Junio C HamanoA release candidate Git 1.7.4-rc1 is available at the usual places for testing:
http://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/
git-1.7.4.rc1.tar.{gz,bz2} (source tarball)
git-htmldocs-1.7.4.rc1.tar.{gz,bz2} (preformatted docs)
git-manpages-1.7.4.rc1.tar.{gz,bz2} (preformatted docs)The RPM binary packages for a few architectures are found in:
testing/git-*-1.7.4.rc1-1.fc13.$arch.rpm (RPM)
Git v1.7.4 Release Notes (draft) ================================
Updates since v1.7.3 --------------------
* The documentation Makefile now assumes by default asciidoc 8 and docbook-xsl >= 1.73. If you have older versions, you can set ASCIIDOC7 and ASCIIDOC_ROFF, respectively.
* The option parsers of various commands that create new branches (or rename existing ones to a new name) were too loose and users were allowed to give a branch a name that begins with a dash by creative abuse of their command line options, which only led to burning themselves. The name of a branch cannot begin with a dash now.
* System-wide fallback default attributes can be stored in /etc/gitattributes; core.attributesfile configuration variable can be used to customize the path to this file.
* The thread structure generated by "git send-email" has changed slightly. Setting the cover letter of the latest series as a reply to the cover letter of the previous series with --in-reply-to used to make the new cover letter and all the patches replies to the cover letter of the previous series; this has been changed to make the patches in the new series replies to the new cover letter.
* Bash completion script in contrib/ has been adjusted to be usable with Bash 4 (options with '=value' didn't complete) It has been also made usable with zsh.
* Different pagers can be chosen depending on which subcommand is being run under the pager, using "pager.<subcommand>" variable.
* The hardcoded tab-width of 8 used in whitespace breakage checks is now configurable via the attributes mechanism.
* Support of case insensitive filesystems (i.e. "core.ignorecase") has been improved. For example, the gitignore mechanism didn't pay attention to the case insensitivity.
* The <tree>:<path> syntax to name a blob in a tree, and :<path> syntax to name a blob in the index (e.g. "master:Makefile", ":hello.c") have been extended. You can start <path> with "./" to implicitly have the (sub)directory you are in prefixed to the lookup. Similarly, ":../Makefile" from a subdirectory would mean "the Makefile of the parent directory in the index".
* "git blame" learned --show-email option to display the e-mail addresses instead of the names of authors.
* "git commit" learned --fixup and --squash options to help later invocation of the interactive rebase.
* Command line options to "git cvsimport" whose names are in capital letters (-A, -M, -R and -S) can now be specified as the default in the .git/config file by their longer names (cvsimport.authorsFile, cvsimport.mergeRegex, cvsimport.trackRevisions, cvsimport.ignorePaths).
* "git daemon" can be built in MinGW environment.
* "git daemon" can take more than one --listen option to listen to multiple addresses.
* "git describe --exact-match" was optimized not to read commit objects unnecessarily.
* "git diff" and "git grep" learned how functions and subroutines in Fortran look like.
* "git fetch" learned "--recurse-submodules" option.
* "git mergetool" tells vim/gvim to show three-way diff by default (use vimdiff2/gvimdiff2 as the tool name for old behaviour).
* "git log -G<pattern>" limits the output to commits whose change has added or deleted lines that match the given pattern.
* "git read-tree" with no argument as a way to empty the index is deprecated; we might want to remove it in the future. Users can use the new --empty option to be more explicit instead.
* "git repack -f" does not spend cycles to recompress objects in the non-delta representation anymore (use -F if you really mean it e.g. after you changed the core.compression variable setting).
* "git merge --log" used to limit the resulting merge log to 20 entries; this is now customizable by giving e.g. "--log=47".
* "git merge" may work better when all files were moved out of a directory in one branch while a new file is created in place of that directory in the other branch.
* "git rebase --autosquash" can use SHA-1 object names to name which commit to fix up (e.g. "fixup! e83c5163").
* The default "recursive" merge strategy learned --rename-threshold option to influence the rename detection, similar to the -M option of "git diff". From "git merge" frontend, "-X<strategy option>" interface, e.g. "git merge -Xrename-threshold=50% ...", can be used to trigger this.
* The "recursive" strategy also learned to ignore various whitespace changes; the most notable is -Xignore-space-at-eol.
* "git send-email" learned "--to-cmd", similar to "--cc-cmd", to read recipient list from a command output.
* "git send-email" learned to read and use "To:" from its input files.
* you can extend "git shell", which is often used on boxes that allow git-only login over ssh as login shell, with custom set of commands.
* The current branch name in "git status" output can be colored differently from the generic header color by setting "color.status.branch" variable.
* "git submodule sync" updates metainformation for all submodules, not just the ones that have been checked out.
* gitweb can use custom 'highlight' command with its configuration file.
* other gitweb updates.
Also contains various documentation updates.
Fixes since v1.7.3 ------------------
All of the fixes in v1.7.3.X maintenance series are included in this release, unless otherwise noted.
* "git log --author=me --author=her" did not find commits written by me or by her; instead it looked for commits written by me and by her, which is impossible.
* "git push --progress" shows progress indicators now.
* "git repack" places its temporary packs under $GIT_OBJECT_DIRECTORY/pack instead of $GIT_OBJECT_DIRECTORY/ to avoid cross directory renames.
* "git submodule update --recursive --other-flags" passes flags down to its subinvocations.