Monday, January 28, 2013

Git 1.8.1.2

Another release to give fixes for a handful bugs to users who are stuck with the maintenance track ;-)  This maintenance release contains the following fixes, and other fixes to the documentation.


  • An element on GIT_CEILING_DIRECTORIES list that does not name the real path to a directory (i.e. a symbolic link) could have caused the GIT_DIR discovery logic to escape the ceiling.
  • Command line completion for "tcsh" emitted an unwanted space after completing a single directory name.
  • Command line completion leaked an unnecessary error message while looking for possible matches with paths in .
  • "git archive" did not record uncompressed size in the header when streaming a zip archive, which confused some implementations of unzip.
  • When users spelled "cc:" in lowercase in the fake "header" in the trailer part, "git send-email" failed to pick up the addresses from there. As e-mail headers field names are case insensitive, this script should follow suit and treat "cc:" and "Cc:" the same way.

For those of you who may not be familiar with how Git development works, these fixes were developed and reviewed on our mailing list (git@vger.kernel.org), and were first applied to the next branch of the main repository where developers and testers regularly pull from. They build and use the version from this branch daily to help ensuring the stability and correctness of the changes.

These changes proved to be safe after a few weeks testing period. And then they were merged to the master branch to become a part of upcoming release (1.8.2, scheduled to happen sometime in February).

Thanks to this fairly conservative development process, you can generally expect that the tip of our master branch is more stable than any released version of Git.

There are, however, people who want to avoid disruptive changes by staying behind, and to satisfy these people, among the changes that have been applied to the master branch, only the ones that are bugfixes (not feature enhancements) are merged from time to time to the maint branch and the results are tagged as maintenance releases.

This 1.8.1.2 is such a release.