1Git 2.16 Release Notes 2====================== 3 4Backward compatibility notes and other notable changes. 5 6 * Use of an empty string as a pathspec element that is used for 7 'everything matches' is now an error. 8 9 10Updates since v2.15 11------------------- 12 13UI, Workflows & Features 14 15 * An empty string as a pathspec element that means "everything" 16 i.e. 'git add ""', is now illegal. We started this by first 17 deprecating and warning a pathspec that has such an element in 18 2.11 (Nov 2016). 19 20 * A hook script that is set unexecutable is simply ignored. Git 21 notifies when such a file is ignored, unless the message is 22 squelched via advice.ignoredHook configuration. 23 24 * "git pull" has been taught to accept "--[no-]signoff" option and 25 pass it down to "git merge". 26 27 * The "--push-option=<string>" option to "git push" now defaults to a 28 list of strings configured via push.pushOption variable. 29 30 * "gitweb" checks if a directory is searchable with Perl's "-x" 31 operator, which can be enhanced by using "filetest 'access'" 32 pragma, which now we do. 33 34 * "git stash save" has been deprecated in favour of "git stash push". 35 36 * The set of paths output from "git status --ignored" was tied 37 closely with its "--untracked=<mode>" option, but now it can be 38 controlled more flexibly. Most notably, a directory that is 39 ignored because it is listed to be ignored in the ignore/exclude 40 mechanism can be handled differently from a directory that ends up 41 to be ignored only because all files in it are ignored. 42 43 * The remote-helper for talking to MediaWiki has been updated to 44 truncate an overlong pagename so that ".mw" suffix can still be 45 added. 46 47 * The remote-helper for talking to MediaWiki has been updated to 48 work with mediawiki namespaces. 49 50 * The "--format=..." option "git for-each-ref" takes learned to show 51 the name of the 'remote' repository and the ref at the remote side 52 that is affected for 'upstream' and 'push' via "%(push:remotename)" 53 and friends. 54 55 * Doc and message updates to teach users "bisect view" is a synonym 56 for "bisect visualize". 57 58 * "git bisect run" that did not specify any command to run used to go 59 ahead and treated all commits to be tested as 'good'. This has 60 been corrected by making the command error out. 61 62 * The SubmittingPatches document has been converted to produce an 63 HTML version via AsciiDoc/Asciidoctor. 64 65 * We learned to optionally talk to a file system monitor via new 66 fsmonitor extension to speed up "git status" and other operations 67 that need to see which paths have been modified. Currently we only 68 support "watchman". See File System Monitor section of 69 git-update-index(1) for more detail. 70 71 * The "diff" family of commands learned to ignore differences in 72 carriage return at the end of line. 73 74 * Places that know about "sendemail.to", like documentation and shell 75 completion (in contrib/) have been taught about "sendemail.tocmd", 76 too. 77 78 * "git add --renormalize ." is a new and safer way to record the fact 79 that you are correcting the end-of-line convention and other 80 "convert_to_git()" glitches in the in-repository data. 81 82 * "git branch" and "git checkout -b" are now forbidden from creating 83 a branch whose name is "HEAD". 84 85 * "git branch --list" learned to show its output through the pager by 86 default when the output is going to a terminal, which is controlled 87 by the pager.branch configuration variable. This is similar to a 88 recent change to "git tag --list". 89 90 * "git grep -W", "git diff -W" and their friends learned a heuristic 91 to extend a pre-context beyond the line that matches the "function 92 pattern" (aka "diff.*.xfuncname") to include a comment block, if 93 exists, that immediately precedes it. 94 95 * "git config --expiry-date gc.reflogexpire" can read "2.weeks" from 96 the configuration and report it as a timestamp, just like "--int" 97 would read "1k" and report 1024, to help consumption by scripts. 98 99 * The shell completion (in contrib/) learned that "git pull" can take 100 the "--autostash" option. 101 102 * The tagnames "git log --decorate" uses to annotate the commits can 103 now be limited to subset of available refs with the two additional 104 options, --decorate-refs[-exclude]=<pattern>. 105 106 * "git grep" compiled with libpcre2 sometimes triggered a segfault, 107 which is being fixed. 108 109 * "git send-email" tries to see if the sendmail program is available 110 in /usr/lib and /usr/sbin; extend the list of locations to be 111 checked to also include directories on $PATH. 112 113 * "git diff" learned, "--anchored", a variant of the "--patience" 114 algorithm, to which the user can specify which 'unique' line to be 115 used as anchoring points. 116 117 * The way "git worktree add" determines what branch to create from 118 where and checkout in the new worktree has been updated a bit. 119 120 * Ancient part of codebase still shows dots after an abbreviated 121 object name just to show that it is not a full object name, but 122 these ellipses are confusing to people who newly discovered Git 123 who are used to seeing abbreviated object names and find them 124 confusing with the range syntax. 125 126 * With a configuration variable rebase.abbreviateCommands set, 127 "git rebase -i" produces the todo list with a single-letter 128 command names. 129 130 * "git worktree add" learned to run the post-checkout hook, just like 131 "git checkout" does, after the initial checkout. 132 133 * "git svn" has been updated to strip CRs in the commit messages, as 134 recent versions of Subversion rejects them. 135 136 * "git imap-send" did not correctly quote the folder name when 137 making a request to the server, which has been corrected. 138 139 * Error messages from "git rebase" have been somewhat cleaned up. 140 141 * Git has been taught to support an https:// URL used for http.proxy 142 when using recent versions of libcurl. 143 144 * "git merge" learned to pay attention to merge.verifySignatures 145 configuration variable and pretend as if '--verify-signatures' 146 option was given from the command line. 147 148 * "git describe" was taught to dig trees deeper to find a 149 <commit-ish>:<path> that refers to a given blob object. 150 151 152Performance, Internal Implementation, Development Support etc. 153 154 * An earlier update made it possible to use an on-stack in-core 155 lockfile structure (as opposed to having to deliberately leak an 156 on-heap one). Many codepaths have been updated to take advantage 157 of this new facility. 158 159 * Calling cmd_foo() as if it is a general purpose helper function is 160 a no-no. Correct two instances of such to set an example. 161 162 * We try to see if somebody runs our test suite with a shell that 163 does not support "local" like bash/dash does. 164 165 * An early part of piece-by-piece rewrite of "git bisect" in C. 166 167 * GSoC to piece-by-piece rewrite "git submodule" in C. 168 169 * Optimize the code to find shortest unique prefix of object names. 170 171 * Pathspec-limited revision traversal was taught not to keep finding 172 unneeded differences once it knows two trees are different inside 173 given pathspec. 174 175 * Conversion from uchar[20] to struct object_id continues. 176 177 * Code cleanup. 178 179 * A single-word "unsigned flags" in the diff options is being split 180 into a structure with many bitfields. 181 182 * TravisCI build updates. 183 184 * Parts of a test to drive the long-running content filter interface 185 has been split into its own module, hopefully to eventually become 186 reusable. 187 188 * Drop (perhaps overly cautious) sanity check before using the index 189 read from the filesystem at runtime. 190 191 * The build procedure has been taught to avoid some unnecessary 192 instability in the build products. 193 194 * A new mechanism to upgrade the wire protocol in place is proposed 195 and demonstrated that it works with the older versions of Git 196 without harming them. 197 198 * An infrastructure to define what hash function is used in Git is 199 introduced, and an effort to plumb that throughout various 200 codepaths has been started. 201 202 * The code to iterate over loose object files got optimized. 203 204 * An internal function that was left for backward compatibility has 205 been removed, as there is no remaining callers. 206 207 * Historically, the diff machinery for rename detection had a 208 hardcoded limit of 32k paths; this is being lifted to allow users 209 trade cycles with a (possibly) easier to read result. 210 211 * The tracing infrastructure has been optimized for cases where no 212 tracing is requested. 213 214 * In preparation for implementing narrow/partial clone, the object 215 walking machinery has been taught a way to tell it to "filter" some 216 objects from enumeration. 217 218 * A few structures and variables that are implementation details of 219 the decorate API have been renamed and then the API got documented 220 better. 221 222 * Assorted updates for TravisCI integration. 223 (merge 4f26366679 sg/travis-fixes later to maint). 224 225 * Introduce a helper to simplify code to parse a common pattern that 226 expects either "--key" or "--key=<something>". 227 228 * "git version --build-options" learned to report the host CPU and 229 the exact commit object name the binary was built from. 230 231Also contains various documentation updates and code clean-ups. 232 233 234Fixes since v2.15 235----------------- 236 237 * "auto" as a value for the columnar output configuration ought to 238 judge "is the output consumed by humans?" with the same criteria as 239 "auto" for coloured output configuration, i.e. either the standard 240 output stream is going to tty, or a pager is in use. We forgot the 241 latter, which has been fixed. 242 243 * The experimental "color moved lines differently in diff output" 244 feature was buggy around "ignore whitespace changes" edges, which 245 has been corrected. 246 247 * Instead of using custom line comparison and hashing functions to 248 implement "moved lines" coloring in the diff output, use the pair 249 of these functions from lower-layer xdiff/ code. 250 251 * Some codepaths did not check for errors when asking what branch the 252 HEAD points at, which have been fixed. 253 254 * "git commit", after making a commit, did not check for errors when 255 asking on what branch it made the commit, which has been corrected. 256 257 * "git status --ignored -u" did not stop at a working tree of a 258 separate project that is embedded in an ignored directory and 259 listed files in that other project, instead of just showing the 260 directory itself as ignored. 261 262 * A broken access to object databases in recent update to "git grep 263 --recurse-submodules" has been fixed. 264 265 * A recent regression in "git rebase -i" that broke execution of git 266 commands from subdirectories via "exec" instruction has been fixed. 267 268 * A (possibly flakey) test fix. 269 270 * "git check-ref-format --branch @{-1}" bit a "BUG()" when run 271 outside a repository for obvious reasons; clarify the documentation 272 and make sure we do not even try to expand the at-mark magic in 273 such a case, but still call the validation logic for branch names. 274 275 * "git fetch --recurse-submodules" now knows that submodules can be 276 moved around in the superproject in addition to getting updated, 277 and finds the ones that need to be fetched accordingly. 278 279 * Command line completion (in contrib/) update. 280 281 * Description of blame.{showroot,blankboundary,showemail,date} 282 configuration variables have been added to "git config --help". 283 284 * After an error from lstat(), diff_populate_filespec() function 285 sometimes still went ahead and used invalid data in struct stat, 286 which has been fixed. 287 288 * UNC paths are also relevant in Cygwin builds and they are now 289 tested just like Mingw builds. 290 291 * Correct start-up sequence so that a repository could be placed 292 immediately under the root directory again (which was broken at 293 around Git 2.13). 294 295 * The credential helper for libsecret (in contrib/) has been improved 296 to allow possibly prompting the end user to unlock secrets that are 297 currently locked (otherwise the secrets may not be loaded). 298 299 * MinGW updates. 300 301 * Error checking in "git imap-send" for empty response has been 302 improved. 303 304 * Recent update to the refs infrastructure implementation started 305 rewriting packed-refs file more often than before; this has been 306 optimized again for most trivial cases. 307 308 * Some error messages did not quote filenames shown in it, which have 309 been fixed. 310 311 * "git rebase -i" recently started misbehaving when a submodule that 312 is configured with 'submodule.<name>.ignore' is dirty; this has 313 been corrected. 314 315 * Building with NO_LIBPCRE1_JIT did not disable it, which has been fixed. 316 317 * We used to add an empty alternate object database to the system 318 that does not help anything; it has been corrected. 319 320 * Doc update around use of "format-patch --subject-prefix" etc. 321 322 * A fix for an ancient bug in "git apply --ignore-space-change" codepath. 323 324 * Clarify and enhance documentation for "merge-base --fork-point", as 325 it was clear what it computed but not why/what for. 326 327 * A few scripts (both in production and tests) incorrectly redirected 328 their error output. These have been corrected. 329 330 * "git notes" sent its error message to its standard output stream, 331 which was corrected. 332 333 * The three-way merge performed by "git cherry-pick" was confused 334 when a new submodule was added in the meantime, which has been 335 fixed (or "papered over"). 336 337 * The sequencer machinery (used by "git cherry-pick A..B", and "git 338 rebase -i", among other things) would have lost a commit if stopped 339 due to an unlockable index file, which has been fixed. 340 341 * "git apply --inaccurate-eof" when used with "--ignore-space-change" 342 triggered an internal sanity check, which has been fixed. 343 344 * Command line completion (in contrib/) has been taught about the 345 "--copy" option of "git branch". 346 347 * When "git rebase" prepared a mailbox of changes and fed it to "git 348 am" to replay them, it was confused when a stray "From " happened 349 to be in the log message of one of the replayed changes. This has 350 been corrected. 351 352 * There was a recent semantic mismerge in the codepath to write out a 353 section of a configuration section, which has been corrected. 354 355 * Mentions of "git-rebase" and "git-am" (dashed form) still remained 356 in end-user visible strings emitted by the "git rebase" command; 357 they have been corrected. 358 359 * Contrary to the documentation, "git pull -4/-6 other-args" did not 360 ask the underlying "git fetch" to go over IPv4/IPv6, which has been 361 corrected. 362 363 * "git checkout --recursive" may overwrite and rewind the history of 364 the branch that happens to be checked out in submodule 365 repositories, which might not be desirable. Detach the HEAD but 366 still allow the recursive checkout to succeed in such a case. 367 (merge 57f22bf997 sb/submodule-recursive-checkout-detach-head later to maint). 368 369 * "git branch --set-upstream" has been deprecated and (sort of) 370 removed, as "--set-upstream-to" is the preferred one these days. 371 The documentation still had "--set-upstream" listed on its 372 synopsis section, which has been corrected. 373 (merge a060f3d3d8 tz/branch-doc-remove-set-upstream later to maint). 374 375 * Internally we use 0{40} as a placeholder object name to signal the 376 codepath that there is no such object (e.g. the fast-forward check 377 while "git fetch" stores a new remote-tracking ref says "we know 378 there is no 'old' thing pointed at by the ref, as we are creating 379 it anew" by passing 0{40} for the 'old' side), and expect that a 380 codepath to locate an in-core object to return NULL as a sign that 381 the object does not exist. A look-up for an object that does not 382 exist however is quite costly with a repository with large number 383 of packfiles. This access pattern has been optimized. 384 (merge 87b5e236a1 jk/fewer-pack-rescan later to maint). 385 386 * In addition to "git stash -m message", the command learned to 387 accept "git stash -mmessage" form. 388 (merge 5675473fcb ph/stash-save-m-option-fix later to maint). 389 390 * @{-N} in "git checkout @{-N}" may refer to a detached HEAD state, 391 but the documentation was not clear about it, which has been fixed. 392 (merge 75ce149575 ks/doc-checkout-previous later to maint). 393 394 * A regression in the progress eye-candy was fixed. 395 (merge 9c5951cacf jk/progress-delay-fix later to maint). 396 397 * The code internal to the recursive merge strategy was not fully 398 prepared to see a path that is renamed to try overwriting another 399 path that is only different in case on case insensitive systems. 400 This does not matter in the current code, but will start to matter 401 once the rename detection logic starts taking hints from nearby 402 paths moving to some directory and moves a new path along with them. 403 (merge 4cba2b0108 en/merge-recursive-icase-removal later to maint). 404 405 * An v2.12-era regression in pathspec match logic, which made it look 406 into submodule tree even when it is not desired, has been fixed. 407 (merge eef3df5a93 bw/pathspec-match-submodule-boundary later to maint). 408 409 * Amending commits in git-gui broke the author name that is non-ascii 410 due to incorrect enconding conversion. 411 412 * Recent update to the submodule configuration code broke "diff-tree" 413 by accidentally stopping to read from the index upfront. 414 (merge fd66bcc31f bw/submodule-config-cleanup later to maint). 415 416 * Git shows a message to tell the user that it is waiting for the 417 user to finish editing when spawning an editor, in case the editor 418 opens to a hidden window or somewhere obscure and the user gets 419 lost. 420 (merge abfb04d0c7 ls/editor-waiting-message later to maint). 421 422 * The "safe crlf" check incorrectly triggered for contents that does 423 not use CRLF as line endings, which has been corrected. 424 (merge 649f1f0948 tb/check-crlf-for-safe-crlf later to maint). 425 426 * "git clone --shared" to borrow from a (secondary) worktree did not 427 work, even though "git clone --local" did. Both are now accepted. 428 (merge b3b05971c1 es/clone-shared-worktree later to maint). 429 430 * The build procedure now allows not just the repositories but also 431 the refs to be used to take pre-formatted manpages and html 432 documents to install. 433 (merge 65289e9dcd rb/quick-install-doc later to maint). 434 435 * Update the shell prompt script (in contrib/) to strip trailing CR 436 from strings read from various "state" files. 437 (merge 041fe8fc83 ra/prompt-eread-fix later to maint). 438 439 * "git merge -s recursive" did not correctly abort when the index is 440 dirty, if the merged tree happened to be the same as the current 441 HEAD, which has been fixed. 442 443 * Bytes with high-bit set were encoded incorrectly and made 444 credential helper fail. 445 (merge 4c267f2ae3 jd/fix-strbuf-add-urlencode-bytes later to maint). 446 447 * "git rebase -p -X<option>" did not propagate the option properly 448 down to underlying merge strategy backend. 449 (merge dd6fb0053c js/fix-merge-arg-quoting-in-rebase-p later to maint). 450 451 * "git merge -s recursive" did not correctly abort when the index is 452 dirty, if the merged tree happened to be the same as the current 453 HEAD, which has been fixed. 454 (merge f309e8e768 ew/empty-merge-with-dirty-index-maint later to maint). 455 456 * Other minor doc, test and build updates and code cleanups. 457 (merge 1a1fc2d5b5 rd/man-prune-progress later to maint). 458 (merge 0ba014035a rd/man-reflog-add-n later to maint). 459 (merge e54b63359f rd/doc-notes-prune-fix later to maint). 460 (merge ff4c9b413a sp/doc-info-attributes later to maint). 461 (merge 7db2cbf4f1 jc/receive-pack-hook-doc later to maint). 462 (merge 5a0526264b tg/t-readme-updates later to maint). 463 (merge 5e83cca0b8 jk/no-optional-locks later to maint). 464 (merge 826c778f7c js/hashmap-update-sample later to maint). 465 (merge 176b2d328c sg/setup-doc-update later to maint). 466 (merge 1b09073514 rs/am-builtin-leakfix later to maint). 467 (merge addcf6cfde rs/fmt-merge-msg-string-leak-fix later to maint). 468 (merge c3ff8f6c14 rs/strbuf-read-once-reset-length later to maint). 469 (merge 6b0eb884f9 db/doc-workflows-neuter-the-maintainer later to maint). 470 (merge 8c87bdfb21 jk/cvsimport-quoting later to maint). 471 (merge 176cb979fe rs/fmt-merge-msg-leakfix later to maint). 472 (merge 5a03360e73 tb/delimit-pretty-trailers-args-with-comma later to maint). 473 (merge d0e6326026 ot/pretty later to maint). 474 (merge 44103f4197 sb/test-helper-excludes later to maint). 475 (merge 170078693f jt/transport-no-more-rsync later to maint). 476 (merge c07b3adff1 bw/path-doc later to maint). 477 (merge bf9d7df950 tz/lib-git-svn-svnserve-tests later to maint). 478 (merge dec366c9a8 sr/http-sslverify-config-doc later to maint). 479 (merge 3f824e91c8 jk/test-suite-tracing later to maint). 480 (merge 1feb061701 db/doc-config-section-names-with-bs later to maint). 481 (merge 74dea0e13c jh/memihash-opt later to maint). 482 (merge 2e9fdc795c ma/bisect-leakfix later to maint).