Git 1.8.5

The latest release Git 1.8.5 is out. Among many incremental improvements, there are a handful of changes that are worth mentioning:

• Magic pathspecs like ":(icase)makefile" (matches both Makefile and makefile) and ":(glob)foo/**/bar" (matches "bar" in "foo" and any subdirectory of "foo") can be used in more places.
• The "http.*" configuration variables can now be specified for individual URLs. E.g
  
  [http] sslVerify = true
  [http "https://weak.example.com/"] sslVerify = false
  
  would turn on http.sslVerify for everybody, except when talking with the specified URL.
• "git mv A B" when moving a submodule has been taught to relocate the submodule's working tree and to adjust the paths in the .gitmodules file.
• "git blame" can now take more than one -L option to discover the origin of multiple blocks of lines.
• The http transport clients can optionally ask to save cookies with the http.savecookies configuration variable.
• "git push" learned a more fine grained control over a blunt "--force" when requesting a non-fast-forward update with the "--force-with-lease=<refname>:<expected object name>" option.
• "git diff --diff-filter=<classes of changes>" can now take lowercase letters (e.g. "--diff-filter=d") to mean "show everything but these classes".  "git diff-files -q" is now a deprecated synonym for "git diff-files --diff-filter=d".
• "git gc" exits early without doing any work when it detects that another instance of itself is already running.

The Codebreakers

Every once in a while, I receive gifts from satisfied Git friends, chosen from my Amazon Wish list. And today was such a day. As I have been fairly busy cleaning up the fallout from our recent move and finally things are beginning less hectic, it turns out to be a perfect distraction gift for me, too ;-)

I only read the first few sections so far (it is a big, thick book and it would take me forever to finish reading and then write about it and thanking the person). Thanks, MTM!

Git 1.8.4.3

The latest maintenance release Git v1.8.4.3 has been tagged and is available at the usual places (see the list of public repositories). The fixes that have already merged to the 'master' branch for the upcoming Git v1.8.5 feature release are all there.

Here are the highlights, relative to the previous maintenance release v1.8.4.2:

• The interaction between use of Perl in our test suite and NO_PERL has been clarified a bit.
  
• A fast-import stream expresses a pathname with funny characters by quoting them in C style; remote-hg remote helper (in contrib/) forgot to unquote such a path.
  
• One long-standing flaw in the pack transfer protocol used by "git clone" was that there was no way to tell the other end which branch "HEAD" points at, and the receiving end needed to guess. A new capability has been defined in the pack protocol to convey this information so that cloning from a repository with more than one branches pointing at the same commit where the HEAD is at now reliably sets the initial branch in the resulting repository.
  
• We did not handle cases where http transport gets redirected during the authorization request (e.g. from http:// to https://).
  
• "git rev-list --objects ^v1.0^ v1.0" gave v1.0 tag itself in the output, but "git rev-list --objects v1.0^..v1.0" did not.
  
• The fall-back parsing of commit objects with broken author or committer lines were less robust than ideal in picking up the timestamps.
  
• Bash prompting code to deal with an SVN remote as an upstream were coded in a way not supported by older Bash versions (3.x).
  
• "git checkout topic", when there is not yet a local "topic" branch but there is a unique remote-tracking branch for a remote "topic" branch, pretended as if "git checkout -t -b topic remote/$r/topic" (for that unique remote $r) was run. This hack however was not implemented for "git checkout topic --".
  
• Coloring around octopus merges in "log --graph" output was screwy.
  
• We did not generate HTML version of documentation to "git subtree" in contrib/.
  
• The synopsis section of "git unpack-objects" documentation has been clarified a bit.
  
• An ancient How-To on serving Git repositories on an HTTP server lacked a warning that it has been mostly superseded with a more modern way.