Git v1.7.11 Release Notes
=========================
Updates since v1.7.10
---------------------
UI, Workflows & Features
* A new mode for push, "simple", which is a cross between "current"
and "upstream", has been introduced. "git push" without any refspec
will push the current branch out to the same name at the remote
repository only when it is set to track the branch with the same
name over there. The plan is to make this mode the new default
value when push.default is not configured.
* A couple of commands learned the "--column" option to produce
columnar output.
* A third-party tool "git subtree" is distributed in contrib/
* A remote helper that acts as a proxy and caches ssl session for the
https:// transport is added to the contrib/ area.
* Error messages given when @{u} is used for a branch without its
upstream configured have been clarified.
* Even with the "-q"uiet option, "checkout" used to report setting up
tracking. Also "branch" learned the "-q"uiet option to squelch
informational message.
* Your build platform may support hardlinks but you may prefer not to
use them, e.g. when installing to DESTDIR to make a tarball and
untarring on a filesystem that has poor support for hardlinks.
There is a Makefile option NO_INSTALL_HARDLINKS for you.
* The smart-http backend used to always override GIT_COMMITTER_*
variables with REMOTE_USER and REMOTE_ADDR, but these variables are
now preserved when set.
* "git am" learned the "--include" option, which is an opposite of
existing the "--exclude" option.
* When "git am -3" needs to fall back to an application of the patch
to a synthesized preimage followed by a 3-way merge, the paths that
needed such treatment are now reported to the end user, so that the
result in them can be eyeballed with extra care.
* The output from "diff/log --stat" used to always allocate 4 columns
to show the number of modified lines, but not anymore.
* "git difftool" learned the "--dir-diff" option to spawn external
diff tools that can compare two directory hierarchies at a time
after populating two temporary directories, instead of running an
instance of the external tool once per a file pair.
* The "fmt-merge-msg" command learned to list the primary contributors
involved in the side topic you are merging in a comment in the merge
commit template.
* "git rebase" learned to optionally keep commits that do not
introduce any change in the original history.
* "git push --recurse-submodules" learned to optionally look into the
histories of submodules bound to the superproject and push them
out.
* A 'snapshot' request to "gitweb" honors If-Modified-Since: header,
based on the commit date.
* "gitweb" learned to highlight the patch it outputs even more.
Foreign Interface
* "git svn" used to die with unwanted SIGPIPE when talking with an HTTP
server that uses keep-alive.
* "git svn" learned to use platform specific authentication
providers, e.g. gnome-keyring, kwallet, etc.
* "git p4" has been moved out of the contrib/ area and has seen more
work on importing labels as tags from (and exporting tags as labels
to) p4.
Performance and Internal Implementation (please report possible regressions)
* Bash completion script (in contrib/) have been cleaned up to make
future work on it simpler.
* An experimental "version 4" format of the index file has been
introduced to reduce on-disk footprint and I/O overhead.
* "git archive" learned to produce its output without reading the
blob object it writes out in memory in its entirety.
* "git index-pack" that runs when fetching or pushing objects to
complete the packfile on the receiving end learned to use multiple
threads to do its job when available.
* The code to compute hash values for lines used by the internal diff
engine was optimized on little-endian machines, using the same
trick the kernel folks came up with.
* "git apply" had some memory leaks plugged.
* Setting up a revision traversal with many starting points was
inefficient as these were placed in a date-order priority queue
one-by-one. Now they are collected in the queue unordered first,
and sorted immediately before getting used.
* More lower-level commands learned to use the streaming API to read
from the object store without keeping everything in core.
* The weighting parameters to suggestion command name typo have been
tweaked, so that "git tags" will suggest "tag?" and not "stage?".
* Because "sh" on the user's PATH may be utterly broken on some
systems, run-command API now uses SHELL_PATH, not /bin/sh, when
spawning an external command (not applicable to Windows port).
* The API to iterate over the refs/ hierarchy has been tweaked to
allow walking only a subset of it more efficiently.
Also contains minor documentation updates and code clean-ups.
Fixes since v1.7.10
-------------------
Unless otherwise noted, all the fixes since v1.7.10 in the maintenance
releases are contained in this release (see release notes to them for
details).
* "git submodule init" used to report "registered for path ..."
even for submodules that were registered earlier.
(cherry-pick c1c259e jl/submodule-report-new-path-once later to maint).
* "git diff --stat" used to fully count a binary file with modified
execution bits whose contents is unmodified, which was not quite
right.
