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" 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.

An earlier change to page "git status" output was overwhelmingly unpopular
and has been reverted.

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 and v1.4.4.5.  If you want to keep your repositories
backwards compatible past these versions, set repack.useDeltaBaseOffset
to false or pack.indexVersion to 1, respectively.

We used to prevent sample hook scripts shipped in templates/ from
triggering by default by relying on the fact that we install them as
unexecutable, but on some filesystems, this approach does not work.
They are now shipped with ".sample" suffix.  If you want to activate
any of these samples as-is, rename them to drop the ".sample" suffix,
instead of running "chmod +x" on them.  For example, you can rename
hooks/post-update.sample to hooks/post-update to enable the sample
hook that runs update-server-info, in order to make repositories
friendly to dumb protocols (i.e. HTTP).

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.

The ".dotest" temporary area "git am" and "git rebase" use is now moved
inside the $GIT_DIR, to avoid mistakes of adding it to the project by
accident.

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.

* 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.)

* index-pack used too much memory when dealing with a deep delta chain.
  This has been optimized.

* 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.

* Performance of "git-blame -C -C" operation is vastly improved.

* 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)

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

* 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.

* By default, stash entries never expire.  Set reflogexpire in [gc
  "refs/stash"] to a reasonable value to get traditional auto-expiration
  behaviour back

* Longstanding latency issue with bash completion script has been
  addressed.  This will need to be backmerged to 'maint' later.

* pager.<cmd> configuration variable can be used to enable/disable the
  default paging behaviour per command.

* "git-add -i" has a new action 'e/dit' to allow you edit the patch hunk
  manually.

* git-am records the original tip of the branch in ORIG_HEAD before it
  starts applying patches.

* 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-apply can be told to apply a patch to a path deeper than what the
  patch records with --directory option.

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

* git-archive uses the zlib default compression level when creating
  zip archive.

* git-archive's command line options --exec and --remote can take their
  parameters as separate command line arguments, similar to other commands.
  IOW, both "--exec=path" and "--exec path" are now supported.

* With -v option, git-branch describes the remote tracking statistics
  similar to the way git-checkout reports by how many commits your branch
  is ahead/behind.

* git-branch's --contains option used to always require a commit parameter
  to limit the branches with; it now defaults to list branches that
  contains HEAD if this parameter is omitted.

* git-branch's --merged and --no-merged option used to always limit the
  branches relative to the HEAD, but they can now take an optional commit
  argument that is used in place of HEAD.

* git-bundle can read the revision arguments from the standard input.

* git-cherry-pick can replay a root commit now.

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

* "git-clone --mirror" is a handy way to set up a bare mirror repository.

* git-cvsserver learned to respond to "cvs co -c".

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

* "git-diff -p" learned to grab a better hunk header lines in
  BibTex, Pascal/Delphi, and Ruby files and also pays attention to
  chapter and part boundary in TeX documents.

* 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.

* fast-import and fast-export learned to export and import gitlinks.

* "gitk" left background process behind after being asked to dig very deep
  history and the user killed the UI; the process is killed when the UI goes
  away now.

* git-rebase records the original tip of branch in ORIG_HEAD before it is
  rewound.

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

* git-rev-parse learned $commit^! and $commit^@ notations used in "log"
  family.  These notations are available in gitk as well, because the gitk
  command internally uses rev-parse to interpret its arguments.

* git-rev-list learned --children option to show child commits it
  encountered during the traversal, instead of showing parent commits.

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

* git-shortlog honors custom output format specified with "--pretty=format:".

* "git-stash save" learned --keep-index option.  This lets you stash away the
  local changes and bring the changes staged in the index to your working
  tree for examination and testing.

* git-stash also learned branch subcommand to create a new branch out of
  stashed changes.

* git-status gives the remote tracking statistics similar to the way
  git-checkout reports by how many commits your branch is ahead/behind.

* "git-svn dcommit" is now aware of auto-props setting the subversion user
  has.

* 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)

* git-merge has been reimplemented in C.


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

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

 * git-clone ignored its -u option; the fix needs to be backported to
   'maint';

 * git-mv used to lose the distinction between changes that are staged
   and that are only in the working tree, by staging both in the index
   after moving such a path.

 * "git-rebase -i -p" rewrote the parents to wrong ones when amending
   (either edit or squash) was involved, and did not work correctly
   when fast forwarding.