Upgrading to Git 1.5.5 Edit

Created 4/9/2008, updated 5/18/2017

These notes were made while doing the upgrade to Git 1.5.5 on two machines:

on a local machine running Mac OS X Leopard 10.5.2, built inside a local clone of the official Git repository
on a remote machine running RHEL 5, built from downloaded source tarballs

Local upgrade

From inside an existing clone of the Git repo:

# get latest changes
git fetch

# check validity of signature on the release tag
git tag -v v1.5.5

# note that I am using "co" here as an alias for "checkout"
git co v1.5.5

# clean up any cruft that may be laying around from previous builds
make clean

# build and test; see note below about building the docs
make prefix=/usr/local test doc

# actually install
sudo make prefix=/usr/local install install-doc

Bash completion update

The Bash completion add-on has seen some updates in this release, so I updated that too:

cp contrib/completion/git-completion.bash ~/.git-completion.sh

This works because I have a couple of lines like this in my ~/.bash_profile:

GIT_COMPLETION=~/.git-completion.sh
test -f "${GIT_COMPLETION}" && source "${GIT_COMPLETION}"

A note on building the documentation

As always, if you want to build the documentation like that you'll need to have the tool chain set up (see "Setting up the Git documentation build chain on Mac OS X Leopard").

If you don't want to set up the tool chain you can download and install the manual pages as shown below.

Remote upgrade

wget http://kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/git-1.5.5.tar.bz2 \
     http://kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/git-1.5.5.tar.bz2.sign \
     http://kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/git-manpages-1.5.5.tar.bz2 \
     http://kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/git-manpages-1.5.5.tar.bz2.sign
gpg --verify git-1.5.5.tar.bz2.sign git-1.5.5.tar.bz2
gpg --verify git-manpages-1.5.5.tar.bz2.sign git-manpages-1.5.5.tar.bz2
tar xjvf git-1.5.5.tar.bz2
cd git-1.5.5
make configure
./configure --without-tcltk
make test
sudo make install
make clean
make configure
./configure
make GITWEB_PROJECTROOT=/pub/git/path_to_public_repos \
     GITWEB_LIST=/pub/git/conf/gitweb-projects \
     GITWEB_STRICT_EXPORT=1 \
     GITWEB_CSS="/gitweb.css" \
     GITWEB_LOGO="/git-logo.png" \
     GITWEB_FAVICON="/git-favicon.png" \
     GITWEB_CONFIG="/pub/git/conf/gitweb.conf" \
     gitweb/gitweb.cgi
sudo -u git cp gitweb/gitweb.{cgi,css} \
               gitweb/git-*.png \
               /pub/git/public_html
cd ..
sudo tar xjv -C /usr/local/man -f git-manpages-1.5.5.tar.bz2

Other tweaks

I ran this on each of my machines:

git config --global color.ui auto

Favorite changes from this release

* "git commit" does not run lstat(2) more than necessary
  anymore.

* Bash completion script (in contrib) are aware of more commands and
  options.

* A catch-all "color.ui" configuration variable can be used to
  enable coloring of all color-capable commands, instead of
  individual ones such as "color.status" and "color.branch".

* The commands refused to take absolute pathnames where they
  require pathnames relative to the work tree or the current
  subdirectory.  They now can take absolute pathnames in such a
  case as long as the pathnames do not refer outside of the
  work tree.  E.g. "git add $(pwd)/foo" now works.

* "git help <alias>" now reports "'git <alias>' is alias to <what>",
  instead of saying "No manual entry for git-<alias>".

* "git diff" learned "--dirstat" option to show birds-eye-summary of
  changes more concisely than "--diffstat".

* "git gc" now automatically prunes unreachable objects that are two
  weeks old or older.

* "git help <alias>" now reports "'git <alias>' is alias to <what>",
  instead of saying "No manual entry for git-<alias>".

* "git stash" learned "pop" command, that applies the latest stash and
  removes it from the stash, and "drop" command to discard the named
  stash entry.

* Two conflict hunks that are separated by a very short span of common
  lines are now coalesced into one larger hunk, to make the result easier
  to read.

Upgrading to Git 1.5.5Edit