Portable Git Changelog

What's new in Portable Git 2.45.0 RC 1

Apr 25, 2024

New Features:
Comes with Git v2.45.0-rc1.
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 Portable Git 2.25.0 RC 0 (Apr 20, 2024)

New in Portable Git 2.44.0 (Feb 24, 2024)

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

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

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

New in Portable Git 2.43.0 (Nov 21, 2023)

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

New in Portable Git 2.42.0.2 (Aug 30, 2023)

New in Portable Git 2.42.0 RC 2 (Aug 17, 2023)

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

New in Portable Git 2.41.0.3 (Jul 14, 2023)

New in Portable Git 2.41.0.2 (Jul 7, 2023)

New in Portable Git 2.41.0 (Jun 2, 2023)

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

New in Portable Git 2.41.0 RC 0 (May 17, 2023)

New in Portable Git 2.40.1 (Apr 25, 2023)

New in Portable Git 2.40.0 (Mar 15, 2023)

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

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

New in Portable Git 2.40.0 RC0 (Feb 27, 2023)

New in Portable Git 2.39.2 (Feb 15, 2023)

New in Portable Git 2.39.1 (Jan 17, 2023)

New in Portable Git 2.39.0(2) (Dec 21, 2022)

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

New in Portable Git 2.38.1 (Oct 19, 2022)

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

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

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

New in Portable Git 2.37.3 (Aug 31, 2022)

New in Portable Git 2.37.2.2 (Aug 12, 2022)

New in Portable Git 2.37.2 (Aug 11, 2022)

New in Portable Git 2.37.1 (Jul 12, 2022)

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

New in Portable Git 2.36.1 (May 9, 2022)

New in Portable Git 2.36.0 (Apr 20, 2022)

New in Portable Git 2.35.2 (Apr 12, 2022)

New in Portable Git 2.36.0 RC 1 (Apr 9, 2022)

New in Portable Git 2.36.0 RC 0 (Apr 5, 2022)

New in Portable Git 2.35.1.2 (Mar 25, 2022)

New in Portable Git 2.35.1 (Jan 29, 2022)

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

New in Portable Git 2.34.1 (Nov 25, 2021)

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

New in Portable Git 2.33.1 (Oct 14, 2021)

New in Portable Git 2.33.0.2 (Aug 24, 2021)

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

New in Portable Git 2.32.0.2 (Jul 6, 2021)

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

New in Portable Git 2.31.1 (Mar 28, 2021)

New in Portable Git 2.30.2 (Mar 10, 2021)

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

New in Portable Git 2.30.1 (Feb 10, 2021)

New in Portable Git 2.30.0.2 (Jan 17, 2021)

New in Portable Git 2.30.0 RC0 (Dec 14, 2020)

New in Portable Git 2.29.2.3 (Dec 8, 2020)

New in Portable Git 2.29.2.2 (Nov 5, 2020)

New in Portable Git 2.29.2 (Oct 30, 2020)

New in Portable Git 2.28.0 (Oct 6, 2020)

New Features:
Comes with Git v2.29.0-rc0.
Comes with cURL v7.72.0.
Comes with MSYS2 runtime (Git for Windows flavor) based on Cygwin 3.1.7.
Comes with Git LFS v2.12.0.
Comes with GNU Privacy Guard v2.2.23.
Comes with OpenSSL v1.1.1h.
Comes with libcbor v0.8.0.
Comes with libfido2 v1.5.0.
Comes with OpenSSH v8.4p1.
Comes with Git Credential Manager Core v2.0.252.766.
Existing Git Credential Manager for Windows users are now automatically upgraded to Git Credential Manager Core.
Git for Windows' installer learned to let users override the default branch used by git init.
The installer size was reduced by dropping a couple unneeded .dll files.
Bug Fixes:New Features
Comes with Git v2.28.0.
Comes with subversion v1.14.0.
Comes with the designated successor of Git Credential Manager for Windows (GCM for Windows), the cross-platform Git Credential Manager Core. For now, this is opt-in, with the idea of eventually retiring GCM for Windows.
Comes with cURL v7.71.1.
Comes with Perl v5.32.0.
Comes with MSYS2 runtime (Git for Windows flavor) based on Cygwin 3.1.6 (including the improvements of Cygwin 3.1.5).
Comes with GNU Privacy Guard v2.2.21.
Bug Fixes
A typo was fixed in the installer.
The new git pull behavior option now records the fast-forward choice correctly.
In v2.27.0, git svn wNew Features:
Comes with Git v2.28.0.
Comes with subversion v1.14.0.
Comes with the designated successor of Git Credential Manager for Windows (GCM for Windows), the cross-platform Git Credential Manager Core. For now, this is opt-in, with the idea of eventually retiring GCM for Windows.
Comes with cURL v7.71.1.
Comes with Perl v5.32.0.
Comes with MSYS2 runtime (Git for Windows flavor) based on Cygwin 3.1.6 (including the improvements of Cygwin 3.1.5).
Comes with GNU Privacy Guard v2.2.21.
Bug Fixes:
A typo was fixed in the installer.
The new git pull behavior option now records the fast-forward choice correctly.
In v2.27.0, git svn was broken completely, which has been fixed.
Some Git operations could end up with bogus modified symbolic links (where git status would report changes but git diff would not), which is now fixed.
When reinstalling (or upgrading) Git for Windows, the "Pseudo Console Support" choice is now remembered correctly.
Under certain circumstances, the Git Bash window (MinTTY) would crash frequently, which has been addressed.
When pseudo console support is enabled, the VIM editor sometimes had troubles accepting certain keystrokes, which was fixed.
Due to a bug, it was not possible to disable Pseudo Console support by reinstalling with the checkbox turned off, which has been fixed.
A bug with enabled Pseudo Console support, where git add -i would not quit the file selection mode upon an empty input, has been fixed.
The cleanup mode called "scissors" in git commit now handles CR/LF line endings correctly.
When cloning into an existing directory, under certain circumstances, the core.worktree option was set unnecessarily. This has been fixed.
as broken completely, which has been fixed.
Some Git operations could end up with bogus modified symbolic links (where git status would report changes but git diff would not), which is now fixed.
When reinstalling (or upgrading) Git for Windows, the "Pseudo Console Support" choice is now remembered correctly.
Under certain circumstances, the Git Bash window (MinTTY) would crash frequently, which has been addressed.
When pseudo console support is enabled, the VIM editor sometimes had troubles accepting certain keystrokes, which was fixed.
Due to a bug, it was not possible to disable Pseudo Console support by reinstalling with the checkbox turned off, which has been fixed.
A bug with enabled Pseudo Console support, where git add -i would not quit the file selection mode upon an empty input, has been fixed.
The cleanup mode called "scissors" in git commit now handles CR/LF line endings correctly.
When cloning into an existing directory, under certain circumstances, the core.worktree option was set unnecessarily. This has been fixed.
The credential helper selector (used as default credential helper in the Portable Git) now persists the users choice correctly again.
The full command-lines of MSYS2 processes (such as cp.exe) spawned from Git's Bash can now be seen in sysmon, wmic etc by default.
A bug preventing Unicode characters from being used in the window title of Git Bash was fixed.
OpenSSH was patched to no longer warn about an "invalid format" when private and public keys are stored separately.
Non-ASCII output of paged Git commands is now rendered correctly in Windows Terminal.
It is now possible to use wordpad.exe as Git's editor of choice.
When using Git via the "Run As..." function, it now uses the correct home directory.

New in Portable Git 2.28.0 RC 0 (Jul 10, 2020)

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

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

New in Portable Git 2.26.2 (Apr 20, 2020)

New in Portable Git 2.26.1 (Apr 14, 2020)

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

New in Portable Git 2.25.1 (Feb 19, 2020)

New in Portable Git 2.24.1 (Dec 10, 2019)

New in Portable Git 2.24.0.2 (Nov 6, 2019)

New in Portable Git 2.24.0 (Nov 6, 2019)

New in Portable Git 2.22.0 (Jul 30, 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.
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 Portable Git 2.21.1 (Feb 27, 2019)

New in Portable Git 2.20.1 (Dec 15, 2018)

New in Portable Git 2.19.2 (Nov 22, 2018)

New in Portable Git 2.19.1 (Oct 6, 2018)

New in Portable Git 2.19.0 (Sep 13, 2018)

New in Portable Git 2.18.0 (Jul 25, 2018)

New in Portable Git 2.17.1.2 (May 30, 2018)

New in Portable Git 2.17.1 (May 30, 2018)

New in Portable Git 2.17.0 (Apr 3, 2018)

New in Portable Git 2.16.3 (Mar 24, 2018)

New in Portable Git 2.16.2 (Feb 20, 2018)

New in Portable Git 2.16.1.4 (Feb 8, 2018)

New in Portable Git 2.16.1.3 (Feb 6, 2018)

New in Portable Git 2.16.1.2 (Feb 3, 2018)

New in Portable Git 2.16.1 (Jan 23, 2018)

New in Portable Git 2.15.1.2 (Nov 30, 2017)

New in Portable Git 2.15.1 (Nov 29, 2017)

New in Portable Git 2.15.0 (Oct 31, 2017)

New in Portable Git 2.14.3 (Oct 27, 2017)

New in Portable Git 2.14.1 (Sep 1, 2017)

New in Portable Git 2.10.2 (Nov 6, 2016)

New in Portable Git 2.6.4 (Dec 29, 2015)

New in Portable Git 2.6.3 (Dec 29, 2015)

New in Portable Git 2.6.2 (Dec 29, 2015)

New in Portable Git 2.6.1 (Dec 29, 2015)

New in Portable Git 2.6.0 (Dec 29, 2015)

New in Portable Git 2.5.3 (Dec 29, 2015)

New in Portable Git 1.9.4 Preview 20140611 (Jul 4, 2014)

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

New in Portable Git 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 Portable Git 1.7.9 (Apr 10, 2012)

gitk updates accumulated since early 2011
git-gui updated to 0.16.0
git-p4 (in contrib/) updates
Git uses gettext to translate its most common interface messages
into the user's language if translations are available and the
locale is appropriately set. Distributors can drop new PO files
in po/ to add new translations
The code to handle username/password for HTTP transactions used in
"git push" & "git fetch" learned to talk "credential API" to
external programs to cache or store them, to allow integration with
platform native keychain mechanisms
The input prompts in the terminal use our own getpass() replacement
when possible. HTTP transactions used to ask for the username without
echoing back what was typed, but with this change you will see it as
you type
The internals of "revert/cherry-pick" have been tweaked to prepare
building more generic "sequencer" on top of the implementation that
drives them
"git rev-parse FETCH_HEAD" after "git fetch" without specifying
what to fetch from the command line will now show the commit that
would be merged if the command were "git pull"
"git add" learned to stream large files directly into a packfile
instead of writing them into individual loose object files
"git checkout -B " is a more intuitive
way to spell "git reset --keep "
"git checkout" and "git merge" learned "--no-overwrite-ignore" option
to tell Git that untracked and ignored files are not expendable
"git commit --amend" learned "--no-edit" option to say that the
user is amending the tree being recorded, without updating the
commit log message
"git commit" and "git reset" re-learned the optimization to prime
the cache-tree information in the index, which makes it faster to
write a tree object out after the index entries are updated
"git commit" detects and rejects an attempt to stuff NUL byte in
the commit log message
"git commit" learned "-S" to GPG-sign the commit; this can be shown
with the "--show-signature" option to "git log"
fsck and prune are relatively lengthy operations that still go
silent while making the end-user wait. They learned to give progress
output like other slow operations
The set of built-in function-header patterns for various languages
knows MATLAB
"git log --format=''" learned new %g[nNeE] specifiers to
show information from the reflog entries when walking the reflog
i.e. with "-g")
"git pull" can be used to fetch and merge an annotated/signed tag
instead of the tip of a topic branch. The GPG signature from the
signed tag is recorded in the resulting merge commit for later
auditing
"git log" learned "--show-signature" option to show the signed tag
that was merged that is embedded in the merge commit. It also can
show the signature made on the commit with "git commit -S"
"git branch --edit-description" can be used to add descriptive text
to explain what a topic branch is about
"git fmt-merge-msg" learned to take the branch description into
account when preparing a merge summary that "git merge" records
when merging a local branch
"git request-pull" has been updated to convey more information
useful for integrators to decide if a topic is worth merging and
what is pulled is indeed what the requestor asked to pull
including
the tip of the branch being requested to be merged
the branch description describing what the topic is about
the contents of the annotated tag, when requesting to pull a tag
"git pull" learned to notice 'pull.rebase' configuration variable
which serves as a global fallback for setting 'branch..rebase'
configuration variable per branch
"git tag" learned "--cleanup" option to control how the whitespaces
and empty lines in tag message are cleaned up
"gitweb" learned to show side-by-side diff
Also contains minor documentation updates and code clean-ups

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

Updates
The scripting part of the codebase is getting prepared for i18n/l10n.
Interix, Cygwin and Minix ports got updated.
Various updates to git-p4 (in contrib/), fast-import, and git-svn.
Gitweb learned to read from /etc/gitweb-common.conf when it exists, before reading from gitweb_config.perl or from /etc/gitweb.conf (this last one is read only when per-repository gitweb_config.perl does not exist).
Various codepaths that invoked zlib deflate/inflate assumed that these functions can compress or uncompress more than 4GB data in one call on platforms with 64-bit long, which has been corrected.
Git now recognizes loose objects written by other implementations that use a non-standard window size for zlib deflation (e.g. Agit running on Android with 4kb window). We used to reject anything that was not deflated with 32kb window.
Interaction between the use of pager and coloring of the output has been improved, especially when a command that is not built-in was involved.
"git am" learned to pass the "--exclude=" option through to underlying "git apply".
You can now feed many empty lines before feeding an mbox file to "git am".
"git archive" can be told to pass the output to gzip compression and produce "archive.tar.gz".
"git bisect" can be used in a bare repository (provided that the test you perform per each iteration does not need a working tree, of course).
The length of abbreviated object names in "git branch -v" output now honors the core.abbrev configuration variable.
"git check-attr" can take relative paths from the command line.
"git check-attr" learned an "--all" option to list the attributes for a given path.
"git checkout" (both the code to update the files upon checking out a different branch and the code to checkout a specific set of files) learned to stream the data from object store when possible, without having to read the entire contents of a file into memory first. An earlier round of this code that is not in any released version had a large leak but now it has been plugged.
"git clone" can now take a "--config key=value" option to set the repository configuration options that affect the initial checkout.
"git commit ..." now lets you feed relative pathspecs that refer to outside your current subdirectory.
"git diff --stat" learned a --stat-count option to limit the output of a diffstat report.
"git diff" learned a "--histogram" option to use a different diff generation machinery stolen from jgit, which might give better performance.
"git diff" had a weird worst case behaviour that can be triggered when comparing files with potentially many places that could match.
"git fetch", "git push" and friends no longer show connection errors for addresses that couldn't be connected to when at least one address succeeds (this is arguably a regression but a deliberate one).
"git grep" learned "--break" and "--heading" options, to let users mimic the output format of "ack".
"git grep" learned a "-W" option that shows wider context using the same logic used by "git diff" to determine the hunk header.
Invoking the low-level "git http-fetch" without "-a" option (which git itself never did---normal users should not have to worry about this) is now deprecated.
The "--decorate" option to "git log" and its family learned to highlight grafted and replaced commits.
"git rebase master topci" no longer spews usage hints after giving the "fatal: no such branch: topci" error message.
The recursive merge strategy implementation got a fairly large fix for many corner cases that may rarely happen in real world projects (it has been verified that none of the 16000+ merges in the Linux kernel history back to v2.6.12 is affected with the corner case bugs this update fixes).
"git stash" learned an "--include-untracked option".
"git submodule update" used to stop at the first error updating a submodule; it now goes on to update other submodules that can be updated, and reports the ones with errors at the end.
"git push" can be told with the "--recurse-submodules=check" option to refuse pushing of the supermodule, if any of its submodules' commits hasn't been pushed out to their remotes.
"git upload-pack" and "git receive-pack" learned to pretend that only a subset of the refs exist in a repository. This may help a site to put many tiny repositories into one repository (this would not be useful for larger repositories as repacking would be problematic).
"git verify-pack" has been rewritten to use the "index-pack" machinery that is more efficient in reading objects in packfiles.
test scripts for gitweb tried to run even when CGI-related perl modules are not installed; they now exit early when the latter are unavailable.
Fixes:
"git branch -m" and "git checkout -b" incorrectly allowed the tip of the branch that is currently checked out updated.

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

New in Portable Git 1.7.4 Preview 20110211 (Jan 30, 2012)

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

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

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

New in Portable Git 1.7.0.2 Preview 20100309 (May 7, 2010)

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).