository $there, when $killed branch is the current
branch pointed at by its HEAD, will be refused by default.

Setting the configuration variables receive.denyCurrentBranch and
receive.denyDeleteCurrent to 'ignore' in the receiving repository
can be used to override these safety features.

* "git send-email" does not make deep threads by default when sending a
patch series with more than two messages. All messages will be sent
as a reply to the first message, i.e. cover letter.

It has been possible already to configure send-email to send "shallow thread"
by setting sendemail.chainreplyto configuration variable to false. The
only thing this release does is to change the default when you haven't
configured that variable.

* "git status" is not "git commit --dry-run" anymore. This change does
not affect you if you run the command without argument.

* "git diff" traditionally treated various "ignore whitespace" options
only as a way to filter the patch output. "git diff --exit-code -b"
exited with non-zero status even if all changes were about changing the
amount of whitespace and nothing else; and "git diff -b" showed the
"diff --git" header line for such a change without patch text.

In this release, the "ignore whitespaces" options affect the semantics
of the diff operation. A change that does not affect anything but
whitespaces is reported with zero exit status when run with
--exit-code, and there is no "diff --git" header for such a change.

* External diff and textconv helpers are now executed using the shell.
This makes them consistent with other programs executed by git, and
allows you to pass command-line parameters to the helpers. Any helper
paths containing spaces or other metacharacters now need to be
shell-quoted. The affected helpers are GIT_EXTERNAL_DIFF in the
environment, and diff.*.command and diff.*.textconv in the config
file.

* The --max-pack-size argument to 'git repack', 'git pack-objects', and
'git fast-import' was assuming the provided size to be expressed in MiB,
unlike the corresponding config variable and other similar options accepting
a size value. It is now expecting a size expressed in bytes, with a possible
unit suffix of 'k', 'm', or 'g'.

Updates since v1.6.6
-----

(subsystems)

* "git fast-import" updates; adds "option" and "feature" to detect the
mismatch between fast-import and the frontends that produce the input
stream.

* "git svn" support of subversion "merge tickets" and miscellaneous fixes.

* "gitk" and "git gui" translation updates.

* "gitweb" updates (code clean-up, load checking etc.)

(portability)

* Some more MSVC portability patches for msysgit port.

* Minimum Pthreads emulation for msysgit port.

(performance)

* More performance improvement patches for msysgit port.

(usability, bells and whistles)

* More commands learned "--quiet" and "--[no-]progress" options.

* Various commands given by the end user (e.g. diff.type.textconv,
and GIT_EDITOR) can be specified with command line arguments. E.g. it
is now possible to say "[diff "utf8doc"] textconv = nkf -w".

* "sparse checkout" feature allows only part of the work tree to be
checked out.

* HTTP transfer can use authentication scheme other than basic
(i.e./e.g. digest).

* Switching from a version of superproject that used to have a submodule
to another version of superproject that no longer has it did not remove
the submodule directory when it should (namely, when you are not
interested in the submodule at all and didn't clone/checkout).

* A new attribute conflict-marker-size can be used to change the size of
the conflict markers from the default 7; this is useful when tracked
contents (e.g. git-merge documentation) have strings that resemble the
conflict markers.

* A new syntax "@{upstream}" can be used on the command line to
substitute the name of the "upstream" of the branch. Missing branch
defaults to the current branch, so "git fetch && git merge @{upstream}"
will be equivalent to "git pull".

* "git am --resolved" has a synonym "git am --continue".

* "git branch --set-upstream" can be used to update the (surprise!) upstream,
i.e. where the branch is supposed to pull and merge from (or rebase onto).

* "git checkout A...B" is a way to detach HEAD at the merge base between
A and B.

* "git checkout -m path" to reset the work tree file back into the
conflicted state works even when you already ran "git add path" and
resolved the conflicts.

* "git commit --date=''" can be used to override the author date
just like "git commit --author=' '" can be used to
override the author identity.

* "git commit --no-status" can be used to omit the listing of the index
and the work tree status in the editor used to prepare the log message.

* "git commit" warns a bit more aggressively until you configure user.email,
whose default value almost always is not (and fundamentally cannot be)
what you want.

* "git difftool" has been extended to make it easier to integrate it
with gitk.

* "git fetch --all" can now be used in place of "git remote update".

* "git grep" does not rely on external grep anymore. It can use more than
one thread to accelerate the operation.

* "git grep" learned "--quiet" option.

* "git log" and friends learned "--glob=heads/*" syntax that is a more
flexible way to complement "--branches/--tags/--remotes".

* "git merge" learned to pass options specific to strategy-backends. E.g.

- "git merge -Xsubtree=path/to/directory" can be used to tell the subtree
strategy how much to shift the trees explicitly.

- "git merge -Xtheirs" can be used to auto-merge as much as possible,
while discarding your own changes and taking merged version in
conflicted regions.

* "git push" learned "git push origin --delete branch", a syntactic sugar
for "git push origin :branch".

* "git push" learned "git push --set-upstream origin forker:forkee" that
lets you configure your "forker" branch to later pull from "forkee"
branch at "origin".

* "git rebase --onto A...B" means the history is replayed on top of the
merge base between A and B.

* "git rebase -i" learned new action "fixup" that squashes the change
but does not affect existing log message.

* "git rebase -i" also learned --autosquash option that is useful
together with the new "fixup" action.

* "git remote" learned set-url subcommand that updates (surprise!) url
for an existing remote nickname.

* "git rerere" learned "forget path" subcommand. Together with "git
checkout -m path" it will be useful when you recorded a wrong
resolution.

* Use of "git reset --merge" has become easier when resetting away a
conflicted mess left in the work tree.

* "git rerere" had rerere.autoupdate configuration but there was no way
to countermand it from the command line; --no-rerere-autoupdate option
given to "merge", "revert", etc. fixes this.

* "git status" learned "-s(hort)" output format.

(developers)

* The infrastructure to build foreign SCM interface has been updated.

* Many more commands are now built-in.

* THREADED_DELTA_SEARCH is no more. If you build with threads, delta
compression will always take advantage of it.

Fixes since v1.6.6
--------

All of the fixes in v1.6.6.X maintenance series are included in this
release, unless otherwise noted.

* "git branch -d branch" used to refuse deleting the branch even when
the branch is fully merged to its upstream branch if it is not merged
to the current branch. It now deletes it in such a case.

* "fiter-branch" command incorrectly said --prune-empty and --filter-commit
were incompatible; the latter should be read as --commit-filter.

* When using "git status" or asking "git diff" to compare the work tree
with something, they used to consider that a checked-out submodule with
uncommitted changes is not modified; this could cause people to forget
committing these changes in the submodule before committing in the
superproject. They now consider such a change as a modification and
"git diff" will append a "-dirty" to the work tree side when generating
patch output or when used with the --submodule option.