Git 1.9.1

Traditionally, releases numbered with three Dewey-decimal digits were major releases that add new features, while ones with four were maintenance releases with only fixes. This was meant to give us some flexibility to say that the difference between 1.7.12 and 1.8.0 are larger than the difference between 1.8.1 and 1.8.2 (1.7.12 was the last major release in the 1.7.x series), while reserving the difference in the first digit for really big changes (i.e. 2.0 may finally toggle a switch that makes Git incompatible with older 1.x releases out of the box).

But we found out that in practice, we do not need to have three levels of changes (an incremental that changes the third digit between 1.8.1 to 1.8.2, a larger update that changes the second digit between 1.7.12 to 1.8.0, and a huge update that changes the first digit between 1.9 and 2.0). Hence the last major release was officially called "Git 1.9" when it was released on February 14, 2014.

It logically follows that, because we are dropping the third digit (or the second, depending on how you look at it) from the numbering of major releases, the first maintenance release for Git 1.9 is named with three digits, not four.

Git 1.9.1 is such a release. Among many changes we have been cooking on the development front towards the next major release, which will be called Git 2.0, this maintenance release contains only the fixes, and everybody is encouraged to upgrade to it.

Fixes since Git 1.9 are as follows:

• "git clean -d pathspec" did not use the given pathspec correctly and ended up cleaning too much.
• "git difftool" misbehaved when the repository is bound to the working tree with the ".git file" mechanism, where a textual file ".git" tells us where it is.
• "git push" did not pay attention to branch.*.pushremote if it is defined earlier than remote.pushdefault; the order of these two variables in the configuration file should not matter, but it did by mistake.
• Codepaths that parse timestamps in commit objects have been tightened.
• "git diff --external-diff" incorrectly fed the submodule directory in the working tree to the external diff driver when it knew it is the same as one of the versions being compared.
• "git reset" needs to refresh the index when working in a working tree (it can also be used to match the index to the HEAD in an otherwise bare repository), but it failed to set up the working tree properly, causing GIT_WORK_TREE to be ignored.
• "git check-attr" when working on a repository with a working tree did not work well when the working tree was specified via the --work-tree (and obviously with --git-dir) option.
• "merge-recursive" was broken in 1.7.7 era and stopped working in an empty (temporary) working tree, when there are renames involved.  This has been corrected.
• "git rev-parse" was loose in rejecting command line arguments that do not make sense, e.g. "--default" without the required value for that option.
• include.path variable (or any variable that expects a path that can use ~username expansion) in the configuration file is not a boolean, but the code failed to check it.
• "git diff --quiet -- pathspec1 pathspec2" sometimes did not return correct status value.
• Attempting to deepen a shallow repository by fetching over smart HTTP transport failed in the protocol exchange, when no-done extension was used.  The fetching side waited for the list of shallow boundary commits after the sending end stopped talking to it.
• Allow "git cmd path/", when the 'path' is where a submodule is bound to the top-level working tree, to match 'path', despite the extra and unnecessary trailing slash (such a slash is often given by command line completion).

Have fun.