ANN: Git for Windows 1.7.0.2 preview 20100309

Git Release Notes (Git-1.7.0.2-preview20100309) Last update: 9 March 2010

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 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.

- 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, 159).

- If configured to use plink, you will have to connect with putty first 
  and accept the host key.

- 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-1.6.5.1-preview20091022

New Features

- Comes with official Git 1.7.0.2.

- Comes with Git-Cheetah (on 32-bit Windows only, for now).

- Comes with connect.exe, a SOCKS proxy.

- Tons of improvements in the installer, thanks to Sebastian Schuberth.

- On Vista, if possible, symlinks are used for the built-ins.

- Features Hany's dos2unix tool, thanks to Sebastian Schuberth.

- Updated Tcl/Tk to version 8.5.8 (thanks Pat Thoyts!).

- By default, only .git/ is hidden, to work around a bug in Eclipse 
  (thanks to Erik Faye-Lund).

Bugfixes

- Fixed threaded grep (thanks to Heiko Voigt).

- git gui was fixed for all kinds of worktree-related failures (thanks Pat 
  Thoyts).

- git gui now fully supports themed widgets (thanks Pat Thoyts and Heiko 
  Voigt).

- Git no longer complains about an unset RUNTIME_PREFIX (thanks Johannes 
  Sixt).

- git gui can Explore Working Copy on Windows again (thanks Markus 
  Heidelberg).

- git gui can create shortcuts again (fixes issue 425, thanks Heiko 
  Voigt).

- When "git checkout" cannot overwrite files because they are in use, it 
  will offer to try again, giving the user a chance to release the file 
  (thanks Heiko Voigt).

- Ctrl+W will close gitk (thanks Jens Lehmann).

- git gui no longer binds Ctrl+C, which caused problems when trying to use 
  said shortcut for the clipboard operation "Copy" (fixes issue 423, 
  thanks Pat Thoyts).

- gitk does not give up when the command line length limit is reached 
  (issue 387).

- The exit code is fixed when Git.cmd is called from cmd.exe (thanks 
  Alexey Borzenkov).

- When launched via the (non-Cheetah) shell extension, the window icon is 
  now correct (thanks Sebastian Schuberth).

- Uses a TrueType font for the console, to be able to render UTF-8 
  correctly.

- Clarified the installer's line ending options (issue 370).

- Substantially speeded up startup time from cmd unless NO_FSTAB_THREAD is 
  set (thanks Johannes Sixt).

- Update msys-1.0.dll yet again, to handle quoted parameters better 
  (thanks Heiko Voigt).

- Updated cURL to a version that supports SSPI.

- Updated tar to handle the pax headers generated by git archive.

- Updated sed to a version that can handle the filter-branch examples.

- .git* files can be associated with the default text editor (issue 397).

Hi,

On Wed, Mar 10, 2010 at 2:24 AM, Johannes Schindelin <Johannes.Schindelin@gmx.de> wrote:

I really appreciate you and msysgit's community's work, thanks.

Heya,

On Tue, Mar 9, 2010 at 19:24, Johannes Schindelin <Johannes.Schindelin@gmx.de> wrote:

Oooh, cool! I gotta try this out at my university and see if it works, if it does we can tell the sysadmis to remove TortoiseGit and install Git-Cheetah instead :D.

I remember from reading a thread about this (I think) a while ago that the default themed widget was the usual tcl/tk stuff, what do I have to do to get a different theme? Perhaps even, dare I say it, a native windows look?

Sweet, any numbers? Also, why would I need to set NO_FSTAB_THREAD?

Thank you for all the hard work Dscho, keep it up!

Thank you to the people working on msysgit as well, it looks like the day is coming fast that I can say "Git on windows? It Just Works (TM)" :).

Hi,

On Wed, 10 Mar 2010, Sverre Rabbelier wrote:

:-)

There is a lot of opportunity to improve this (and there is a lot of opportunity for me to review patches, there are still some I have to look at closely).

Good news: you do not need to do anything, gitk and git gui should now look like native applications out of the box.

Yes: http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.msysgit/7986

Basically, if you are not running Git from Git Bash, but from cmd.exe, every single call to MSys programs (such as sh.exe, perl.exe, sed.exe, etc) will take 100ms extra.

When you want to access a USB stick that you plugged in after starting Git Bash.

Feedback like this is always very much appreciated! :-)

Oh, I would not be too sure about that...

Ciao, Dscho

Heya,

On Wed, Mar 10, 2010 at 02:30, Johannes Schindelin <Johannes.Schindelin@gmx.de> wrote:

Aah, even more in the pipeline eh? Nice.

Awesome, look forward to seeing the new improved and awesomeness :).

On Mittwoch, 10. März 2010, Johannes Schindelin wrote:

1. The environment variable name is MSYS_WATCH_FSTAB.

2. Unfortunately, it does not make a plugged-in USB stick visible to a running 
bash; this non-feature is not addressed by this variable.

3. You would want to set the variable to non-zero if you frequently 
edit /etc/fstab while an interactive bash is running. :-P

-- Hannes

On 10 March 2010 00:48, Sverre Rabbelier <srabbelier@gmail.com> wrote:

That is just on unix where there is no 'native' look. On Windows it can pick up your desktop settings be they XP, Vista or old-style Windows95ish. If you are using XP style on your desktop, then gitk/git-gui will also use that. Pat Thoyts

Johannes Schindelin <Johannes.Schindelin@gmx.de> writes:

In case somebody is wondering where to download this from...

    http://code.google.com/p/msysgit/

is the URL to visit ;-)    

Thanks, msysgit folks.

On Tue, Mar 9, 2010 at 7:24 PM, Johannes Schindelin <Johannes.Schindelin@gmx.de> wrote:

thanks to all contributors for the hard work!

for instaweb, I will post soon an "how to use mongoose" instead of Apache. I managed to make it work, so we could propose it in the installer. What I need to workout is the path with spaces "program files" which I believe is the only hickup...

this is a really fast bash now. I'll try it again with a corporate machine with many network disks mounted. Nice!

I was first mislead by this feature. I thought I could also edit .git/* like config and all...

This one feels weird here on Vista: .gitignore or .gitattributes end up having no name visible at all on Explorer file view. I can only see their real names once I fire the editor, on the title bar of the editor. Is this expected ?

On Wed, Mar 10, 2010 at 1:58 AM, Christian MICHON wrote:

By default, XP and newer hide extensions. For security[1] and usability reasons, the first thing any sane person does after installing Windows is change explorer to show extensions.

So it's expected, but only if you're insane. :-)

Peter Harris

[1] Malware authors like to ship "trojan.exe" with an embedded icon that looks like the one your text editor sets on text files. Or even "trojan.txt.exe"

Hi,

On Wed, 10 Mar 2010, Christian MICHON wrote:

What do you mean? Remember: I do not have Vista, you'll have to help me a little to understand the problem. Maybe in this case, a screenshot would help. Or if you have an idea how to solve the issue, a patch :-)

Ciao, Dscho

On Wed, Mar 10, 2010 at 1:30 PM, Johannes Schindelin <Johannes.Schindelin@gmx.de> wrote:

What I meant is that in any folder view (icon,list,etc...) I see the icon corresponding to default editor files (in this case notepad), but the name is blanked. I cannot see the name of the file until I double click on it: by then, the name appears in the title bar of notepad. I hope this time the explaination is clearer.

I'll send a screenshot tonight, not at home right now :-(

I actually installed it on XP here turning this feature off (I want to find easily my .gitignore and .gitattributes).

No idea on how to solve this yet. I'll look.

Christian MICHON schrieb:

Yes, when you have your Explorer in luser-mode. Go to the Options and *turn off* "Hide extensions of known files types". This unhides the "file extensions" .gitattributes, .gitignore, but also .txt, .doc, etc. that Windows knows about. :-P

-- Hannes

On Wed, Mar 10, 2010 at 3:22 PM, Johannes Sixt <j.sixt@viscovery.net> wrote:

damn. that was it and it's so simple: stupid me, I never bothered to change those settings on vista.

thanks a bunch. I believe there's no need for the screenshot after all...

On 3/9/2010 7:24 PM, Johannes Schindelin wrote:

Thanks to all for the good work!

Stefan

Johannes Schindelin <Johannes.Schindelin@gmx.de> writes:

I'm adding my thanks to the others already given here. I'm not a windows user, so not using it myself, but it's great to know that Git can run properly on Windows! Keep the great work!

Can you give an update on how much recomandable msysgit is? I mean, at some point in time, users seemed to be happy, but I remember you discouraging people from using it in production because of remaining serious bugs. Do you think it is now stable enough to be recommanded? More reliable than the cygwin version?

Thanks,

Hi,

On Wed, 10 Mar 2010, Matthieu Moy wrote:

Thanks for those kind words!

I cannot say anything about the Cygwin version, as I haven't used it in ages.

As for Git for Windows: I still think that it would be dangerous to let users download and use Git for Windows without warning them that they did not obtain commercial support, so it is their responsibility to take care of any issues they encounter.

While there are quite a number of nice people who are more than willing to help (and don't start to count me amongst them :-), nobody should think that it is okay to complain when something does not work as expected: they should have expected that.

Having said that, I have a number of (almost) happy customers of the thing in my day-job project, and that's the only reason why I can get away with working a bit on msysGit during work hours.

Ciao, Dscho

Le 10/03/2010 17:44, Johannes Schindelin a écrit :

I'm using Cygwin version since years now. I'm building Git daily from master on Cygwin. No problem on my side with Git.

I have some issues with git-svn from time to time because some DLL are not properly relocated. I need to call Cygwin "rebaseall". This is often the case after installing a new version of SVN (under Cygwin) and/or Perl. But apart from that git-svn run like a charm on Cygwin too. I would expect Git on Cygwin a bit slower than a native version, but Git is so fast (and much faster than SVN) than it is just ok as-is.

Pascal.

On Wed, Mar 10, 2010 at 10:06 PM, Pascal Obry <pascal@obry.net> wrote:

I did set up git from cygwin on windows 2003 server with gitolite, and I'm using msysgit on the clients side.

Clearly I'll try sooner or later to remove cygwin from the equation to gain speed...

Johannes Schindelin:

The redesigned installer seems to have lost the option to choose to use Putty over OpenSSH, is there any documentation on how to set it up to use Putty anyway?

Hi,

On Mon, 22 Mar 2010, Peter Krefting wrote:

Support for Putty has not been taken away, but it caused us so many problems (because people cannot easily accept new host keys). So it is only offered if you proved that you can accept new host keys yourself, and saved a session.

Hth, Dscho

Johannes Schindelin:

That explains the reports I got about the option being shown only to some people.

Thanks.

On Mon, Mar 22, 2010 at 6:58 PM, Johannes Schindelin <Johannes.Schindelin@gmx.de> wrote:

With putty and pageant, the key with passphrase can be used. Is there any way to use key with passphrase when using the msysgit ssh?

On 23 March 2010 01:54, Ping Yin <pkufranky@gmail.com> wrote:

Use ssh-agent.

After you start the msys shell enter:

eval $(ssh-agent)

Then you can use 'ssh-add' to add a key to the agent. If it requires a password then it will prompt you at that point. Now any further ssh activity in the current session can acquire the pre-authenticated key from the agent.

On Tue, Mar 23, 2010 at 8:03 PM, Pat Thoyts <patthoyts@googlemail.com> wrote:

Thanks. I'm sorry that i didn't make it clear. I know this works for msys shell, but it doesn't work for git-gui.