Re: Announce: Git for Windows 1.6.3

>
> Hi,
>
> this mail tries to inform you that a new version of Git for Windows has
> been released.  Overall, the differences to Git 1.6.3 have been reduced
> dramatically, thanks to the immense efforts of Johannes Sixt on the test
> suite.
>
> There are two major modifications relative to git.git, though: Marius
> Storm-Olsen's readdir() and nedmalloc patches.  They are rather large, but
> well-contained changes, and we tested extensively in the last few weeks.
>
> One consequence is that the test-suite no longer takes 45 minutes on the
> machine I test on, but less than 20 minutes.
>
> And now, without further ado, the release notes:
>
> Git Release Notes (Git-1.6.3-preview20090507)
> Last update: 07 May 2009
>
> Known issues
>
> - Some commands are not yet supported on Windows and excluded from the
>  installation; namely: git archimport, git cvsexportcommit, git
>  cvsimport, git cvsserver, git instaweb, git send-email, git shell.
> - The Logitec QuickCam software can cause spurious crashes. See "Why does
>  make often crash creating a sh.exe.stackdump file when I try to compile
>  my source code?" on the MinGW Wiki
>  (http://www.mingw.org/wiki/Environment_issues)
> - The Quick Launch icon will only be installed for the user running setup
>  (typically the Administrator). This is a technical restriction and will
>  not change.
> - Git Bash launched through the Explorer shell extension does not have the
>  git icon in its taskbar. This is a technical restriction and will not
>  change.
> - git send-mail does not work properly (Issue 27).
> - curl uses $HOME/_netrc instead of $HOME/.netrc.
> - If you want to specify a different location for --upload-pack, you have
>  to start the absolute path with two slashes. Otherwise MSys will mangle
>  the path.
> - git and bash have serious problems with non-ASCII file names (Issue 80,
>  108, 159, 188).
> - If configured to use plink, you will have to connect with putty first,
>  as you cannot accept the host key due to the console window being
>  blocked (Issue 96).
> - MinGW does not support IPv6 yet (Issue 182).
> - When run from cmd.exe instead of Git Bash, some characters seem to be
>  "swallowed" from Git's output (Issue 192).
> - There are a spurious write errors during rebase (Issue 200) that seem
>  not to be reproducible on most computers.
> - As merge tools are executed using the MSys bash, options starting with
>  "/" need to be handled specially: MSys would interpret that as a POSIX
>  path, so you need to double the slash (Issue 226).  Example: instead of
>  "/base", say "//base".  Also, extra care has to be paid to pass Windows
>  programs Windows paths, as they have no clue about MSys style POSIX
>  paths -- You can use something like $(cmd //c echo "$POSIXPATH").
>
> Changes since Git-1.6.2.2-preview20090408
>
> New Features
>
> - Comes with official git 1.6.3.
> - Thanks to Marius Storm-Olsen, Git has a substantially faster readdir()
>  implementation now.
> - Marius Storm-Olsen also contributed a patch to include nedmalloc, again
>  speeding up Git noticably.
> - Compiled with GCC 4.4.0
>
> Bugfixes
>
> - Portable Git contains a README.portable.
> - Portable Git now actually includes the builtins.
> - Portable Git includes git-cmd.bat and git-bash.bat.
> - Portable Git is now shipped as a .7z; it still is a self-extracting
>  archive if you rename it to .exe.
> - Git includes the Perl Encode module now.
> - Git now includes the filter-branch tool.
> - There is a workaround for a Windows 7 regression triggering a crash in
>  the progress reporting (e.g. during a clone). This fixes issues 236 and
>  247.
> - gitk tries not to crash when it is closed while reading references
>  (Issue 125, thanks Pat Thoyts).
> - In some setups, hard-linking is not as reliable as it should be, so we
>  have a workaround which avoids hard links in some situations (Issues 222
>  and 229).
> - git-svn sets core.autocrlf to false now, hopefully shutting up most of
>  the git-svn reports.
>
> Ciao,
> Dscho (on behalf of the msysGit team)
>
>