What's new in Git 1.9

I know you are all busy with looting marathons in DayZ but bear with me. Something is worth checking out today. The latest git point release (1.9) has come out!

Here is what caught my eye from the release notes. If you're inclined you can obviously go ahead and scour the notes in all their nerdy beauty by yourself. But let me help!

Before I start let me also gently point you to my earlier notes on releases 1.8.2, 1.8.3, 1.8.4, 1.8.5. Lots of neat tricks and goodies in there, too.

Upgrade pointers for everyone

How do you upgrade? Here some instructions that should get you started:

• Type brew update && brew upgrade git if you use homebrew on OSX.
• Use a magic apt trick if on Ubuntu based distributions (I leave other distributions as an exercise for the reader).
• Simply run the new installer if on Windows (the Windows port sometimes lags a bit behind so please be patient if you can't find it right away).

Note!: Package managers in some cases might delay the distribution of the update; that is out of my hands.

Network operations updates: push and fetch

"git fetch --tags" now fetches all plus tags

The meaning of the --tags option in git fetch has changed; The command now fetches tags in addition to what is fetched by the same command without the option.

Now you can "fetch" from a shallow-clone!

You can now fetch from a shallowly-cloned repository, an action that was forbidden before; Note that the receiver becomes now a shallow repository with a truncated history too.

Standard "git push origin master" has more solid semantics

git push origin master or more generally any git push $where $what has been enhanced to use the same ref mapping git push origin would use to determine which ref at the origin is to be updated to the local master. For example, with this configuration:

[remote "origin"] push = refs/heads/*:refs/review/*

Just like git push origin would push out our local branches to corresponding refs under refs/review/ hierarchy at origin, git push origin master will now update refs/review/master over there.

Logging and aesthetics

Log everything but directory

The negative pathspec syntax allows git log ‐‐ . ':!dir' to tell us I am interested in everything but the 'dir' directory.

difftool progress

git difftool shows how many different paths there are in total, and how many of them have been shown so far, to indicate progress.

Colors and formatting on "for-earch-ref"

git for-each-ref ‐‐format=... learned a few formatting directives:

e.g. "%(color:red)%(HEAD)%(color:reset) %(refname:short) %(subject)"

git log learned "‐‐exclude={glob}", pretty cool!

git log and friends learned the ‐‐exclude={glob} option, to allow people to say list history of all branches except those that match this pattern with git log ‐‐exclude='_/_' ‐‐branches.

Other improvements

git merge-base ‐‐fork-point to find a fork point out of the reflog

git merge-base learned the ‐‐fork-point mode, that implements the same logic used in git pull ‐‐rebase to find a suitable fork point out of the reflog entries for the remote-tracking branch the work has been based on. git rebase has the same logic that can be triggered with the ‐‐fork-point option.

Some deprecated commands are gone!

A handful of ancient commands that have long been deprecated are finally gone, namely:

repo-config, tar-tree, lost-found and peek-remote

Submodule: More robust "git submodule foreach"

The command string given to git submodule foreach $cmd $args is passed directly to the shell, without being eval'ed. This is a backward incompatible change that may break existing users. This differs now from how ssh does the parsing. In short it's not needed to over quote the $args anymore.

Conclusions

That's it for now. Let me know if you find this update useful and stay tuned for more. Follow me @durdn and the awesome @AtlDevtools team for more DVCS rocking.