Git 1.7.4-rc1Edit

From the official release announcement to the Git mailing list:

A release candidate Git 1.7.4-rc1 is available at the usual places
for testing:

 http://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/

 git-1.7.4.rc1.tar.{gz,bz2}			(source tarball)
 git-htmldocs-1.7.4.rc1.tar.{gz,bz2}		(preformatted docs)
 git-manpages-1.7.4.rc1.tar.{gz,bz2}		(preformatted docs)

The RPM binary packages for a few architectures are found in:

 testing/git-*-1.7.4.rc1-1.fc13.$arch.rpm	(RPM)


Git v1.7.4 Release Notes (draft)
================================

Updates since v1.7.3
--------------------

* The documentation Makefile now assumes by default asciidoc 8 and
  docbook-xsl >= 1.73. If you have older versions, you can set
  ASCIIDOC7 and ASCIIDOC_ROFF, respectively.

* The option parsers of various commands that create new branches (or
  rename existing ones to a new name) were too loose and users were
  allowed to give a branch a name that begins with a dash by creative
  abuse of their command line options, which only led to burning
  themselves.  The name of a branch cannot begin with a dash now.

* System-wide fallback default attributes can be stored in
  /etc/gitattributes; core.attributesfile configuration variable can
  be used to customize the path to this file.

* The thread structure generated by "git send-email" has changed
  slightly.  Setting the cover letter of the latest series as a reply
  to the cover letter of the previous series with --in-reply-to used
  to make the new cover letter and all the patches replies to the
  cover letter of the previous series; this has been changed to make
  the patches in the new series replies to the new cover letter.

* Bash completion script in contrib/ has been adjusted to be usable with
  Bash 4 (options with '=value' didn't complete)  It has been also made
  usable with zsh.

* Different pagers can be chosen depending on which subcommand is
  being run under the pager, using "pager.<subcommand>" variable.

* The hardcoded tab-width of 8 used in whitespace breakage checks is now
  configurable via the attributes mechanism.

* Support of case insensitive filesystems (i.e. "core.ignorecase") has
  been improved.  For example, the gitignore mechanism didn't pay attention
  to the case insensitivity.

* The <tree>:<path> syntax to name a blob in a tree, and :<path>
  syntax to name a blob in the index (e.g. "master:Makefile",
  ":hello.c") have been extended.  You can start <path> with "./" to
  implicitly have the (sub)directory you are in prefixed to the
  lookup.  Similarly, ":../Makefile" from a subdirectory would mean
  "the Makefile of the parent directory in the index".

* "git blame" learned --show-email option to display the e-mail
  addresses instead of the names of authors.

* "git commit" learned --fixup and --squash options to help later invocation
  of the interactive rebase.

* Command line options to "git cvsimport" whose names are in capital
  letters (-A, -M, -R and -S) can now be specified as the default in
  the .git/config file by their longer names (cvsimport.authorsFile,
  cvsimport.mergeRegex, cvsimport.trackRevisions, cvsimport.ignorePaths).

* "git daemon" can be built in MinGW environment.

* "git daemon" can take more than one --listen option to listen to
  multiple addresses.

* "git describe --exact-match" was optimized not to read commit
  objects unnecessarily.

* "git diff" and "git grep" learned how functions and subroutines
  in Fortran look like.

* "git fetch" learned "--recurse-submodules" option.

* "git mergetool" tells vim/gvim to show three-way diff by default
  (use vimdiff2/gvimdiff2 as the tool name for old behaviour).

* "git log -G<pattern>" limits the output to commits whose change has
  added or deleted lines that match the given pattern.

* "git read-tree" with no argument as a way to empty the index is
  deprecated; we might want to remove it in the future.  Users can
  use the new --empty option to be more explicit instead.

* "git repack -f" does not spend cycles to recompress objects in the
  non-delta representation anymore (use -F if you really mean it
  e.g. after you changed the core.compression variable setting).

* "git merge --log" used to limit the resulting merge log to 20
  entries; this is now customizable by giving e.g. "--log=47".

* "git merge" may work better when all files were moved out of a
  directory in one branch while a new file is created in place of that
  directory in the other branch.

* "git rebase --autosquash" can use SHA-1 object names to name which
  commit to fix up (e.g. "fixup! e83c5163").

* The default "recursive" merge strategy learned --rename-threshold
  option to influence the rename detection, similar to the -M option
  of "git diff".  From "git merge" frontend, "-X<strategy option>"
  interface, e.g. "git merge -Xrename-threshold=50% ...", can be used
  to trigger this.

* The "recursive" strategy also learned to ignore various whitespace
  changes; the most notable is -Xignore-space-at-eol.

* "git send-email" learned "--to-cmd", similar to "--cc-cmd", to read
  recipient list from a command output.

* "git send-email" learned to read and use "To:" from its input files.

* you can extend "git shell", which is often used on boxes that allow
  git-only login over ssh as login shell, with custom set of
  commands.

* The current branch name in "git status" output can be colored differently
  from the generic header color by setting "color.status.branch" variable.

* "git submodule sync" updates metainformation for all submodules,
  not just the ones that have been checked out.

* gitweb can use custom 'highlight' command with its configuration file.

* other gitweb updates.


Also contains various documentation updates.


Fixes since v1.7.3
------------------

All of the fixes in v1.7.3.X maintenance series are included in this
release, unless otherwise noted.

* "git log --author=me --author=her" did not find commits written by
  me or by her; instead it looked for commits written by me and by
  her, which is impossible.

* "git push --progress" shows progress indicators now.

* "git repack" places its temporary packs under $GIT_OBJECT_DIRECTORY/pack
  instead of $GIT_OBJECT_DIRECTORY/ to avoid cross directory renames.

* "git submodule update --recursive --other-flags" passes flags down
  to its subinvocations.