GIT Updates, Fixes, and Improvements

submodule foreach" subcommand allows you to iterate over checked out submodules. * "git submodule sync" subcommands allows you to update the origin URL recorded in submodule directories from the toplevel .gitmodules file. * "git svn branch" can create new branches on the other end. * "gitweb" can use more saner PATH_INFO based URL. (internal) * "git hash-object" learned to lie about the path being hashed, so that correct gitattributes processing can be done while hashing contents stored in a temporary file. * various callers of git-merge-recursive avoid forking it as an external process. * Git class defined in "Git.pm" can be subclasses a bit more easily. * We used to link GNU regex library as a compatibility layer for some platforms, but it turns out it is not necessary on most of them. * Some path handling routines used fixed number of buffers used alternately but depending on the call depth, this arrangement led to hard to track bugs. This issue is being addressed. Fixes since v1.6.0 ------------------ All of the fixes in v1.6.0.X maintenance series are included in this release, unless otherwise noted. * Porcelains implemented as shell scripts were utterly confused when you entered to a subdirectory of a work tree from sideways, following a symbolic link (this may need to be backported to older releases later). * Tracking symbolic links would work better on filesystems whose lstat() returns incorrect st_size value for them. * "git add" and "git update-index" incorrectly allowed adding S/F when S is a tracked symlink that points at a directory D that has a path F in it (we still need to fix a similar nonsense when S is a submodule and F is a path in it). * "git am" after stopping at a broken patch lost --whitespace, -C, -p and --3way options given from the command line initially. * "git diff --stdin" used to take two trees on a line and compared them, but we dropped support for such a use case long time ago. This has been resurrected. * "git filter-branch" failed to rewrite a tag name with slashes in it. * "git http-push" did not understand URI scheme other than opaquelocktoken when acquiring a lock from the server (this may need to be backported to older releases later). * After "git rebase -p" stopped with conflicts while replaying a merge, "git rebase --continue" did not work (may need to be backported to older releases). * "git revert" records relative to which parent a revert was made when reverting a merge. Together with new documentation that explains issues around reverting a merge and merging from the updated branch later, this hopefully will reduce user confusion (this may need to be backported to older releases later). * "git rm --cached" used to allow an empty blob that was added earlier to be removed without --force, even when the file in the work tree has since been modified. * "git push --tags --all $there" failed with generic usage message without telling saying these two options are incompatible. * "git log --author/--committer" match used to potentially match the timestamp part, exposing internal implementation detail. Also these did not work with --fixed-strings match at all. * "gitweb" did not mark non-ASCII characters imported from external HTML fragments correctly.

This section describes new features and fixes in GIT, including updates to submodule, svn, and gitweb commands, as well as fixes for issues related to symbolic links, tracking, and porcelain scripts, and improvements to commands like git add, git am, git diff, and git rebase.