Git 1.7.12-rc0

A release-candidate preview for the upcoming 1.7.12 has been tagged. The release tarballs are found at:

    http://code.google.com/p/git-core/downloads/list

as usual.

Git v1.7.12 Release Notes (draft)

Updates since v1.7.11

UI, Workflows & Features

• Git can be told to normalize pathnames it read from readdir(3) and all arguments it got from the command line into precomposed UTF-8 (assuming that they come as decomposed UTF-8), in order to work around issues on Mac OS.
• I think there still are other places that need conversion (e.g. paths that are read from stdin for some commands), but this should be a good first step in the right direction.
• Per-user $HOME/.gitconfig file can optionally be stored in $HOME/.config/git/config instead, which is in line with XDG.
• The value of core.attributesfile and core.excludesfile default to $HOME/.config/attributes and $HOME/.config/ignore respectively when these files exist.
• Logic to disambiguate abbreviated object names have been taught to take advantage of object types that are expected in the context, e.g. XXXXXX in the "git describe" output v1.2.3-gXXXXXX must be a commit object, not a blob nor a tree.  This will help us prolong the lifetime of abbreviated object names.
• "git apply" learned to wiggle the base version and perform three-way merge when a patch does not exactly apply to the version you have.
• Scripted Porcelain writers now have access to the credential API via the "git credential" plumbing command.
• "git clone --local $path" started its life as an experiment to optionally use link/copy when cloning a repository on the disk, but we didn't deprecate it after we made the option a no-op to always use the optimization.  The command learned "--no-local" option to turn this off, as a more explicit alternative over use of file:// URL.
• "git fetch" and friends used to say "remote side hung up unexpectedly" when they failed to get response they expect from the other side, but one common reason why they don't get expected response is that the remote repository does not exist or cannot be read. The error message in this case was updated to give better hints to the user.
• "git help -w $cmd" can show HTML version of documentation for "git-$cmd" by setting help.htmlpath to somewhere other than the default location where the build procedure installs them locally; the variable can even point at a http:// URL.
• "git rebase [-i] --root $tip" can now be used to rewrite all the history leading to "$tip" down to the root commit.
• "git rebase -i" learned "-x " to insert "exec " after each commit in the resulting history.
• "git status" gives finer classification to various states of paths in conflicted state and offer advice messages in its output.
• "git submodule" learned to deal with nested submodule structure where a module is contained within a module whose origin is specified as a relative URL to its superproject's origin.
• A rather heavy-ish "git completion" script has been split to create a separate "git prompting" script, to help lazy-autoloading of the completion part while making prompting part always available.
• "gitweb" pays attention to various forms of credits that are similar to "Signed-off-by:" lines in the commit objects and highlights them accordingly.

Foreign Interface

• "mediawiki" remote helper (in contrib/) learned to handle file attachments.
• "git p4" now uses "Jobs:" and "p4 move" when appropriate.
• vcs-svn has been updated to clean-up compilation, lift 32-bit limitations, etc.

Performance, Internal Implementation, etc. (please report possible regressions)

• Some tests showed false failures caused by a bug in ecryptofs.
• We no longer use AsciiDoc7 syntax in our documentation and favor a more modern style.
• "git am --rebasing" codepath was taught to grab authorship, log message and the patch text directly out of existing commits.  This will help rebasing commits that have confusing "diff" output in their log messages.
• "git index-pack" and "git pack-objects" use streaming API to read from the object store to avoid having to hold a large blob object in-core while they are doing their thing.
• Code to match paths with exclude patterns learned to avoid calling fnmatch() by comparing fixed leading substring literally when possible.
• "git log -n 1 -- rarely-touched-path" was spending unnecessary cycles after showing the first change to find the next one, only to discard it.

Also contains minor documentation updates and code clean-ups.

Fixes since v1.7.11

Unless otherwise noted, all the fixes since v1.7.11 in the maintenance releases are contained in this release (see release notes to them for details).

• "git commit-tree" learned a more natural "-p " order of arguments long time ago, but recently forgot it by mistake.  (merge 4b7518a kk/maint-commit-tree later to maint).
• "git diff --no-ext-diff" did not output anything for a typechange filepair when GIT_EXTERNAL_DIFF is in effect.  (merge c12f82a jv/maint-no-ext-diff later to maint).
• When "git am" failed, old timers knew to check .git/rebase-apply/patch to see what went wrong, but we never told the users about it.  (merge 14bf2d5 pg/maint-1.7.9-am-where-is-patch later to maint).
• When "git submodule add" clones a submodule repository, it can get confused where to store the resulting submodule repository in the superproject's .git/ directory when there is a symbolic link in the path to the current directory.  (merge 6eafa6d jl/maint-1.7.10-recurse-submodules-with-symlink later to maint).
• In 1.7.9 era, we taught "git rebase" about the raw timestamp format but we did not teach the same trick to "filter-branch", which rolled a similar logic on its own.  (merge 44b85e89 jc/maint-filter-branch-epoch-date later to maint).