GIT v1.5.2 Release Notes
========================
Updates since v1.5.1
--------------------
* Plumbing level superproject support.
You can include a subdirectory that has an independent git
repository in your index and tree objects of your project
("superproject"). This plumbing (i.e. "core") level
superproject support explicitly excludes recursive behaviour.
The "subproject" entries in the index and trees of a superproject
are incompatible with older versions of git. Experimenting with
the plumbing level support is encouraged, but be warned that
unless everybody in your project updates to this release or
later, using this feature would make your project
inaccessible by people with older versions of git.
* Plumbing level gitattributes support.
The gitattributes mechanism allows you to add 'attributes' to
paths in your project, and affect the way certain git
operations work. Currently you can influence if a path is
considered a binary or text (the former would be treated by
'git diff' not to produce textual output; the latter can go
through the line endings conversion process in repositories
with core.autocrlf set), expand and unexpand '$Id$' keyword
with blob object name, specify a custom 3-way merge driver,
and specify a custom diff driver. You can also apply
arbitrary filter to contents on check-in/check-out codepath
but this feature is an extremely sharp-edged razor and needs
to be handled with caution (do not use it unless you
understand the earlier mailing list discussion on keyword
expansion). These conversions apply when checking files in
or out, and exporting via git-archive.
* The packfile format now optionally supports 64-bit index.
This release supports the "version 2" format of the .idx
file. This is automatically enabled when a huge packfile
needs more than 32-bit to express offsets of objects in the
pack.
* Comes with an updated git-gui 0.7.1
* Updated gitweb:
- can show combined diff for merges;
- uses font size of user's preference, not hardcoded in pixels;
- can now 'grep';
* New commands and options.
- "git bisect start" can optionally take a single bad commit and
zero or more good commits on the command line.
- "git shortlog" can optionally be told to wrap its output.
- "subtree" merge strategy allows another project to be merged in as
your subdirectory.
- "git format-patch" learned a new --subject-prefix=<string>
option, to override the built-in "[PATCH]".
- "git add -u" is a quick way to do the first stage of "git
commit -a" (i.e. update the index to match the working
tree); it obviously does not make a commit.
- "git clean" honors a new configuration, "clean.requireforce". When
set to true, this makes "git clean" a no-op, preventing you
from losing files by typing "git clean" when you meant to
say "make clean". You can still say "git clean -f" to
override this.
- "git log" family of commands learned --date={local,relative,default}
option. --date=relative is synonym to the --relative-date.
--date=local gives the timestamp in local timezone.
* Updated behavior of existing commands.
- When $GIT_COMMITTER_EMAIL or $GIT_AUTHOR_EMAIL is not set
but $EMAIL is set, the latter is used as a substitute.
- "git diff --stat" shows size of preimage and postimage blobs
for binary contents. Earlier it only said "Bin".
- "git lost-found" shows stuff that are unreachable except
from reflogs.
- "git checkout branch^0" now detaches HEAD at the tip commit
on the named branch, instead of just switching to the
branch (use "git checkout branch" to switch to the branch,
as before).
- "git bisect next" can be used after giving only a bad commit
without giving a good one (this starts bisection half-way to
the root commit). We used to refuse to operate without a
good and a bad commit.
- "git push", when pushing into more than one repository, does
not stop at the first error.
- "git archive" does not insist you to give --format parameter
anymore; it defaults to "tar".
- "git cvsserver" can use backends other than sqlite.
- "gitview" (in contrib/ section) learned to better support
"git-annotate".
- "git diff $commit1:$path2 $commit2:$path2" can now report
mode changes between the two blobs.
- Local "git fetch" from a repository whose object store is
one of the alternates (e.g. fetching from the origin in a
repository created with "git clone -l -s") avoids
downloading objects unnecessarily.
- "git blame" uses .mailmap to canonicalize the author name
just like "git shortlog" does.
- "git pack-objects" pays attention to pack.depth
configuration variable.
- "git cherry-pick" and "git revert" does not use .msg file in
the working tree to prepare commit message; instead it uses
$GIT_DIR/MERGE_MSG as other commands do.
* Builds
- git-p4import has never been installed; now there is an
installation option to do so.
- gitk and git-gui can be configured out.
- Generated documentation pages automatically get version
information from GIT_VERSION.
- Parallel build with "make -j" descending into subdirectory
was fixed.
* Performance Tweaks
- Optimized "git-rev-list --bisect" (hence "git-bisect").
- Optimized "git-add $path" in a large directory, most of
whose contents are ignored.
- Optimized "git-diff-tree" for reduced memory footprint.
- The recursive merge strategy updated a worktree file that
was changed identically in two branches, when one of them
renamed it. We do not do that when there is no rename, so
match that behaviour. This avoids excessive rebuilds.
- The default pack depth has been increased to 50, as the
recent addition of delta_base_cache makes deeper delta chains
much less expensive to access. Depending on the project, it was
reported that this reduces the resulting pack file by 10%
or so.
Fixes since v1.5.1
------------------
All of the fixes in v1.5.1 maintenance series are included in
this release, unless otherwise noted.
* Bugfixes
- Switching branches with "git checkout" refused to work when
a path changes from a file to a directory between the
current branch and the new branch, in order not to lose
possible local changes in the directory that is being turned
into a file with the switch. We now allow such a branch
switch after making sure that there is no locally modified
file nor un-ignored file in the directory. This has not
been backported to 1.5.1.x series, as it is rather an
intrusive change.
- Merging branches that have a file in one and a directory in
another at the same path used to get quite confused. We
handle such a case a bit more carefully, even though that is
still left as a conflict for the user to sort out. This
will not be backported to 1.5.1.x series, as it is rather an
intrusive change.
- git-fetch had trouble with a remote with insanely large number
of refs.
- "git clean -d -X" now does not remove non-excluded directories.
- rebasing (without -m) a series that changes a symlink to a directory
in the middle of a path confused git-apply greatly and refused to
operate.
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