Git 1.8.4-rc0

A release candidate preview Git v1.8.4-rc0 is now available for testing at the usual places.

As this cycle is a rather large update, please test this thoroughly. It contains 814 non-merge commits, from 90+ contributors (v1.8.3 consisted of 694 changes from 97 contributors).

Here are some highlights:

• "git log" learnt the "-Lbegin,end:filename" option. This starts from the specified range and digs through the history. It may still have rough edges and memory leaks, though.
• "git clean" learnt the interactive mode, modeled after "git add -i" interface.
• "git check-mailmap" is a new command that lets you inquire your .mailmap file for the canonical username and e-mail address.
• "git name-rev" learnt to name an annotated tag object name back to its tagname.
• Various subcommands of "git submodule" now works even from a subdirectory.
• "git submodule update" can optionally clone the submodule repositories shallowly.
• The "push.default=simple" mode of "git push" has been updated to behave like "current" when you push to a remote that is different from where you fetch from (e.g. via remote.pushdefault), in order to better support the triangular workflow.
• "git log" learnt the "--author-date-order" option.
• The configuration variable color.ui defaults to "auto" now.
• Instead of typing "HEAD", you can say "@" instead, e.g. "git log @".
• "git describe" learnt the "--first-parent" option.
• "git fetch $remote $branch" used to avoid touching the remote-tracking branch (you could always be explicit and say "git fetch $remote $branch:refs/remotes/$remote/$branch"). The command now updates the remote-tracking branch (if configured).
• Use of platform fnmatch(3) function (many places like pathspec matching, .gitignore and .gitattributes) have been replaced with wildmatch, allowing "foo/**/bar" to match "foo/bar", "foo/a/bar", etc.

Have fun.

Git 1.8.3.4

The latest maintenance release Git v1.8.3.4 is now available at the usual places. This is mostly to propagate documentation fixes and test updates from the master front back to the maintenance track, but there are a handful of minor fixes as well:

• The bisect log listed incorrect commits when bisection ends with only skipped ones.
• The test coverage framework was left broken for some time.
• The test suite for HTTP transport did not run with Apache 2.4.
• "git diff" used to fail when core.safecrlf is set and the working tree contents had mixed CRLF/LF line endings. Committing such a content must be prohibited, but "git diff" should help the user to locate and fix such problems without failing.

These fixes are already on the 'master' branch to be included in upcoming Git 1.8.4. Hopefully we can do its zeroth release candidate preview early this week.

Have fun.

Git 1.8.3.3

The third maintenance release for 1.8.3.x series is now available at the usual places. It contains the following fixes that have already been applied to the 'master' branch for 1.8.4.

• "git apply" parsed patches that add new files, generated by programs other than Git, incorrectly.  This is an old breakage in v1.7.11.
• Older cURL wanted piece of memory we call it with to be stable, but we updated the auth material after handing it to a call.
• "git pull" into nothing trashed "local changes" that were in the index.
• Many "git submodule" operations did not work on a submodule at a path whose name is not in ASCII.
• "cherry-pick" had a small leak in its error codepath.
• Logic used by git-send-email to suppress cc mishandled names like "A U. Thor" <author@example.xz>, where the human readable part needs to be quoted (the user input may not have the double quotes around the name, and comparison was done between quoted and unquoted strings).  It also mishandled names that need RFC2047 quoting.
• "gitweb" forgot to clear a global variable $search_regexp upon each request, mistakenly carrying over the previous search to a new one when used as a persistent CGI.
• The wildmatch engine did not honor WM_CASEFOLD option correctly.
•  "git log -c --follow $path" segfaulted upon hitting the commit that renamed the $path being followed.
• When a reflog notation is used for implicit "current branch", e.g. "git log @{u}", we did not say which branch and worse said "branch ''" in the error messages.
• Mac OS X does not like to write(2) more than INT_MAX number of bytes; work it around by chopping write(2) into smaller pieces.
• Newer MacOS X encourages the programs to compile and link with their CommonCrypto, not with OpenSSL.