RelNotes-1.6.0.txt

GIT v1.6.0 Release Notes
========================

User visible changes
--------------------

With the default Makefile settings, most of the programs are now
installed outside your $PATH, except for "git", "gitk", "git-gui" and
some server side programs that need to be accessible for technical
reasons. Invoking a git subcommand as "git-xyzzy" from the command
line has been deprecated since early 2006 (and officially announced in
1.5.4 release notes); use of them from your scripts after adding
output from "git --exec-path" to the $PATH is still supported in this
release, but users are again strongly encouraged to adjust their
scripts to use "git xyzzy" form, as we will stop installing
"git-xyzzy" hardlinks for built-in commands in later releases.

Source changes needed for porting to MinGW environment are now all in the
main git.git codebase.

By default, packfiles created with this version uses delta-base-offset
encoding introduced in v1.4.4. Pack idx files are using version 2 that
allows larger packs and added robustness thanks to its CRC checking,
introduced in v1.5.2.

GIT_CONFIG, which was only documented as affecting "git config", but
actually affected all git commands, now only affects "git config".
GIT_LOCAL_CONFIG, also only documented as affecting "git config" and
not different from GIT_CONFIG in a useful way, is removed.

An ancient merge strategy "stupid" has been removed.


Updates since v1.5.6
--------------------

(subsystems)

* git-p4 in contrib learned "allowSubmit" configuration to control on
 which branch to allow "submit" subcommand.

* git-gui learned to stage changes per-line.

(portability)

* Changes for MinGW port have been merged, thanks to Johannes Sixt and
 gangs.

* Sample hook scripts shipped in templates/ are now suffixed with
 *.sample. We used to prevent them from triggering by default by
 relying on the fact that we install them as unexecutable, but on
 some filesystems this approach does not work. Instead of running
 "chmod +x" on them, the users who want to activate these samples
 as-is can now rename them dropping *.sample suffix.

* perl's in-place edit (-i) does not work well without backup files on Windows;
 some tests are rewritten to cope with this.

(documentation)

* Updated howto/update-hook-example

* Got rid of usage of "git-foo" from the tutorial and made typography
 more consistent.

* Disambiguating "--" between revs and paths is finally documented.

(performance, robustness, sanity etc.)

* even more documentation pages are now accessible via "man" and "git help".

* reduced excessive inlining to shrink size of the "git" binary.

* verify-pack checks the object CRC when using version 2 idx files.

* When an object is corrupt in a pack, the object became unusable even
 when the same object is available in a loose form, We now try harder to
 fall back to these redundant objects when able. In particular, "git
 repack -a -f" can be used to fix such a corruption as long as necessary
 objects are available.

* git-clone does not create refs in loose form anymore (it behaves as
 if you immediately ran git-pack-refs after cloning). This will help
 repositories with insanely large number of refs.

* core.fsyncobjectfiles configuration can be used to ensure that the loose
 objects created will be fsync'ed (this is only useful on filesystems
 that does not order data writes properly).

* "git commit-tree" plumbing can make Octopus with more than 16 parents.
 "git commit" has been capable of this for quite some time.

(usability, bells and whistles)

* A new environment variable GIT_CEILING_DIRECTORIES can be used to stop
 the discovery process of the toplevel of working tree; this may be useful
 when you are working in a slow network disk and are outside any working tree,
 as bash-completion and "git help" may still need to run in these places.

* git-apply can handle a patch that touches the same path more than once
 much better than before.

* git-apply can be told not to trust the line counts recorded in the input
 patch but recount, with the new --recount option.

* git-archive can be told to omit certain paths from its output using
 export-ignore attributes.

* git-clone can clone from a remote whose URL would be rewritten by
 configuration stored in $HOME/.gitconfig now.

* git-diff --check now checks leftover merge conflict markers.

* When remote side used to have branch 'foo' and git-fetch finds that now
 it has branch 'foo/bar', it refuses to lose the existing remote tracking
 branch and its reflog. The error message has been improved to suggest
 pruning the remote if the user wants to proceed and get the latest set
 of branches from the remote, including such 'foo/bar'.

* fast-export learned to export and import marks file; this can be used to
 interface with fast-import incrementally.

* "git rerere" can be told to update the index with auto-reused resolution
 with rerere.autoupdate configuration variable.

* git-send-mail can talk not just over SSL but over TLS now.

* You can tell "git status -u" to even more aggressively omit checking
 untracked files with --untracked-files=no.

* Original SHA-1 value for "update-ref -d" is optional now.

* Error codes from gitweb are made more descriptive where possible, rather
 than "403 forbidden" as we used to issue everywhere.

(internal)


Fixes since v1.5.6
------------------

All of the fixes in v1.5.6 maintenance series are included in
this release, unless otherwise noted.

 * "git fetch" into an empty repository used to remind the fetch will
 be huge by saying "no common commits", but it is already known by
 the user anyway (need to backport 8cb560f to 'maint').

---
exec >/var/tmp/1
O=v1.5.6.2-246-g86d7244
echo O=$(git describe refs/heads/master)
git shortlog --no-merges $O..refs/heads/master ^refs/heads/maint