Git for Windows Changelog

What's new in Git for Windows 2.45.0

Apr 30, 2024

New Features:
Comes with Git v2.45.0.
Comes with PCRE2 v10.43.
Comes with GNU Privacy Guard v2.4.5.
Comes with Git LFS v3.5.1.
MinGit now supports running git difftool.
Comes with OpenSSH v9.7.P1.
Comes with GNU TLS v3.8.4.
Comes with Tig v2.5.9.
Comes with cURL v8.7.1.
Comes with Git Credential Manager v2.5.0.
Bug Fixes:
Since v2.14.0(2), Git for Windows' installer registers the Open Git Bash here and Open Git GUI here context menu items also in the special Libraries folders, but the uninstaller never removed them from those folders, which was fixed.
A regression where git clone no longer worked in the presence of includeIf.*.onbranch config settings has been fixed.
Apparently some anti-malware programs fiddle with the mode of stdout which can lead to problems because expected output is missing, which was fixed.

New in Git for Windows 2.45.0 RC 1 (Apr 25, 2024)

New in Git for Windows 2.25.0 RC 0 (Apr 20, 2024)

New in Git for Windows 2.44.0 (Feb 24, 2024)

New in Git for Windows 2.44.0 RC 2 (Feb 21, 2024)

New in Git for Windows 2.44.0 RC 1 (Feb 15, 2024)

New in Git for Windows 2.44.0 RC 0 (Feb 10, 2024)

New in Git for Windows 2.43.0 (Nov 21, 2023)

New in Git for Windows 2.43.0 RC 2 (Nov 15, 2023)

New in Git for Windows 2.43.0 RC 1 (Nov 8, 2023)

New in Git for Windows 2.43.0 RC 0 (Nov 3, 2023)

New in Git for Windows 2.42.0.2 (Aug 30, 2023)

New in Git for Windows 2.42.0 (Aug 22, 2023)

New in Git for Windows 2.42.0 RC 2 (Aug 16, 2023)

New in Git for Windows 2.42.0 RC 1 (Aug 11, 2023)

New in Git for Windows 2.42.0 RC 0 (Aug 8, 2023)

New in Git for Windows 2.41.0.2 (Jul 7, 2023)

New in Git for Windows 2.41.0 (Jun 2, 2023)

New in Git for Windows 2.41.0 RC 2 (May 25, 2023)

New in Git for Windows 2.41.0 RC 1 (May 20, 2023)

New in Git for Windows 2.41.0 RC (May 17, 2023)

New in Git for Windows 2.40.1 (Apr 25, 2023)

New in Git for Windows 2.40.0 (Mar 14, 2023)

New in Git for Windows 2.40.0 RC 2 (Mar 8, 2023)

New in Git for Windows 2.40.0 RC 1 (Mar 5, 2023)

New in Git for Windows 2.40.0 RC 0 (Feb 27, 2023)

New in Git for Windows 2.39.2 (Feb 14, 2023)

New in Git for Windows 2.39.1 (Jan 17, 2023)

New in Git for Windows 2.39.0(2) (Dec 21, 2022)

New in Git for Windows 2.39.0 (Dec 12, 2022)

New in Git for Windows 2.39.0 RC 2 (Dec 6, 2022)

New in Git for Windows 2.39.0 RC 1 (Nov 30, 2022)

New in Git for Windows 2.39.0 RC 0 (Nov 23, 2022)

New in Git for Windows 2.38.1 (Oct 18, 2022)

New in Git for Windows 2.38.0 (Oct 3, 2022)

New in Git for Windows 2.38.0 RC 2 (Sep 28, 2022)

New in Git for Windows 2.38.0 RC 1 (Sep 22, 2022)

New in Git for Windows 2.38.0 RC 0 (Sep 16, 2022)

New in Git for Windows 2.37.3 (Aug 30, 2022)

New in Git for Windows 2.37.2.2 (Aug 12, 2022)

New in Git for Windows 2.37.2 Pre-release (Aug 11, 2022)

New in Git for Windows 2.37.1 (Jul 12, 2022)

New in Git for Windows 2.37.0 (Jun 28, 2022)

New in Git for Windows 2.37.0 RC 2 (Jun 23, 2022)

New in Git for Windows 2.37.0 RC 1 (Jun 18, 2022)

New in Git for Windows 2.37.0 RC 0 (Jun 15, 2022)

New in Git for Windows 2.36.1 (May 9, 2022)

New in Git for Windows 2.36.0 (Apr 20, 2022)

New in Git for Windows 2.36.0 RC 2 (Apr 18, 2022)

New in Git for Windows 2.35.3 (Apr 15, 2022)

New in Git for Windows 2.35.2 (Apr 12, 2022)

New in Git for Windows 2.36.0.0 RC 1 (Apr 9, 2022)

New in Git for Windows 2.36.0.0 RC 0 (Apr 5, 2022)

New in Git for Windows 2.35.1.2 (Feb 1, 2022)

New in Git for Windows 2.35.1 (Jan 29, 2022)

New in Git for Windows 2.35.0 (Jan 24, 2022)

New in Git for Windows 2.35.0 RC 1 (Jan 15, 2022)

New in Git for Windows 2.35.0 RC 0 (Jan 11, 2022)

New in Git for Windows 2.34.1 (Nov 25, 2021)

New in Git for Windows 2.34.0 (Nov 16, 2021)

New in Git for Windows 2.34.0 RC 2 (Nov 10, 2021)

New in Git for Windows 2.34.0 RC 1 (Nov 4, 2021)

New in Git for Windows 2.34.0 RC 0 (Oct 30, 2021)

New in Git for Windows 2.33.1 (Oct 14, 2021)

New in Git for Windows 2.33.0.2 (Aug 24, 2021)

New in Git for Windows 2.33.0 (Aug 18, 2021)

New in Git for Windows 2.33.0 RC 2 (Aug 13, 2021)

New in Git for Windows 2.33.0 RC 1 (Aug 8, 2021)

New in Git for Windows 2.33.0 RC 0 (Aug 3, 2021)

New in Git for Windows 2.32.0.2 (Jul 6, 2021)

New in Git for Windows 2.32.0 (Jun 7, 2021)

New in Git for Windows 2.32.0 RC 3 (Jun 2, 2021)

New in Git for Windows 2.32.0 RC 2 (May 28, 2021)

New in Git for Windows 2.32.0 RC 1 (May 23, 2021)

New in Git for Windows 2.32.0 RC 0 (May 17, 2021)

New in Git for Windows 2.31.1 (Mar 28, 2021)

New in Git for Windows 2.31.0 (Mar 16, 2021)

New in Git for Windows 2.31.0 RC 2 (Mar 11, 2021)

New in Git for Windows 2.30.2 (Mar 9, 2021)

New in Git for Windows 2.31.0 RC 1 (Mar 4, 2021)

New in Git for Windows 2.31.0 RC 0 (Feb 26, 2021)

New in Git for Windows 2.30.1 (Feb 9, 2021)

New in Git for Windows 2.30.0.2 (Jan 15, 2021)

New in Git for Windows 2.30.0 (Dec 29, 2020)

New in Git for Windows 2.30.0 RC 2 (Dec 24, 2020)

New in Git for Windows 2.30.0 RC 1 (Dec 19, 2020)

New in Git for Windows 2.30.0 RC0 (Dec 15, 2020)

New in Git for Windows 2.29.2.3 (Dec 8, 2020)

New in Git for Windows 2.29.2.2 (Nov 5, 2020)

New in Git for Windows 2.29.2 (Oct 30, 2020)

New in Git for Windows 2.29.1 (Oct 24, 2020)

New in Git for Windows 2.29.0 (Oct 20, 2020)

New in Git for Windows 2.29.0 RC 2 (Oct 15, 2020)

New in Git for Windows 2.29.0 RC 1 (Oct 9, 2020)

New in Git for Windows 2.29.0 RC 0 (Oct 6, 2020)

New in Git for Windows 2.28.0 (Jul 28, 2020)

New in Git for Windows 2.28.0 RC 2 (Jul 23, 2020)

New in Git for Windows 2.28.0 RC 1 (Jul 18, 2020)

New in Git for Windows 2.28.0 RC 0 (Jul 11, 2020)

New in Git for Windows 2.27.0 (Jun 1, 2020)

New in Git for Windows 2.27.0 RC 2 (May 26, 2020)

New in Git for Windows 2.27.0 RC 1 (May 20, 2020)

New in Git for Windows 2.27.0 RC 0 (May 15, 2020)

New in Git for Windows 2.26.2 (Apr 20, 2020)

New in Git for Windows 2.26.1 (Apr 14, 2020)

New in Git for Windows 2.26.0 (Mar 23, 2020)

New in Git for Windows 2.26.0 RC 2 (Mar 17, 2020)

New in Git for Windows 2.26.0 RC 0 (Mar 6, 2020)

New in Git for Windows 2.25.1 (Feb 19, 2020)

New in Git for Windows 2.25.0 (Jan 14, 2020)

New in Git for Windows 2.24.1 (Dec 10, 2019)

New in Git for Windows 2.24.0.2 (Nov 6, 2019)

New in Git for Windows 2.24.0 (Nov 6, 2019)

New in Git for Windows 2.23.0 (Aug 18, 2019)

New in Git for Windows 2.22.0 (Jun 8, 2019)

New Features:
Comes with Git v2.22.0.
The awk included in Git for Windows now includes extensions such as inplace.
The file/product version stored in the installer's .exe file now matches the version of the included git.exe file's.
Comes with OpenSSH v8.0p1.
Comes with Git LFS v2.7.2.
Comes with MSYS2 runtime (Git for Windows flavor) based on Cygwin v3.x (see release notes for Cygwin 3.0.0, 3.0.1, 3.0.2, 3.0.3, 3.0.4, 3.0.5, 3.0.6, and 3.0.7).
There are now experimental built-in versions of git add -i and git add -p, i.e. those modes are now a lot faster (in particular at startup). You can opt into using them on the last installer page.
PortableGit now comes with a meta credential helper, i.e. a GUI that lets the user choose which of the available credential helpers to use. This should help to avoid storing credentials on other people's machines when running portable Git from a thumb drive.
Comes with gawk v5.0.0.
Comes with Git Credential Manager v1.19.0.
Comes with git-flow v1.12.3.
Comes with OpenSSL v1.1.1c.
Comes with GNU Privacy Guard v2.2.16, specifically [patched to handle Windows paths](https://github.com/git-for-windows/MSYS2
Comes with cURL v7.65.1.
Comes with Heimdal v7.5.0.
Packages/pull/33).
Bug Fixes:
Git for Windows' updater is now accessible, i.e. it can be read by a screen reader.
Git update-git-for-windows (i.e. the auto updater of Git for Windows) now reports correctly when it failed to access the GitHub API.
Git for Windows' updater no longer runs into GitHub API rate limits (this used to be quite common in enterprise scenarios, where many users would share one IP as far as GitHub is concerned).
Gitk no longer fails with "filename too long" when there are 1,000+ branches/tags.
A bug which on occasion caused lengthy rebase runs to crash without error message was fixed.
Two workarounds from the Git for Windows 1.x era (concerning reading credentials via GUI and fetching via git://) were considered obsolete.
Git difftool --no-index can now be run outside of Git worktrees.
Git rebase -i used to get confused when an exec command created new commits and then appended pick lines for them. This has been fixed.
During a run of git rebase --rebase-merges, the output of git status now shows label lines correctly, i.e. with the labels' names instead of the commit hash they point to.
We now avoid problems updating the commit graph when gc.writeCommitGraph=true.

New in Git for Windows 2.21.0 (Feb 27, 2019)

New in Git for Windows 2.20.1 (Dec 15, 2018)

New in Git for Windows 2.20.0 (Dec 10, 2018)

New in Git for Windows 2.19.2 (Nov 22, 2018)

New in Git for Windows 2.19.1 (Oct 7, 2018)

New in Git for Windows 2.19.0 (Sep 13, 2018)

New in Git for Windows 2.18.0 (Jul 25, 2018)

New in Git for Windows 2.17.1 (May 30, 2018)

New in Git for Windows 2.17.0 (Apr 3, 2018)

New in Git for Windows 2.16.3 (Mar 24, 2018)

New in Git for Windows 2.16.2 (Feb 20, 2018)

New in Git for Windows 2.16.1.4 (Feb 8, 2018)

New in Git for Windows 2.16.1.3 (Feb 6, 2018)

New in Git for Windows 2.16.1.2 (Feb 3, 2018)

New in Git for Windows 2.16.1 (Jan 23, 2018)

New in Git for Windows 2.16.0.2 (Jan 19, 2018)

New in Git for Windows 2.16.0 (Jan 19, 2018)

New in Git for Windows 2.15.1.2 (Nov 30, 2017)

New in Git for Windows 2.15.0 (Oct 30, 2017)

New in Git for Windows 2.14.3 (Oct 24, 2017)

New in Git for Windows 2.14.2(3) (Oct 16, 2017)

New in Git for Windows 2.14.2(2) (Oct 6, 2017)

New in Git for Windows 2.14.2 (Sep 27, 2017)

New Features:
Comes with Git v2.14.2.
Comes with cURL v7.55.1.
The XP-compatibility layer emulating pthreads (which is no longer
needed) was dropped in favor of modern Windows threading APIs; This
should make threaded operations slightly faster and more robust.
On Windows, UNC paths can now be accessed via file//host/share/
repo.git-style paths.
Comes with a new custom Git command git update to help keeping Git
up-to-date on your machine.
The Git installer now offers an option to keep Git up-to-date by
calling git update regularly.
Comes with BusyBox v1.28.0pre.16353.2739df917.
As is common elsewhere, Ctrl+Left and Ctrl+Right now move word-wise
in Git Bash, too.
Comes with patch level 2 of the MSYS2 runtime (Git for Windows
flavor) based on Cygwin 2.9.0.
Comes with Git LFS v2.3.0.
The vs/master branch can now be built in Visual Studio 2017, too
As requested by the same user who implemented the change, Git for
Windows now comes with tig, a text-mode interface for Git.
Bug Fixes:
It is now possible to override http.sslBackend on the command-line.
The installer now detects correctly whether symbolic links can be
created by regular users.
Git Bash now renders non-ASCII directories nicely.
A regression that caused the fetch operation with lots of refs to
be a lot slower than before was fixed.
The git-gui.exe and gitk.exe wrappers intended to be used in Git
CMD now handle command-line parameters correctly.
The core.longPaths setting is now heeded when packing refs, and
other previously forgotten Git commands.
Pressing Ctrl+Z in Git Bash no longer kills Win32 processes (e.g.
git.exe) anymore, because POSIX job control is only available with
MSYS2 processes.
Git for Windows now sets core.fsyncObjectFiles = true by default
which makes it a lot more fault-tolerant, say, when power is lost.
A bug has been fixed where Git for Windows could run into an
infinite loop trying to rename a file.
Before installing Git for Windows, we already verified that no Git
Bash instance is active (which would prevent files from being
overwritten). We now also verify that no git.exe processes are
active, either.

New in Git for Windows 2.14.1 (Sep 1, 2017)

New in Git for Windows 2.14.0(2) (Sep 1, 2017)

New in Git for Windows 2.14.0 (Sep 1, 2017)

New in Git for Windows 2.13.3 (Sep 1, 2017)

New in Git for Windows 2.13.2 (Sep 1, 2017)

New in Git for Windows 2.13.1.2 (Sep 1, 2017)

New in Git for Windows 2.13.1 (Sep 1, 2017)

New in Git for Windows 2.13.0 (Sep 1, 2017)

New in Git for Windows 2.12.2 (Apr 6, 2017)

"git status --porcelain" is supposed to give a stable output, but a few strings were left as translatable by mistake.
"Dumb http" transport used to misparse a nonsense http-alternates response, which has been fixed.
"git diff --quiet" relies on the size field in diff_filespec to be correctly populated, but diff_populate_filespec() helper function made an incorrect short-cut when asked only to populate the size field for paths that need to go through convert_to_git() (e.g. CRLF conversion).
There is no need for Python only to give a few messages to the standard error stream, but we somehow did.
A leak in a codepath to read from a packed object in (rare) cases has been plugged.
"git upload-pack", which is a counter-part of "git fetch", did not report a request for a ref that was not advertised as invalid. This is generally not a problem (because "git fetch" will stop before making such a request), but is the right thing to do.
A "gc.log" file left by a backgrounded "gc --auto" disables further automatic gc; it has been taught to run at least once a day (by default) by ignoring a stale "gc.log" file that is too old.
"git remote rm X", when a branch has remote X configured as the value of its branch.*.remote, tried to remove branch.*.remote and branch.*.merge and failed if either is unset.
A caller of tempfile API that uses stdio interface to write to files may ignore errors while writing, which is detected when tempfile is closed (with a call to ferror()). By that time, the original errno that may have told us what went wrong is likely to be long gone and was overwritten by an irrelevant value. close_tempfile() now resets errno to EIO to make errno at least predictable.
"git show-branch" expected there were only very short branch names in the repository and used a fixed-length buffer to hold them without checking for overflow.
The code that parses header fields in the commit object has been updated for (micro)performance and code hygiene.
A test that creates a confusing branch whose name is HEAD has been corrected not to do so.
"Cc:" on the trailer part does not have to conform to RFC strictly, unlike in the e-mail header. "git send-email" has been updated to ignore anything after '>' when picking addresses, to allow non-address cruft like " # stable 4.4" after the address.
"git push" had a handful of codepaths that could lead to a deadlock when unexpected error happened, which has been fixed.
Code to read submodule.<name>.ignore config did not state the variable name correctly when giving an error message diagnosing misconfiguration.
"git ls-remote" and "git archive --remote" are designed to work without being in a directory under Git's control. However, recent updates revealed that we randomly look into a directory called .git/ without actually doing necessary set-up when working in a repository. Stop doing so.
The code to parse the command line "git grep <patterns>... <rev> [[--] <pathspec>...]" has been cleaned up, and a handful of bugs have been fixed (e.g. we used to check "--" if it is a rev).
The code to parse "git -c VAR=VAL cmd" and set configuration variable for the duration of cmd had two small bugs, which have been fixed. This supersedes jc/config-case-cmdline topic that has been discarded.
Also contains various documentation updates and code clean-ups.

New in Git for Windows 2.6.4 (Dec 29, 2015)

New in Git for Windows 2.6.3 (Dec 29, 2015)

New in Git for Windows 2.6.2 (Dec 29, 2015)

New in Git for Windows 2.6.1 (Dec 29, 2015)

New in Git for Windows 2.6.0 (Dec 29, 2015)

New in Git for Windows 2.5.3 (Dec 29, 2015)

New in Git for Windows 1.8.5.2 Preview 20131230 (Jan 17, 2014)

Foreign interfaces, subsystems and ports:
"git-svn" has been taught to use the serf library, which is the only option SVN 1.8.0 offers us when talking the HTTP protocol.
"git-svn" talking over an https:// connection using the serf library dumped core due to a bug in the serf library that SVN uses. Work around it on our side, even though the SVN side is being fixed.
On MacOS X, we detected if the filesystem needs the "pre-composed unicode strings" workaround, but did not automatically enable it. Now we do.
remote-hg remote helper misbehaved when interacting with a local Hg repository relative to the home directory, e.g. "clone hg::~/there".
imap-send ported to OS X uses Apple's security framework instead of OpenSSL's.
"git fast-import" treats an empty path given to "ls" as the root of the tree.
UI, Workflows & Features:
xdg-open can be used as a browser backend for "git web-browse"(hence to show "git help -w" output), when available.
"git grep" and "git show" pay attention to the "--textconv" option when these commands are told to operate on blob objects (e.g. "git grep -e pattern --textconv HEAD:Makefile").
"git replace" helper no longer allows an object to be replaced with another object of a different type to avoid confusion (you can still manually craft such a replacement using "git update-ref", as an escape hatch).
"git status" no longer prints the dirty status information of submodules for which submodule.$name.ignore is set to "all".
"git rebase -i" honours core.abbrev when preparing the insn sheet for editing.
"git status" during a cherry-pick shows which original commit is being picked.
Instead of typing four capital letters "HEAD", you can say "@" now, e.g. "git log @".
"git check-ignore" follows the same rule as "git add" and "git status" in that the ignore/exclude mechanism does not take effect on paths that are already tracked. With the "--no-index" option, it can be used to diagnose which paths that should have been ignored
have been mistakenly added to the index.
Some irrelevant "advice" messages that are shared with "git status" output have been removed from the commit log template.
"update-refs" learned a "--stdin" option to read multiple update requests and perform them in an all-or-none fashion.
Just like "make -C ", "git -C ..." tells Git to go there before doing anything else.
Just like "git checkout -" knows to check out, and "git merge -" knows to merge, the branch you were previously on, "git cherry-pick" now understands "git cherry-pick -" to pick from the previous branch.
"git status" now omits the prefix to make its output a comment in a commit log editor, which is not necessary for human consumption. Scripts that parse the output of "git status" are advised to use "git status --porcelain" instead, as its format is stable and easier to parse.
The ref syntax "foo^{tag}" (with the literal string "{tag}") peels a tag ref to itself, i.e. it's a no-op., and fails if "foo" is not a tag. "git rev-parse --verify v1.0^{tag}" is
a more convenient way than "test $(git cat-file -t v1.0) = tag" to check if v1.0 is a tag.
"git branch -v -v" (and "git status") did not distinguish among a branch that is not based on any other branch, a branch that is in sync with its upstream branch, and a branch that is configured with an upstream branch that no longer exists.
Earlier we started rejecting any attempt to add the 0{40} object name to the index and to tree objects, but it sometimes is necessary to allow this to be able to use tools like filter-branch to correct such broken tree objects. "filter-branch" can again be used to do this.
"git config" did not provide a way to set or access numbers larger than a native "int" on the platform; it now provides 64-bit signed integers on all platforms.
"git pull --rebase" always chose to do the bog-standard flattening rebase. You can tell it to run "rebase --preserve-merges" with "git pull --rebase=preserve" or by setting "pull.rebase" configuration to "preserve".
"git push --no-thin" actually disables the "thin pack transfer" optimization.
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.*" variables can now be specified for individual URLs.
"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=:" option.
"git diff --diff-filter=" 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 fetch" (hence "git pull" as well) learned to check "fetch.prune" and "remote.*.prune" configuration variables and to behave as if the "--prune" command line option was given.
"git check-ignore -z" applied the NUL termination to both its input (with --stdin) and its output, but "git check-attr -z" ignored the option on the output side. Make both honor -z on the input and output side the same way.
"git whatchanged" may still be used by old timers, but mention of it in documents meant for new users will only waste readers' time wondering what the difference is between it and "git log". Make it less prominent in the general part of the documentation and explain that it is merely a "git log" with different default behaviour in its own document.
Performance, Internal Implementation, etc:
"git for-each-ref" when asking for merely the object name does not have to parse the object pointed at by the refs; the codepath has been optimized.
The HTTP transport will try to use TCP keepalive when able.
"git repack" is now written in C.
Build procedure for MSVC has been updated.
If a build-time fallback is set to "cat" instead of "less", we should apply the same "no subprocess or pipe" optimization as we apply to user-supplied GIT_PAGER=cat.
Many commands use a --dashed-option as an operation mode selector (e.g. "git tag --delete") that excludes other operation modes (e.g. "git tag --delete --verify" is nonsense) and that cannot be negated (e.g. "git tag --no-delete" is nonsense). The parse-options API learned a new OPT_CMDMODE macro to make it easier to implement such a set of options.
OPT_BOOLEAN() in the parse-options API was misdesigned to be "counting up" but many subcommands expect it to behave as "on/off". Update them to use OPT_BOOL() which is a proper boolean.
"git gc" exits early without doing any work when it detects that another instance of itself is already running.
Under memory pressure and/or file descriptor pressure, we used to close pack windows that are not used and also closed filehandles to open but unused packfiles. These are now controlled separately to better cope with the load.
Also contains various documentation updates and code clean-ups.

New in Git for Windows 1.8.4 Preview 20130916 (Oct 29, 2013)

New in Git for Windows 1.8.3 Preview 20130601 (Jun 13, 2013)

Updates:
Foreign interface:
remote-hg and remote-bzr helpers (in contrib/ since v1.8.2) have been updated; especially, the latter has been done in an accelerated schedule (read: we may not have merged to this release if we were following the usual "cook sufficiently in next before unleashing it to the world" workflow) in order to help Emacs folks, whose primary SCM seems to be stagnating.
UI, Workflows & Features:
A handful of updates applied to gitk, including an addition of "revert" action, showing dates in tags in a nicer way, making colors configurable, and support for -G'pickaxe' search.
The prompt string generator (in contrib/completion/) learned to show how many changes there are in total and how many have been replayed during a "git rebase" session.
"git branch --vv" learned to paint the name of the branch it integrates with in a different color (color.branch.upstream, which defaults to blue).
In a sparsely populated working tree, "git checkout " no longer unmarks paths that match the given pathspec that were originally ignored with "--sparse" (use --ignore-skip-worktree-bits option to resurrect these paths out of the index if you really want to).
"git log --format" specifier learned %C(auto) token that tells Git to use color when interpolating %d (decoration), %h (short commit object name), etc. for terminal output.
"git bisect" leaves the final outcome as a comment in its bisect log file.
"git clone --reference" can now refer to a gitfile "textual symlink" that points at the real location of the repository.
"git count-objects" learned "--human-readable" aka "-H" option to show various large numbers in Ki/Mi/GiB scaled as necessary.
"git cherry-pick $blob" and "git cherry-pick $tree" are nonsense, and a more readable error message e.g. "can't cherry-pick a tree" is given (we used to say "expected exactly one commit").
The "--annotate" option to "git send-email" can be turned on (or off) by default with sendemail.annotate configuration variable (you can use --no-annotate from the command line to override it).
The "--cover-letter" option to "git format-patch" can be turned on (or off) by default with format.coverLetter configuration variable. By setting it to 'auto', you can turn it on only for a series with two or more patches.
The bash completion support (in contrib/) learned that cherry-pick takes a few more options than it already knew about.
"git help" learned "-g" option to show the list of guides just like list of commands are given with "-a".
A triangular "pull from one place, push to another place" workflow is supported better by new remote.pushdefault (overrides the "origin" thing) and branch.*.pushremote (overrides the branch.*.remote) configuration variables.
"git status" learned to report that you are in the middle of a revert session, just like it does for a cherry-pick and a bisect session.
The handling by "git branch --set-upstream-to" against various forms of erroneous inputs was suboptimal and has been improved.
When the interactive access to git-shell is not enabled, it issues a message meant to help the system administrator to enable it. An explicit way has been added to issue custom messages to refuse an access over the network to help the end users who connect to the service expecting an interactive shell.
In addition to the case where the user edits the log message with the "e)dit" option of "am -i", replace the "Applying: this patch" message with the final log message contents after applymsg hook munges it.
"git status" suggests users to look into using --untracked=no option when it takes too long.
"git status" shows a bit more information during a rebase/bisect session.
"git fetch" learned to fetch a commit at the tip of an unadvertised ref by specifying a raw object name from the command line when the server side supports this feature.
Output from "git log --graph" works better with submodule log output now.
"git count-objects -v" learned to report leftover temporary packfiles and other garbage in the object store.
A new read-only credential helper (in contrib/) to interact with the .netrc/.authinfo files has been added.
"git send-email" can be used with the credential helper system.
There was no Porcelain way to say "I no longer am interested in this submodule", once you express your interest in a submodule with "submodule init". "submodule deinit" is the way to do so.
"git pull --rebase" learned to pass "-v/-q" options to underlying "git rebase".
The new "--follow-tags" option tells "git push" to push relevant annotated tags when pushing branches out.
"git merge" and "git pull" can optionally be told to inspect and reject when merging a commit that does not carry a trusted GPG signature.
"git mergetool" now feeds files to the "p4merge" backend in the order that matches the p4 convention, where "theirs" is usually shown on the left side, which is the opposite from what other backends expect.
"show/log" now honors gpg.program configuration just like other parts of the code that use GnuPG.
"git log" that shows the difference between the parent and the child has been optimized somewhat.
"git difftool" allows the user to write into the temporary files being shown; if the user makes changes to the working tree at the same time, it now refrains from overwriting the copy in the working tree and leaves the temporary file so that changes can be merged manually.
There was no good way to ask "I have a random string that came from outside world. I want to turn it into a 40-hex object name while making sure such an object exists". A new peeling suffix ^{object} can be used for that purpose, together with "rev-parse --verify".
Performance, Internal Implementation, etc:
Updates for building under msvc.
A handful of issues in the code that traverses the working tree to find untracked and/or ignored files have been fixed, and the general codepath involved in "status -u" and "clean" have been cleaned up and optimized.
The stack footprint of some codepaths that access an object from a pack has been shrunk.
The logic to coalesce the same lines removed from the parents in the output from "diff -c/--cc" has been updated, but with O(n^2) complexity, so this might turn out to be undesirable.
The code to enforce permission bits on files in $GIT_DIR/ for shared repositories has been simplified.
A few codepaths know how much data they need to put in the hashtables they use when they start, but still began with small tables and repeatedly grew and rehashed them.
The API to walk reflog entries from the latest to older, which was necessary for operations such as "git checkout -", was cumbersome to use correctly and also inefficient.
Codepaths that inspect log-message-to-be and decide when to add a new Signed-off-by line in various commands have been consolidated.
The pkt-line API, implementation and its callers have been cleaned up to make them more robust.
The Cygwin port has a faster-but-lying lstat(2) emulation whose incorrectness does not matter in practice except for a few codepaths, and setting permission bits on directories is a codepath that needs to use a more correct one.
"git checkout" had repeated pathspec matches on the same paths, which have been consolidated. Also a bug in "git checkout dir/" that is started from an unmerged index has been fixed.
A few bugfixes to "git rerere" working on corner case merge conflicts have been applied.
Also contains various documentation updates and code clean-ups.
Fixes:
Unless otherwise noted, all the fixes since v1.8.2 in the maintenance
track are contained in this release (see release notes to them for
details).
Recent versions of File::Temp (used by "git svn") started blowing up when its tempfile sub is called as a class method; updated the callsite to call it as a plain vanilla function to fix it. (merge eafc2dd hb/git-pm-tempfile later to maint).
Various subcommands of "git remote" simply ignored extraneous command line arguments instead of diagnosing them as errors.
When receive-pack detects an error in the pack header it received in order to decide which of unpack-objects or index-pack to run, it returned without closing the error stream, which led to a hung sideband thread.
Zsh completion forgot that the '%' character used to signal untracked files needs to be escaped with another '%'.
A commit object whose author or committer ident are malformed crashed some code that trusted that a name, an email and a timestamp can always be found in it.
When "upload-pack" fails while generating a pack in response to "git fetch" (or "git clone"), the receiving side had a programming error that triggered the die handler recursively.
"rev-list --stdin" and friends kept bogus pointers into the input buffer around as human readable object names. This was not a huge problem but was exposed by a new change that uses these names in
error output.
Smart-capable HTTP servers were not restricted via the GIT_NAMESPACE mechanism when talking with commit-walking clients, like they are when talking with smart HTTP clients. (merge 6130f86 jk/http-dumb-namespaces later to maint).
"git merge-tree" did not omit a merge result that is identical to the "our" side in certain cases. (merge aacecc3 jk/merge-tree-added-identically later to maint).
Perl scripts like "git-svn" closed (instead of redirecting to /dev/null) the standard error stream, which is not a very smart thing to do. A later open may return file descriptor #2 for an unrelated purpose, and error reporting code may write into it.
"git show-branch" was not prepared to show a very long run of ancestor operators e.g. foobar^2~2^2^2^2...^2~4 correctly.
"git diff --diff-algorithm algo" is also understood as "git diff --diff-algorithm=algo".
The new core.commentchar configuration was not applied in a few places.
"git bundle" erroneously bailed out when parsing a valid bundle containing a prerequisite commit without a commit message.
"git log -S/-G" started paying attention to textconv filter, but there was no way to disable this. Make it honor the --no-textconv option.
When used with the "-d temporary-directory" option, "git filter-branch" failed to come back to the original working tree to perform the final clean-up procedure.
"git merge $(git rev-parse v1.8.2)" behaved quite differently from "git merge v1.8.2", as if v1.8.2 were written as v1.8.2^0 and did not pay much attention to the annotated tag payload. Make the code notice the type of the tag object, in addition to the dwim_ref() based classification the current code uses (i.e. the name appears in refs/tags/) to decide when to special-case tag merging.
Fix a 1.8.1.x regression that stopped matching "dir" (without a trailing slash) to a directory "dir".
"git apply --whitespace=fix" was not prepared to see a line getting longer after fixing whitespaces (e.g. tab-in-indent aka Python).
The prompt string generator (in contrib/completion/) did not notice when we are in a middle of a "git revert" session.
"submodule summary --summary-limit" option did not support the "--option=value" form.
"index-pack --fix-thin" used an uninitialized value to compute the delta depths of objects it appends to the resulting pack.
"index-pack --verify-stat" used a few counters outside the protection of a mutex, possibly showing incorrect numbers.
The code to keep track of what directory names are known to Git on platforms with case insensitive filesystems could get confused upon a hash collision between these pathnames and would loop forever.
Annotated tags outside the refs/tags/ hierarchy were not advertised correctly to ls-remote and fetch with recent versions of Git.
Recent optimizations broke shallow clones.
"git cmd -- ':(top'" was not diagnosed as an invalid syntax, and instead the parser kept reading beyond the end of the string.
"git tag -f " always said "Updated tag ''" even when creating a new tag (i.e. neither overwriting nor updating).
"git p4" did not behave well when the path to the root of the P4 client was not its real path. (merge bbd8486 pw/p4-symlinked-root later to maint).
"git archive" reported a failure when asked to create an archive out of an empty tree. It is more intuitive to give an empty archive back in such a case.
When "format-patch" quoted a non-ascii string in header files, it incorrectly applied rfc2047 and chopped a single character in the middle of the string.
An aliased command spawned from a bare repository that does not say it is bare with "core.bare = yes" was treated as non-bare by mistake.
In "git reflog expire", the REACHABLE bit was not cleared from the correct objects.
The logic used by "git diff -M --stat" to shorten the names of files before and after a rename did not work correctly when the common prefix and suffix between the two filenames overlapped.
The "--match=" option of "git describe", when used with "--all" to allow refs that are not annotated tags to be a base of description, did not restrict the output from the command to those refs that match the given pattern.
Clarify in the documentation "what" gets pushed to "where" when the command line to "git push" does not say these explicitly.
The "--color=" argument to the commands in the diff family was described poorly.
The arguments given to the pre-rebase hook were not documented.
The v4 index format was not documented.
The "--match=" argument "git describe" takes uses glob pattern but it wasn't obvious from the documentation.
Some sources failed to compile on systems that lack NI_MAXHOST in their system header (e.g. z/OS).
Add an example use of "--env-filter" in "filter-branch" documentation.
"git bundle verify" did not say "records a complete history" for a bundle that does not have any prerequisites.
In the v1.8.0 era, we changed symbols that do not have to be global to file scope static, but a few functions in graph.c were used by CGit sideways, bypassing the entry points of the API the in-tree users use.
"git update-index -h" did not do the usual "-h(elp)" thing.
"git index-pack" had a buffer-overflow while preparing an informational message when the translated version of it was too long.
'git commit -m "$msg"' used to add an extra newline even when $msg already ended with one.
The SSL peer verification done by "git imap-send" did not ask for Server Name Indication (RFC 4366), failing to connect to SSL/TLS sites that serve multiple hostnames on a single IP.
perl/Git.pm::cat_blob slurped everything in core only to write it out to a file descriptor, which was not a very smart thing to do.
"git branch" did not bother to check nonsense command line parameters. It now issues errors in many cases.
Verification of signed tags was not done correctly when not in C or en/US locale.
Some platforms and users spell UTF-8 differently; retry with the most official "UTF-8" when the system does not understand the user-supplied encoding name that is a common alternative spelling of UTF-8.
When export-subst is used, "zip" output recorded an incorrect size of the file.
"git am $maildir/" applied messages in an unexpected order; sort filenames read from the maildir/ in a way that is more likely to sort the messages in the order the writing MUA meant to, by sorting numeric segments in numeric order and non-numeric segments in alphabetical order.
"git submodule update", when recursed into sub-submodules, did not accumulate the prefix paths.

New in Git for Windows 1.8.1.2 Preview 20130201 (Mar 16, 2013)

New in Git for Windows 1.8.0 Preview 20121022 (Jan 15, 2013)

Updates:
UI, Workflows & Features:
A credential helper for Win32 to allow access to the keychain of the logged-in user has been added.
An initial port to HP NonStop.
A credential helper to allow access to the Gnome keyring has been added.
When "git am" sanitizes the "Subject:" line, we strip the prefix from "Re: subject" and also from a less common "re: subject", but left the even less common "RE: subject" intact. Now we strip that too.
It was tempting to say "git branch --set-upstream origin/master", but that tells Git to arrange the local branch "origin/master" to integrate with the currently checked out branch, which is highly unlikely what the user meant. The option is deprecated; use the new "--set-upstream-to" (with a short-and-sweet "-u") option instead.
"git cherry-pick" learned the "--allow-empty-message" option to allow it to replay a commit without any log message.
After "git cherry-pick -s" gave control back to the user asking help to resolve conflicts, concluding "git commit" used to need to be run with "-s" if the user wants to sign it off; now the command leaves the sign-off line in the log template.
"git daemon" learned the "--access-hook" option to allow an external command to decline service based on the client address, repository path, etc.
"git difftool --dir-diff" learned to use symbolic links to prepare a temporary copy of the working tree when available.
"git grep" learned to use a non-standard pattern type by default if a configuration variable tells it to.
Accumulated updates to "git gui" has been merged.
"git log -g" learned the "--grep-reflog=" option to limit its output to commits with a reflog message that matches the given pattern.
"git merge-base" learned the "--is-ancestor A B" option to tell if A is an ancestor of B. The result is indicated by its exit status code.
"git mergetool" now allows users to override the actual command used with the mergetool.$name.cmd configuration variable even for built-in mergetool backends.
"git rebase -i" learned the "--edit-todo" option to open an editor to edit the instruction sheet.
Foreign Interface:
"git svn" has been updated to work with SVN 1.7.
"git p4" learned the "--conflicts" option to specify what to do when encountering a conflict during "p4 submit".
Performance, Internal Implementation, etc:
Git ships with a fall-back regexp implementation for platforms with buggy regexp library, but it was easy for people to keep using their platform regexp by mistake. A new test has been added to check this.
The "check-docs" build target has been updated and greatly simplified.
The test suite is run under MALLOC_CHECK_ when running with a glibc that supports the feature.
The documentation in the TeXinfo format was using indented output for materials meant to be examples that are better typeset in monospace.
Compatibility wrapper around some mkdir(2) implementations that reject parameters with trailing slash has been introduced.
Compatibility wrapper for systems that lack usable setitimer() has been added.
The option parsing of "git checkout" had error checking, dwim and defaulting missing options, all mixed in the code, and issuing an appropriate error message with useful context was getting harder. The code has been reorganized to allow giving a proper diagnosis when the user says "git checkout -b -t foo bar" (e.g. "-t" is not a good name for a branch).
Many internal uses of a "git merge-base" equivalent were only to see if one commit fast-forwards to the other, which did not need the full set of merge bases to be computed. They have been updated to use less expensive checks.
The heuristics to detect and silently convert latin1 to utf8 when we were told to use utf-8 in the log message has been transplanted from "mailinfo" to "commit" and "commit-tree".
Messages given by "git -h" from many subcommands have been marked for translation.
Fixes:
The attribute system may be asked for a path that itself or its leading directories no longer exists in the working tree, and it is fine if we cannot open .gitattribute file in such a case. Failure to open per-directory .gitattributes with error status other than ENOENT and ENOTDIR should be diagnosed, but it wasn't.
When looking for $HOME/.gitconfig etc., it is OK if we cannot read them because they do not exist, but we did not diagnose existing files that we cannot read.
When "git am" is fed an input that has multiple "Content-type: ..." header, it did not grok charset= attribute correctly.
"git am" mishandled a patch attached as application/octet-stream (e.g. not text/*); Content-Transfer-Encoding (e.g. base64) was not honored correctly.
"git blame MAKEFILE" run in a history that has "Makefile" but not "MAKEFILE" should say "No such file MAKEFILE in HEAD", but got confused on a case insensitive filesystem and failed to do so.
Even during a conflicted merge, "git blame $path" always meant to blame uncommitted changes to the "working tree" version; make it more useful by showing cleanly merged parts as coming from the other branch that is being merged.
It was unclear in the documentation for "git blame" that it is unnecessary for users to use the "--follow" option.
Output from "git branch -v" contains "(no branch)" that could be localized, but the code to align it along with the names of branches was counting in bytes, not in display columns.
"git cherry-pick A C B" used to replay changes in A and then B and then C if these three commits had committer timestamps in that order, which is not what the user who said "A C B" naturally expects.
A repository created with "git clone --single" had its fetch refspecs set up just like a clone without "--single", leading the subsequent "git fetch" to slurp all the other branches, defeating the whole point of specifying "only this branch".
Documentation talked about "first line of commit log" when it meant the title of the commit. The description was clarified by defining how the title is decided and rewording the casual mention of "first line" to "title".
"git cvsimport" did not thoroughly cleanse tag names that it inferred from the names of the tags it obtained from CVS, which caused "git tag" to barf and stop the import in the middle.
Earlier we made the diffstat summary line that shows the number of lines added/deleted localizable, but it was found irritating having to see them in various languages on a list whose discussion language is English, and this change has been reverted.
"git fetch --all", when passed "--no-tags", did not honor the "--no-tags" option while fetching from individual remotes (the same issue existed with "--tags", but the combination "--all --tags" makes much less sense than "--all --no-tags").
"git fetch" over http had an old workaround for an unlikely server misconfiguration; it turns out that this hurts debuggability of the configuration in general, and has been reverted.
"git fetch" over http advertised that it supports "deflate", which is much less common, and did not advertise the more common "gzip" on its Accept-Encoding header.
"git fetch" over the dumb-http revision walker could segfault when curl's multi interface was used.
"git gc --auto" notified the user that auto-packing has triggered even under the "--quiet" option.
After "gitk" showed the contents of a tag, neither "Reread references" nor "Reload" updated what is shown as the contents of it when the user overwrote the tag with "git tag -f".
"git log --all-match --grep=A --grep=B" ought to show commits that mention both A and B, but when these three options are used with --author or --committer, it showed commits that mention either A or B (or both) instead.
The "-Xours" backend option to "git merge -s recursive" was ignored for binary files.
"git p4", when "--use-client-spec" and "--detect-branches" are used together, misdetected branches.
"git receive-pack" (the counterpart to "git push") did not give progress output while processing objects it received to the puser when run over the smart-http protocol.
When you misspell the command name you give to the "exec" action in the "git rebase -i" instruction sheet you were told that 'rebase' is not a git subcommand from "git rebase --continue".
The subcommand in "git remote" to remove a defined remote was "rm" and the command did not take a fully-spelled "remove".
The interactive prompt that "git send-email" gives was error prone. It asked "What e-mail address do you want to use?" with the address it guessed (correctly) the user would want to use in its prompt, tempting the user to say "y". But the response was taken as "No, please use 'y' as the e-mail address instead", which is most certainly not what the user meant.
"git show --format='%ci'" did not give the timestamp correctly for commits created without human readable name on the "committer" line.
"git show --quiet" ought to be a synonym for "git show -s", but wasn't.
"git submodule frotz" was not diagnosed as "frotz" being an unknown subcommand to "git submodule"; the user instead got a complaint that "git submodule status" was run with an unknown path "frotz".
"git status" honored the ignore=dirty settings in .gitmodules but "git commit" didn't.
"gitweb" did not give the correct committer timezone in its feed output due to a typo.

New in Git for Windows 1.7.10 Preview 20120409 (Apr 10, 2012)

UI, Workflows & Features"
various "gitk" updates
show the path to the top level directory in the window title
update preference edit dialog
display file list correctly when directories are given on command line
make "git-describe" output in the log message into a clickable link
avoid matching the UNIX timestamp part when searching all fields
give preference to symbolic font names like sans & monospace
allow comparing two commits using a mark
"gitk" honors log.showroot configuration
Teams for localizing the messages from the Porcelain layer of
commands are starting to form, thanks to Jiang Xin who volunteered
to be the localization coordinator. Translated messages for
simplified Chinese, Swedish and Portuguese are available
The configuration mechanism learned an "include" facility; an
assignment to the include.path pseudo-variable causes the named
file to be included in-place when Git looks up configuration
variables
A content filter (clean/smudge) used to be just a way to make the
recorded contents "more useful", and allowed to fail; a filter can
now optionally be marked as "required"
Options whose names begin with "--no-" (e.g. the "--no-verify"
option of the "git commit" command) can be negated by omitting
"no-" from its name, e.g. "git commit --verify"
"git am" learned to pass "-b" option to underlying "git mailinfo", so
that a bracketed string other than "PATCH" at the beginning can be kept
"git clone" learned "--single-branch" option to limit cloning to a
single branch (surprise!); tags that do not point into the history
of the branch are not fetched
"git clone" learned to detach the HEAD in the resulting repository
when the user specifies a tag with "--branch" (e.g., "--branch=v1.0")
Clone also learned to print the usual "detached HEAD" advice in such
a case, similar to "git checkout v1.0"
When showing a patch while ignoring whitespace changes, the context
lines are taken from the postimage, in order to make it easier to
view the output
"git diff --stat" learned to adjust the width of the output on
wider terminals, and give more columns to pathnames as needed
"diff-highlight" filter (in contrib/) was updated to produce more
aesthetically pleasing output
"fsck" learned "--no-dangling" option to omit dangling object
information
"git log -G" and "git log -S" learned to pay attention to the "-i"
option. With "-i", "log -G" ignores the case when finding patch
hunks that introduce or remove a string that matches the given
pattern. Similarly with "-i", "log -S" ignores the case when
finding the commit the given block of text appears or disappears
from the file
"git merge" in an interactive session learned to spawn the editor
by default to let the user edit the auto-generated merge message
to encourage people to explain their merges better. Legacy scripts
can export GIT_MERGE_AUTOEDIT=no to retain the historical behavior
Both "git merge" and "git pull" can be given --no-edit from the
command line to accept the auto-generated merge message
The advice message given when the user didn't give enough clue on
what to merge to "git pull" and "git merge" has been updated to
be more concise and easier to understand
"git push" learned the "--prune" option, similar to "git fetch"
The whole directory that houses a top-level superproject managed by
"git submodule" can be moved to another place
"git symbolic-ref" learned the "--short" option to abbreviate the
refname it shows unambiguously
"git tag --list" can be given "--points-at " to limit its
output to those that point at the given object
"gitweb" allows intermediate entries in the directory hierarchy
that leads to a project to be clicked, which in turn shows the
list of projects inside that directory
"gitweb" learned to read various pieces of information for the
repositories lazily, instead of reading everything that could be
needed (including the ones that are not necessary for a specific
task)
Project search in "gitweb" shows the substring that matched in the
project name and description highlighted
HTTP transport learned to authenticate with a proxy if needed
A new script "diffall" is added to contrib/; it drives an
external tool to perform a directory diff of two Git revisions
in one go, unlike "difftool" that compares one file at a time
Foreign Interface:
Improved handling of views, labels and branches in "git-p4" (in contrib)
"git-p4" (in contrib) suffered from unnecessary merge conflicts when
p4 expanded the embedded $RCS$-like keywords; it can be now told to
unexpand them
Some "git-svn" updates
"vcs-svn"/"svn-fe" learned to read dumps with svn-deltas and
support incremental imports
"git difftool/mergetool" learned to drive DeltaWalker
Performance:
Unnecessary calls to parse_object() "git upload-pack" makes in
response to "git fetch", have been eliminated, to help performance
in repositories with excessive number of refs
Internal Implementation (please report possible regressions)
Recursive call chains in "git index-pack" to deal with long delta
chains have been flattened, to reduce the stack footprint
Use of add_extra_ref() API is now gone, to make it possible to
cleanly restructure the overall refs API
The command line parser of "git pack-objects" now uses parse-options
API
The test suite supports the new "test_pause" helper function
Parallel to the test suite, there is a beginning of performance
benchmarking framework
t/Makefile is adjusted to prevent newer versions of GNU make from
running tests in seemingly random order
The code to check if a path points at a file beyond a symbolic link
has been restructured to be thread-safe
When pruning directories that has become empty during "git prune"
and "git prune-packed", call closedir() that iterates over a
directory before rmdir() it
Also contains minor documentation updates and code clean-ups
Fixes:
Unless otherwise noted, all the fixes since v1.7.9 in the maintenance
releases are contained in this release (see release notes to them for
details)
Build with NO_PERL_MAKEMAKER was broken and Git::I18N did not work
with versions of Perl older than 5.8.3
merge 5eb660e ab/perl-i18n later to maint)
"git tag -s" honored "gpg.program" configuration variable since
1.7.9, but "git tag -v" and "git verify-tag" didn't
merge a2c2506 az/verify-tag-use-gpg-config later to maint)
"configure" script learned to take "--with-sane-tool-path" from the
command line to record SANE_TOOL_PATH (used to avoid broken platform
tools in /usr/bin) in config.mak.autogen. This may be useful for
people on Solaris who have saner tools outside /usr/xpg[46]/bin
zsh port of bash completion script needed another workaround

New in Git for Windows 1.7.9 Preview 20120201 (Feb 1, 2012)

New in Git for Windows 1.7.8 Preview 20111206 (Jan 30, 2012)

Updates
Some git-svn, git-gui, git-p4 (in contrib) and msysgit updates.
Updates to bash completion scripts.
The build procedure has been taught to take advantage of computed dependency automatically when the complier supports it.
The date parser now accepts timezone designators that lack minutes part and also has a colon between "hh:mm".
The contents of the /etc/mailname file, if exists, is used as the default value of the hostname part of the committer/author e-mail.
"git am" learned how to read from patches generated by Hg.
"git archive" talking with a remote repository can report errors from the remote side in a more informative way.
"git branch" learned an explicit --list option to ask for branches listed, optionally with a glob matching pattern to limit its output.
"git check-attr" learned "--cached" option to look at .gitattributes files from the index, not from the working tree.
Variants of "git cherry-pick" and "git revert" that take multiple commits learned to "--continue" and "--abort".
"git daemon" gives more human readble error messages to clients using ERR packets when appropriate.
Errors at the network layer is logged by "git daemon".
"git diff" learned "--minimal" option to spend extra cycles to come up with a minimal patch output.
"git diff" learned "--function-context" option to show the whole function as context that was affected by a change.
"git difftool" can be told to skip launching the tool for a path by answering 'n' to its prompt.
"git fetch" learned to honor transfer.fsckobjects configuration to validate the objects that were received from the other end, just like "git receive-pack" (the receiving end of "git push") does.
"git fetch" makes sure that the set of objects it received from the other end actually completes the history before updating the refs.
"git receive-pack" (the receiving end of "git push") learned to do the same.
"git fetch" learned that fetching/cloning from a regular file on the filesystem is not necessarily a request to unpack a bundle file; the file could be ".git" with "gitdir: " in it.
"git for-each-ref" learned "%(contents:subject)", "%(contents:body)" and "%(contents:signature)". The last one is useful for signed tags.
"git grep" used to incorrectly pay attention to .gitignore files scattered in the directory it was working in even when "--no-index" option was used. It no longer does this. The "--exclude-standard" option needs to be given to explicitly activate the ignore mechanism.
"git grep" learned "--untracked" option, where given patterns are searched in untracked (but not ignored) files as well as tracked files in the working tree, so that matches in new but not yet added files do not get missed.
The recursive merge backend no longer looks for meaningless existing merges in submodules unless in the outermost merge.
"git log" and friends learned "--children" option.
"git ls-remote" learned to respond to "-h"(elp) requests.
"mediawiki" remote helper can interact with (surprise!) MediaWiki with "git fetch" & "git push".
"git merge" learned the "--edit" option to allow users to edit the merge commit log message.
"git rebase -i" can be told to use special purpose editor suitable only for its insn sheet via sequence.editor configuration variable.
"git send-email" learned to respond to "-h"(elp) requests.
"git send-email" allows the value given to sendemail.aliasfile to begin with "~/" to refer to the $HOME directory.
"git send-email" forces use of Authen::SASL::Perl to work around issues between Authen::SASL::Cyrus and AUTH PLAIN/LOGIN.
"git stash" learned "--include-untracked" option to stash away untracked/ignored cruft from the working tree.
"git submodule clone" does not leak an error message to the UI level unnecessarily anymore.
"git submodule update" learned to honor "none" as the value for submodule..update to specify that the named submodule should not be checked out by default.
When populating a new submodule directory with "git submodule init", the $GIT_DIR metainformation directory for submodules is created inside GIT_DIR/modules// directory of the superproject and referenced via the gitfile mechanism. This is to make it possible to switch between commits in the superproject that has and does not have the submodule in the tree without re-cloning.
"gitweb" leaked unescaped control characters from syntax hiliter outputs.
"gitweb" can be told to give custom string at the end of the HTML HEAD element.
"gitweb" now has its own manual pages.
Fixes:
HTTP transport did not use pushurl correctly, and also did not tell what host it is trying to authenticate with when asking for credentials. (merge deba493 jk/http-auth later to maint).
"git blame" was aborted if started from an uncommitted content and the path had the textconv filter in effect. (merge 8518088 ss/blame-textconv-fake-working-tree later to maint).
Adding many refs to the local repository in one go (e.g. "git fetch" that fetches many tags) and looking up a ref by name in a repository with too many refs were unnecessarily slow. (merge 17d68a54d jp/get-ref-dir-unsorted later to maint).
Report from "git commit" on untracked files was confused under core.ignorecase option. (merge 395c7356 jk/name-hash-dirent later to maint).
"git merge" did not understand ":/" as a way to name a commit.
"git push" on the receiving end used to call post-receive and post-update hooks for attempted removal of non-existing refs. (merge 160b81ed ph/push-to-delete-nothing later to maint).
Help text for "git remote set-url" and "git remote set-branches" were misspelled. (merge c49904e fc/remote-seturl-usage-fix later to maint). (merge 656cdf0 jc/remote-setbranches-usage-fix later to maint).

New in Git for Windows 1.7.7.1 Preview 20111027 (Jan 30, 2012)

New in Git for Windows 1.7.7 Preview 20111014 (Jan 30, 2012)

New in Git for Windows 1.7.6 Preview 20110708 (Jan 30, 2012)

New in Git for Windows 1.7.4 Preview 20111027 (Dec 5, 2011)

New in Git for Windows 1.7.3.2 Preview 20101025 (Jun 9, 2011)

New in Git for Windows 1.7.2.3 Preview 20100911 (Jun 9, 2011)

New in Git for Windows 1.7.1 Preview 20100612 (Jun 9, 2011)

New in Git for Windows 1.7.0.2 Preview 20100309 (Jun 9, 2011)

New in Git for Windows 1.6.5.1 Preview 20091022 (Jun 9, 2011)

New Features:Comes with official Git 1.7.0.2.
Comes with Git-Cheetah (on 32-bit Windows only, for now).
Comes with connect.exe, a SOCKS proxy.
Tons of improvements in the installer, thanks to Sebastian Schuberth.
On Vista, if possible, symlinks are used for the built-ins.
Features Hany's dos2unix tool, thanks to Sebastian Schuberth.
Updated Tcl/Tk to version 8.5.8 (thanks Pat Thoyts!).
By default, only .git/ is hidden, to work around a bug in Eclipse (thanks to Erik Faye-Lund).
Bugfixes:
Fixed threaded grep (thanks to Heiko Voigt).
git gui was fixed for all kinds of worktree-related failures (thanks Pat Thoyts).
git gui now fully supports themed widgets (thanks Pat Thoyts and Heiko Voigt).
Git no longer complains about an unset RUNTIME_PREFIX (thanks Johannes Sixt).
git gui can Explore Working Copy on Windows again (thanks Markus Heidelberg).
git gui can create shortcuts again (fixes issue 425, thanks Heiko Voigt).
When "git checkout" cannot overwrite files because they are in use, it will offer to try again, giving the user a chance to release the file (thanks Heiko Voigt).
Ctrl+W will close gitk (thanks Jens Lehmann).
git gui no longer binds Ctrl+C, which caused problems when trying to use said shortcut for the clipboard operation "Copy" (fixes issue 423, thanks Pat Thoyts).
gitk does not give up when the command line length limit is reached (issue 387).
The exit code is fixed when Git.cmd is called from cmd.exe (thanks Alexey Borzenkov).
When launched via the (non-Cheetah) shell extension, the window icon is now correct (thanks Sebastian Schuberth).
Uses a TrueType font for the console, to be able to render UTF-8 correctly.
Clarified the installer's line ending options (issue 370).
Substantially speeded up startup time from cmd unless NO_FSTAB_THREAD is set (thanks Johannes Sixt).
Update msys-1.0.dll yet again, to handle quoted parameters better (thanks Heiko Voigt).
Updated cURL to a version that supports SSPI.
Updated tar to handle the pax headers generated by git archive.
Updated sed to a version that can handle the filter-branch examples.
.git* files can be associated with the default text editor (issue 397).