"The latest feature release GIT 1.5.5 is available at the usual places," began Git maintainer Junio Hamano, adding "we kept this cycle just slightly over two months, as the previous 1.5.4 cycle was painfully tooooo long."
Git is a distributed version control system that was originally written by Linus Torvalds in April of 2005. It was written to be only a temporary replacement for BitKeeper, which Linus had been using to manage kernel source code since February of 2002. Junio Hamano took over maintainership of Git in July of 2005, and the tool has long since become quite popular outside of even Linux kernel development. Regarding the latest stable release, Junio highlighted some of the changes, including:
"Comes with git-gui 0.10.1; bunch of portability improvement patches coming from an effort to port to Solaris has been applied; 'git fetch' over the native git protocol used to make a connection to find out the set of current remote refs and another to actually download the pack data. We now use only one connection for these tasks; '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'; bash completion's prompt helper function can talk about operation in-progress (e.g. merge, rebase, etc.); 'git help' can use different backends to show manual pages and this can be configured using 'man.viewer' configuration; 'git gui' learned an auto-spell checking; 'git checkout' and 'git remote' are rewritten in C; 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."
From: Junio C Hamano
Subject: [ANNOUNCE] GIT 1.5.5
Date: Apr 8, 11:51 pm 2008
The latest feature release GIT 1.5.5 is available at the usual
places:
http://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/
git-1.5.5.tar.{gz,bz2} (tarball)
git-htmldocs-1.5.5.tar.{gz,bz2} (preformatted docs)
git-manpages-1.5.5.tar.{gz,bz2} (preformatted docs)
RPMS/$arch/git-*-1.5.5-1.$arch.rpm (RPM)
We kept this cycle just slightly over two months, as the previous 1.5.4
cycle was painfully tooooo long.
GIT v1.5.5 Release Notes
========================
Updates since v1.5.4
--------------------
(subsystems)
* Comes with git-gui 0.10.1
(portability)
* We shouldn't ask for BSD group ownership semantics by setting g+s bit
on directories on older BSD systems that refuses chmod() by non root
users. BSD semantics is the default there anyway.
* Bunch of portability improvement patches coming from an effort to port
to Solaris has been applied.
(performance)
* On platforms with suboptimal qsort(3) implementation, there
is an option to use more reasonable substitute we ship with
our software.
* New configuration variable "pack.packsizelimit" can be used
in place of command line option --max-pack-size.
* "git fetch" over the native git protocol used to make a
connection to find out the set of current remote refs and
another to actually download the pack data. We now use only
one connection for these tasks.
* "git commit" does not run lstat(2) more than necessary
anymore.
(usability, bells and whistles)
* Bash completion script (in contrib) are aware of more commands and
options.
* You can be warned when core.autocrlf conversion is applied in
such a way that results in an irreversible conversion.
* 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.
* Error messages used to be sent to stderr, only to get hidden,
when $PAGER was in use. They now are sent to stdout along
with the command output to be shown in the $PAGER.
* A pattern "foo/" in .gitignore file now matches a directory
"foo". Pattern "foo" also matches as before.
* bash completion's prompt helper function can talk about
operation in-progress (e.g. merge, rebase, etc.).
* Configuration variables "url.<usethis>.insteadof = <otherurl>" can be
used to tell "git-fetch" and "git-push" to use different URL than what
is given from the command line.
* "git add -i" behaves better even before you make an initial commit.
* "git am" refused to run from a subdirectory without a good reason.
* After "git apply --whitespace=fix" fixes whitespace errors in a patch,
a line before the fix can appear as a context or preimage line in a
later patch, causing the patch not to apply. The command now knows to
see through whitespace fixes done to context lines to successfully
apply such a patch series.
* "git branch" (and "git checkout -b") to branch from a local branch can
optionally set "branch.<name>.merge" to mark the new branch to build on
the other local branch, when "branch.autosetupmerge" is set to
"always", or when passing the command line option "--track" (this option
was ignored when branching from local branches). By default, this does
not happen when branching from a local branch.
* "git checkout" to switch to a branch that has "branch.<name>.merge" set
(i.e. marked to build on another branch) reports how much the branch
and the other branch diverged.
* When "git checkout" has to update a lot of paths, it used to be silent
for 4 seconds before it showed any progress report. It is now a bit
more impatient and starts showing progress report early.
* "git commit" learned a new hook "prepare-commit-msg" that can
inspect what is going to be committed and prepare the commit
log message template to be edited.
* "git cvsimport" can now take more than one -M options.
* "git describe" learned to limit the tags to be used for
naming with --match option.
* "git describe --contains" now barfs when the named commit
cannot be described.
* "git describe --exact-match" describes only commits that are tagged.
* "git describe --long" describes a tagged commit as $tag-0-$sha1,
instead of just showing the exact tagname.
* "git describe" warns when using a tag whose name and path contradict
with each other.
* "git diff" learned "--relative" option to limit and output paths
relative to the current directory when working in a subdirectory.
* "git diff" learned "--dirstat" option to show birds-eye-summary of
changes more concisely than "--diffstat".
* "git format-patch" learned --cover-letter option to generate a cover
letter template.
* "git gc" learned --quiet option.
* "git gc" now automatically prunes unreachable objects that are two
weeks old or older.
* "git gc --auto" can be disabled more easily by just setting gc.auto
to zero. It also tolerates more packfiles by default.
* "git grep" now knows "--name-only" is a synonym for the "-l" option.
* "git help <alias>" now reports "'git <alias>' is alias to <what>",
instead of saying "No manual entry for git-<alias>".
* "git help" can use different backends to show manual pages and this can
be configured using "man.viewer" configuration.
* "gitk" does not restore window position from $HOME/.gitk anymore (it
still restores the size).
* "git log --grep=<what>" learned "--fixed-strings" option to look for
<what> without treating it as a regular expression.
* "git gui" learned an auto-spell checking.
* "git push <somewhere> HEAD" and "git push <somewhere> +HEAD" works as
expected; they push the current branch (and only the current branch).
In addition, HEAD can be written as the value of "remote.<there>.push"
configuration variable.
* When the configuration variable "pack.threads" is set to 0, "git
repack" auto detects the number of CPUs and uses that many threads.
* "git send-email" learned to prompt for passwords
interactively.
* "git send-email" learned an easier way to suppress CC
recipients.
* "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.
* "git submodule" learned a new subcommand "summary" to show the
symmetric difference between the HEAD version and the work tree version
of the submodule commits.
* Various "git cvsimport", "git cvsexportcommit", "git cvsserver",
"git svn" and "git p4" improvements.
(internal)
* Duplicated code between git-help and git-instaweb that
launches user's preferred browser has been refactored.
* It is now easier to write test scripts that records known
breakages.
* "git checkout" is rewritten in C.
* "git remote" is rewritten in C.
* 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.
* Run-command API's use of file descriptors is documented clearer and
is more consistent now.
* diff output can be sent to FILE * that is different from stdout. This
will help reimplementing more things in C.
Fixes since v1.5.4
------------------
All of the fixes in v1.5.4 maintenance series are included in
this release, unless otherwise noted.
* "git-http-push" did not allow deletion of remote ref with the usual
"push <remote> :<branch>" syntax.
* "git-rebase --abort" did not go back to the right location if
"git-reset" was run during the "git-rebase" session.
* "git imap-send" without setting imap.host did not error out but
segfaulted.
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Learning Git
I've been looking at using Git as a convenient way of storing some small projects of mine. I like the fact that the low-level "plumbing" commands make it easy to synthesize history after the fact--I have written a Python script that, given a set of versions of source files, builds them into a Git repository, using the file modification dates/times as commit dates/times.
Oh, one niggle, though--Git has a very strange way of dealing with time zones. And it records the time zone (in its own limited format) of each commit, which seems to me unnecessary--recording the UTC date/time should be enough.
Have you already submitted a
Have you already submitted a bugreport/feature request? This might be more fruitful.
Re: Learning Git
Oh, one niggle, though--Git has a very strange way of dealing with time zones. And it records the time zone (in its own limited format) of each commit, which seems to me unnecessary--recording the UTC date/time should be enough.
Git _records UTC date/time_ in the form of UNIX epoch. The time zone is purely informative, meant to convert data in UTC into localtime (e.g. to see which commits were made at deep night, local time ;-))