Wednesday, November 27, 2013

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.