Git 1.8.1

The latest release has just been tagged. Thanks, everybody, and a happy new year.

Git v1.8.1 Release Notes
========================

Backward compatibility notes
----------------------------

In the next major release (not *this* one), we will change the
behavior of the "git push" command.

When "git push [$there]" does not say what to push, we have used the
traditional "matching" semantics so far (all your branches were sent
to the remote as long as there already are branches of the same name
over there).  We will use the "simple" semantics that pushes the
current branch to the branch with the same name, only when the current
branch is set to integrate with that remote branch.  There is a user
preference configuration variable "push.default" to change this, and
"git push" will warn about the upcoming change until you set this
variable in this release.

"git branch --set-upstream" is deprecated and may be removed in a
relatively distant future.  "git branch [-u|--set-upstream-to]" has
been introduced with a saner order of arguments to replace it.


Updates since v1.8.0
--------------------

UI, Workflows & Features

 * Command-line completion scripts for tcsh and zsh have been added.

 * "git-prompt" scriptlet (in contrib/completion) can be told to paint
   pieces of the hints in the prompt string in colors.

 * Some documentation pages that used to ship only in the plain text
   format are now formatted in HTML as well.

 * We used to have a workaround for a bug in ancient "less" that
   causes it to exit without any output when the terminal is resized.
   The bug has been fixed in "less" version 406 (June 2007), and the
   workaround has been removed in this release.

 * When "git checkout" checks out a branch, it tells the user how far
   behind (or ahead) the new branch is relative to the remote tracking
   branch it builds upon.  The message now also advises how to sync
   them up by pushing or pulling.  This can be disabled with the
   advice.statusHints configuration variable.

 * "git config --get" used to diagnose presence of multiple
   definitions of the same variable in the same configuration file as
   an error, but it now applies the "last one wins" rule used by the
   internal configuration logic.  Strictly speaking, this may be an
   API regression but it is expected that nobody will notice it in
   practice.

 * A new configuration variable "diff.context" can be used to
   give the default number of context lines in the patch output, to
   override the hardcoded default of 3 lines.

 * "git format-patch" learned the "--notes=" option to give
   notes for the commit after the three-dash lines in its output.

 * "git log -p -S" now looks for the  after applying
   the textconv filter (if defined); earlier it inspected the contents
   of the blobs without filtering.

 * "git log --grep=" learned to honor the "grep.patterntype"
   configuration set to "perl".

 * "git replace -d 

Is there any science in Amazon pricing?

I keep a handful of stuff in the "Saved for later" category in my Amazon shopping cart. It is amusing to see that prices of some items constantly keep changing.

Take these earbuds, for example. I listen to podcasts while commuting with a pair of earbuds plugged to my phone, and for that purpose audiophile-grade fidelity is not a requirement. Ones from different brands I tried over time, including these, have developed frayed wire just outside the connector plug and died after several months' use. Cheap earbuds are consumables to me, and I keep a couple of unopened spares around, and restock every once in a while.

They used to be around $20, but among several colors, I noticed that one particular color started selling below $10 a few weeks ago. A few days ago it was at $8.26 and then this morning I saw it at $8.06. Another example I saw was that a deck of cards that lists at $45 fluctuated both upwards and downwards between around $30 to $45 within just a few weeks. I saw a similar pattern between $140-$160 for a pair of men's shoes within three weeks.

I am guessing one of the reasons why they keep changing the prices is because they want to encourage customers to come back to their shopping cart often. I however wonder how the price fluctuations are computed. Is it random-walk just to make sure that "The prices of items in your cart changed" notice appears often enough, or is there a deep science based on supply-and-demand and consumer psychology involved? Perhaps they are measuring how low they have to go before I move an item out of the "Saved for later" bin to see how bad a cheapskate I am?

I can understand why the price of this DVD that I kept in the "Saved for later" for the last three years gradually climbed before December 25th and then dropped soon after that day every year. But I do not expect there is much seasonality in demand with earbuds or deck of cards.

Git 1.8.1-rc3

I was hoping that we can do the real 1.8.1 release this weekend, and have a slow week or two towards the new year, but I ended up with an extra release candidate. Hopefully this will be the last rc release before the real thing.

A good news is that this delay was not caused by any last minute show-stopper regression. Rather, it was only to improve the quality of the pre-formatted documentation pages that are produced when the release is made. Relative to the previous 1.8.1-rc2, the only changes in the source tarball are documentation updates.

I've updated the AsciiDoc toolchain that is used to produce the pre-formatted documentation pages (git-htmldocs and git-manpages) to a newer version. I was assuming that the distributions all build their own versions of documentation pages with their versions of tools, but apparently some of them cheat and package these pre-formatted pages and give them to their customers. So if you are a developers of such a distribution, you may want to double-check the documentation tarballs for this release candidate.

The final will be tagged sometime around the end of the year or early next year.

Git 1.8.0.2

While we advance toward the v1.8.1 release on the 'master' front, fixes to a few bugs have been merged to the maintenance track and v1.8.0.2 has been tagged.


The release tarballs are found at:

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

and their SHA-1 checksums are:

1e1640794596da40f35194c29a8cc4e41c6b4f6d  git-1.8.0.2.tar.gz
6b9e14c5b19b2e27605014252febd61a700012a3  git-htmldocs-1.8.0.2.tar.gz
ce0673256ce90451269a82a2464eab060adbfec6  git-manpages-1.8.0.2.tar.gz

Please upgrade.

Fixes since v1.8.0.1

• Various codepaths have workaround for a common misconfiguration to spell "UTF-8" as "utf8", but it was not used uniformly.  Most notably, mailinfo (which is used by "git am") lacked this support.
• We failed to mention a file without any content change but whose permission bit was modified, or (worse yet) a new file without any content in the "git diff --stat" output.
• When "--stat-count" hides a diffstat for binary contents, the total   number of added and removed lines at the bottom was computed incorrectly.
• When "--stat-count" hides a diffstat for unmerged paths, the total   number of affected files at the bottom of the "diff --stat" output was computed incorrectly.
• "diff --shortstat" miscounted the total number of affected files when there were unmerged paths.
• "git p4" used to try expanding malformed "$keyword$" that spans across multiple lines.
• "git update-ref -d --deref SYM" to delete a ref through a symbolic ref that points to it did not remove it correctly.
• Syntax highlighting in "gitweb" was not quite working.

Also contains other minor fixes and documentation updates.