Git v1.7.8 Release Notes
========================

Updates since v1.7.7
--------------------

 * Some git-svn, git-gui, git-p4 (in contrib) and msysgit updates.

 * Updates to bash completion scripts.

 * The build procedure has been taught to take advantage of computed
   dependency automatically when the compiler supports it.

 * The date parser now accepts timezone designators that lack minutes
   part and also has a colon between "hh:mm".

 * The contents of the /etc/mailname file, if exists, is used as the
   default value of the hostname part of the committer/author e-mail.

 * "git am" learned how to read from patches generated by Hg.

 * "git archive" talking with a remote repository can report errors
   from the remote side in a more informative way.

 * "git branch" learned an explicit --list option to ask for branches
   listed, optionally with a glob matching pattern to limit its output.

 * "git check-attr" learned "--cached" option to look at .gitattributes
   files from the index, not from the working tree.

 * Variants of "git cherry-pick" and "git revert" that take multiple
   commits learned to "--continue" and "--abort".

 * "git daemon" gives more human readable error messages to clients
   using ERR packets when appropriate.

 * Errors at the network layer is logged by "git daemon".

 * "git diff" learned "--minimal" option to spend extra cycles to come
   up with a minimal patch output.

 * "git diff" learned "--function-context" option to show the whole
   function as context that was affected by a change.

 * "git difftool" can be told to skip launching the tool for a path by
   answering 'n' to its prompt.

 * "git fetch" learned to honor transfer.fsckobjects configuration to
   validate the objects that were received from the other end, just like
   "git receive-pack" (the receiving end of "git push") does.

 * "git fetch" makes sure that the set of objects it received from the
   other end actually completes the history before updating the refs.
   "git receive-pack" (the receiving end of "git push") learned to do the
   same.

 * "git fetch" learned that fetching/cloning from a regular file on the
   filesystem is not necessarily a request to unpack a bundle file; the
   file could be ".git" with "gitdir: <path>" in it.

 * "git for-each-ref" learned "%(contents:subject)", "%(contents:body)"
   and "%(contents:signature)". The last one is useful for signed tags.

 * "git grep" used to incorrectly pay attention to .gitignore files
   scattered in the directory it was working in even when "--no-index"
   option was used. It no longer does this. The "--exclude-standard"
   option needs to be given to explicitly activate the ignore
   mechanism.

 * "git grep" learned "--untracked" option, where given patterns are
    searched in untracked (but not ignored) files as well as tracked
    files in the working tree, so that matches in new but not yet
    added files do not get missed.

 * The recursive merge backend no longer looks for meaningless
   existing merges in submodules unless in the outermost merge.

 * "git log" and friends learned "--children" option.

 * "git ls-remote" learned to respond to "-h"(elp) requests.

 * "mediawiki" remote helper can interact with (surprise!) MediaWiki
   with "git fetch" & "git push".

 * "git merge" learned the "--edit" option to allow users to edit the
   merge commit log message.

 * "git rebase -i" can be told to use special purpose editor suitable
   only for its insn sheet via sequence.editor configuration variable.

 * "git send-email" learned to respond to "-h"(elp) requests.

 * "git send-email" allows the value given to sendemail.aliasfile to begin
   with "~/" to refer to the $HOME directory.

 * "git send-email" forces use of Authen::SASL::Perl to work around
   issues between Authen::SASL::Cyrus and AUTH PLAIN/LOGIN.

 * "git stash" learned "--include-untracked" option to stash away
   untracked/ignored cruft from the working tree.

 * "git submodule clone" does not leak an error message to the UI
   level unnecessarily anymore.

 * "git submodule update" learned to honor "none" as the value for
   submodule.<name>.update to specify that the named submodule should
   not be checked out by default.

 * When populating a new submodule directory with "git submodule init",
   the $GIT_DIR metainformation directory for submodules is created inside
   $GIT_DIR/modules/<name>/ directory of the superproject and referenced
   via the gitfile mechanism. This is to make it possible to switch
   between commits in the superproject that has and does not have the
   submodule in the tree without re-cloning.

 * "gitweb" leaked unescaped control characters from syntax hiliter
   outputs.

 * "gitweb" can be told to give custom string at the end of the HTML
   HEAD element.

 * "gitweb" now has its own manual pages.


Also contains other documentation updates and minor code cleanups.


Fixes since v1.7.7
------------------

Unless otherwise noted, all fixes in the 1.7.7.X maintenance track are
included in this release.

 * HTTP transport did not use pushurl correctly, and also did not tell
   what host it is trying to authenticate with when asking for
   credentials.
   (merge deba493 jk/http-auth later to maint).

 * "git blame" was aborted if started from an uncommitted content and
   the path had the textconv filter in effect.
   (merge 8518088 ss/blame-textconv-fake-working-tree later to maint).

 * Adding many refs to the local repository in one go (e.g. "git fetch"
   that fetches many tags) and looking up a ref by name in a repository
   with too many refs were unnecessarily slow.
   (merge 17d68a54d jp/get-ref-dir-unsorted later to maint).

 * Report from "git commit" on untracked files was confused under
   core.ignorecase option.
   (merge 395c7356 jk/name-hash-dirent later to maint).

 * "git merge" did not understand ":/<pattern>" as a way to name a commit.

 " "git push" on the receiving end used to call post-receive and post-update
   hooks for attempted removal of non-existing refs.
   (merge 160b81ed ph/push-to-delete-nothing later to maint).

 * Help text for "git remote set-url" and "git remote set-branches"
   were misspelled.
   (merge c49904e fc/remote-seturl-usage-fix later to maint).
   (merge 656cdf0 jc/remote-setbranches-usage-fix later to maint).