RelNotes-1.5.3.txt

GIT v1.5.3 Release Notes
========================

Updates since v1.5.2
--------------------

* The commit walkers other than http are officially deprecated,
 but still supported for now.

* The submodule support has Porcelain layer.

* There are a handful pack-objects changes to help you cope better
 with repositories with pathologically large blobs in them.

* For people who need to import from Perforce, a front-end for
 fast-import is in contrib/fast-import/.

* Comes with git-gui 0.8.0.

* Comes with updated gitk.

* New commands and options.

 - "git log --date=<format>" can use more formats: iso8601, rfc2822.

 - The hunk header output from "git diff" family can be customized
 with the attributes mechanism. See gitattributes(5) for details.

 - "git stash" allows you to quickly save away your work in
 progress and replay it later on an updated state.

 - "git rebase" learned an "interactive" mode that let you
 pick and reorder which commits to rebuild.

 - "git fsck" can save its findings in $GIT_DIR/lost-found,
 without a separate invocation of "git lost-found" command.

 - $GIT_WORK_TREE environment variable can be used together with
 $GIT_DIR to work in a subdirectory of a working tree that is
 not located at "$GIT_DIR/..".

 - "git log" learned a new option "--follow", to follow
 renaming history of a single file.

 - "git-filter-branch" lets you rewrite the revision history of
 the current branch, creating a new branch. You can specify a
 number of filters to modify the commits, files and trees.

 - "git-cvsserver" learned new options (--base-path, --export-all,
 --strict-paths) inspired by git-daemon.

 - "git-submodule" command helps you manage the projects from
 the superproject that contain them.

 - In addition to core.compression configuration option,
 core.loosecompression and pack.compression options can
 independently tweak zlib compression levels used for loose
 and packed objects.

 - "git-ls-tree -l" shows size of blobs pointed at by the
 tree entries, similar to "/bin/ls -l".

 - "git-rev-list" learned --regexp-ignore-case and
 --extended-regexp options to tweak its matching logic used
 for --grep fitering.

 - "git-describe --contains" is a handier way to call more
 obscure command "git-name-rev --tags".

 - "git gc --aggressive" tells the command to spend more cycles
 to optimize the repository harder.

 - "git repack" learned a "window-memory" limit which
 dynamically reduces the window size to stay within the
 specified memory usage.

 - "git repack" can be told to split resulting packs to avoid
 exceeding limit specified with "--max-pack-size".

 - "git fsck" gained --verbose option. This is really really
 verbose but it might help you identify exact commit that is
 corrupt in your repository.

 - "git format-patch" learned --numbered-files option. This
 may be useful for MH users.

 - "git format-patch" learned format.subjectprefix configuration
 variable, which serves the same purpose as "--subject-prefix"
 option.

 - "git tag -n -l" shows tag annotations while listing tags.

 - "git cvsimport" can optionally use the separate-remote layout.

 - "git blame" can be told to see through commits that change
 whitespaces and indentation levels with "-w" option.

 - "git send-email" can be told not to thread the messages when
 sending out more than one patches.

 - "git config" learned NUL terminated output format via -z to
 help scripts.

 - "git init -q" makes the command quieter.

* Updated behavior of existing commands.

 - "git rm --cached" does not complain when removing a newly
 added file from the index anymore.

 - "git svn dcommit" retains local merge information.

 - "git config" to set values also honors type flags like --bool
 and --int.

 - core.quotepath configuration can be used to make textual git
 output to emit most of the characters in the path literally.

 - "git mergetool" chooses its backend more wisely, taking
 notice of its environment such as use of X, Gnome/KDE, etc.

 - "gitweb" shows merge commits a lot nicer than before. The
 default view uses more compact --cc format, while the UI
 allows to choose normal diff with any parent.

 - snapshot files "gitweb" creates from a repository at
 $path/$project/.git are more useful. We use $project part
 in the filename, which we used to discard.

 - "git cvsimport" creates lightweight tags; there is no
 interesting information we can record in an annotated tag,
 and the handcrafted ones the old code created was not
 properly formed anyway.

 - "git-push" pretends that you immediately fetched back from
 the remote by updating corresponding remote tracking
 branches if you have any.

 - The diffstat given after a merge (or a pull) honors the
 color.diff configuration.

 - "git-apply --whitespace=strip" removes blank lines added at
 the end of the file.

 - "git-fetch" over git native protocols with "-v" option shows
 connection status, and the IP address of the other end, to
 help diagnosing problems.

 - We used to have core.legacyheaders configuration, when
 set to false, allowed git to write loose objects in a format
 that mimicks the format used by objects stored in packs. It
 turns out that this was not so useful. Although we will
 continue to read objects written in that format, we do not
 honor that configuration anymore and create loose objects in
 the legacy/traditional format.

 - "--find-copies-harder" option to diff family can now be
 spelled as "-C -C" for brevity.

 - "git-mailsplit" (hence "git-am") can read from Maildir
 formatted mailboxes.

 - "git-cvsserver" does not barf upon seeing "cvs login"
 request.

 - "pack-objects" honors "delta" attribute set in
 .gitattributes. It does not attempt to deltify blobs that
 come from paths with delta attribute set to false.

 - "new-workdir" script (in contrib) can now be used with a
 bare repository.

 - "git-mergetool" learned to use gvimdiff.

 - "gitview" (in contrib) has a better blame interface.

 - "git log" and friends did not handle a commit log message
 that is larger than 16kB; they do now.

 - "--pretty=oneline" output format for "git log" and friends
 deals with "malformed" commit log messages that have more
 than one lines in the first paragraph better. We used to
 show the first line, cutting the title at mid-sentence; we
 concatenate them into a single line and treat the result as
 "oneline".

 - "git p4import" has been demoted to contrib status. For
 a superior option, checkout the git-p4 front end to
 git-fast-import (also in contrib). The man page and p4
 rpm have been removed as well.

* Builds

 - old-style function definitions (most notably, a function
 without parameter defined with "func()", not "func(void)")
 have been eradicated.

* Performance Tweaks

 - git-pack-objects avoids re-deltification cost by caching
 small enough delta results it creates while looking for the
 best delta candidates.

 - git-pack-objects learned a new heuristcs to prefer delta
 that is shallower in depth over the smallest delta
 possible. This improves both overall packfile access
 performance and packfile density.

 - diff-delta code that is used for packing has been improved
 to work better on big files.

 - when there are more than one pack files in the repository,
 the runtime used to try finding an object always from the
 newest packfile; it now tries the same packfile as we found
 the object requested the last time, which exploits the
 locality of references.

 - verifying pack contents done by "git fsck --full" got boost
 by carefully choosing the order to verify objects in them.


Fixes since v1.5.2
------------------

All of the fixes in v1.5.2 maintenance series are included in
this release, unless otherwise noted.

* Bugfixes

 - "gitweb" had trouble handling non UTF-8 text with older
 Encode.pm Perl module.

--
exec >/var/tmp/1
O=v1.5.3-rc2
echo O=`git describe refs/heads/master`
git shortlog --no-merges $O..refs/heads/master ^refs/heads/maint