Documentation / RelNotes / 2.2.0.txton commit Merge branch 'po/everyday-doc' (1cb3324)
   1Git v2.2 Release Notes
   2======================
   3
   4Updates since v2.1
   5------------------
   6
   7Ports
   8
   9 * Building on older MacOS X systems automatically sets
  10   the necessary NO_APPLE_COMMON_CRYPTO build-time option.
  11
  12
  13UI, Workflows & Features
  14
  15 * "git archive" learned to filter what gets archived with pathspec.
  16
  17 * "git config --edit --global" starts from a skeletal per-user
  18   configuration file contents, instead of a total blank, when the
  19   user does not already have any.  This immediately reduces the
  20   need for a later "Have you forgotten setting core.user?" and we
  21   can add more to the template as we gain more experience.
  22
  23 * "git stash list -p" used to be almost always a no-op because each
  24   stash entry is represented as a merge commit.  It learned to show
  25   the difference between the base commit version and the working tree
  26   version, which is in line with what "git show" gives.
  27
  28 * Sometimes users want to report a bug they experience on their
  29   repository, but they are not at liberty to share the contents of
  30   the repository.  "fast-export" was taught an "--anonymize" option
  31   to replace blob contents, names of people and paths and log
  32   messages with bland and simple strings to help them.
  33
  34 * "log --date=iso" uses a slight variant of ISO 8601 format that is
  35   made more human readable.  A new "--date=iso-strict" option gives
  36   datetime output that is more strictly conformant.
  37
  38 * A broken reimplementation of Git could write an invalid index that
  39   records both stage #0 and higher stage entries for the same path.
  40   We now notice and reject such an index, as there is no sensible
  41   fallback (we do not know if the broken tool wanted to resolve and
  42   forgot to remove higher stage entries, or if it wanted to unresolve
  43   and forgot to remove the stage#0 entry).
  44
  45 * The "pre-receive" and "post-receive" hooks are no longer required
  46   to consume their input fully (not following this requirement used
  47   to result in intermittent errors in "git push").
  48
  49 * The pretty-format specifier "%d", which expanded to " (tagname)"
  50   for a tagged commit, gained a cousin "%D" that just gives the
  51   "tagname" without frills.
  52
  53 * "git push" learned "--signed" push, that allows a push (i.e.
  54   request to update the refs on the other side to point at a new
  55   history, together with the transmission of necessary objects) to be
  56   signed, so that it can be verified and audited, using the GPG
  57   signature of the person who pushed, that the tips of branches at a
  58   public repository really point the commits the pusher wanted to,
  59   without having to "trust" the server.
  60
  61Performance, Internal Implementation, etc.
  62
  63 * The API to manipulate the "refs" is currently undergoing a revamp
  64   to make it more transactional, with the eventual goal to allow
  65   all-or-none atomic updates and migrating the storage to something
  66   other than the traditional filesystem based one (e.g. databases).
  67
  68 * The lockfile API and its users have been cleaned up.
  69
  70 * We no longer attempt to keep track of individual dependencies to
  71   the header files in the build procedure, relying on automated
  72   dependency generation support from modern compilers.
  73
  74 * In tests, we have been using NOT_{MINGW,CYGWIN} test prerequisites
  75   long before negated prerequisites e.g. !MINGW were invented.
  76   The former has been converted to the latter to avoid confusion.
  77
  78 * Looking up remotes configuration in a repository with very many
  79   remotes defined has been optimized.
  80
  81 * There are cases where you lock and open to write a file, close it
  82   to show the updated contents to external processes, and then have
  83   to update the file again while still holding the lock, but the
  84   lockfile API lacked support for such an access pattern.
  85
  86 * The API to allocate the structure to keep track of commit
  87   decoration has been updated to make it less cumbersome to use.
  88
  89 * An in-core caching layer to let us avoid reading the same
  90   configuration files number of times has been added.  A few commands
  91   have been converted to use this subsystem.
  92
  93 * Various code paths have been cleaned up and simplified by using
  94   "strbuf", "starts_with()", and "skip_prefix()" APIs more.
  95
  96 * A few codepaths that died when large blobs that would not fit in
  97   core are involved in their operation have been taught to punt
  98   instead, by e.g. marking too large a blob as not to be diffed.
  99
 100 * A few more code paths in "commit" and "checkout" have been taught
 101   to repopulate the cache-tree in the index, to help speed up later
 102   "write-tree" (used in "commit") and "diff-index --cached" (used in
 103   "status").
 104
 105 * A common programming mistake to assign the same short option name
 106   to two separate options is detected by parse_options() API to help
 107   developers.
 108
 109 * The code path to write out the packed-refs file has been optimized,
 110   which especially matters in a repository with a large number of
 111   refs.
 112
 113 * The check to see if a ref $F can be created by making sure no
 114   existing ref has $F/ as its prefix has been optimized, which
 115   especially matters in a repository with a large number of existing
 116   refs.
 117
 118 * "git fsck" was taught to check contents of tag objects a bit more.
 119
 120 * "git hash-object" was taught a "--literally" option to help
 121   debugging.
 122
 123 * When running a required clean filter, we do not have to mmap the
 124   original before feeding the filter.  Instead, stream the file
 125   contents directly to the filter and process its output.
 126
 127Also contains various documentation updates and code clean-ups.
 128
 129
 130Fixes since v2.1
 131----------------
 132
 133Unless otherwise noted, all the fixes since v2.1 in the maintenance
 134track are contained in this release (see the maintenance releases'
 135notes for details).
 136
 137 * "git log --pretty/format=" with an empty format string did not
 138   mean the more obvious "No output whatsoever" but "Use default
 139   format", which was counterintuitive.
 140
 141 * Implementations of "tar" that do not understand an extended pax
 142   header would extract the contents of it in a regular file; make
 143   sure the permission bits of this file follows the same tar.umask
 144   configuration setting.
 145
 146 * "git -c section.var command" and "git -c section.var= command"
 147   should pass the configuration differently (the former should be a
 148   boolean true, the latter should be an empty string).
 149
 150 * Applying a patch not generated by Git in a subdirectory used to
 151   check the whitespace breakage using the attributes for incorrect
 152   paths. Also whitespace checks were performed even for paths
 153   excluded via "git apply --exclude=<path>" mechanism.
 154
 155 * "git bundle create" with date-range specification were meant to
 156   exclude tags outside the range, but it didn't.
 157
 158 * "git add x" where x that used to be a directory has become a
 159   symbolic link to a directory misbehaved.
 160
 161 * The prompt script checked $GIT_DIR/ref/stash file to see if there
 162   is a stash, which was a no-no.
 163
 164 * Pack-protocol documentation had a minor typo.
 165
 166 * "git checkout -m" did not switch to another branch while carrying
 167   the local changes forward when a path was deleted from the index.
 168
 169 * "git daemon" (with NO_IPV6 build configuration) used to incorrectly
 170   use the hostname even when gethostbyname() reported that the given
 171   hostname is not found.
 172   (merge 107efbe rs/daemon-fixes later to maint).
 173
 174 * With sufficiently long refnames, "git fast-import" could have
 175   overflown an on-stack buffer.
 176
 177 * After "pack-refs --prune" packed refs at the top-level, it failed
 178   to prune them.
 179
 180 * Progress output from "git gc --auto" was visible in "git fetch -q".
 181
 182 * We used to pass -1000 to poll(2), expecting it to also mean "no
 183   timeout", which should be spelled as -1.
 184
 185 * "git rebase" documentation was unclear that it is required to
 186   specify on what <upstream> the rebase is to be done when telling it
 187   to first check out <branch>.
 188   (merge 95c6826 so/rebase-doc later to maint).
 189
 190 * "git push" over HTTP transport had an artificial limit on number of
 191   refs that can be pushed imposed by the command line length.
 192   (merge 26be19b jk/send-pack-many-refspecs later to maint).
 193
 194 * When receiving an invalid pack stream that records the same object
 195   twice, multiple threads got confused due to a race.
 196   (merge ab791dd jk/index-pack-threading-races later to maint).
 197
 198 * An attempt to remove the entire tree in the "git fast-import" input
 199   stream caused it to misbehave.
 200   (merge 2668d69 mb/fast-import-delete-root later to maint).
 201
 202 * Reachability check (used in "git prune" and friends) did not add a
 203   detached HEAD as a starting point to traverse objects still in use.
 204   (merge c40fdd0 mk/reachable-protect-detached-head later to maint).
 205
 206 * "git config --add section.var val" used to lose existing
 207   section.var whose value was an empty string.
 208   (merge c1063be ta/config-add-to-empty-or-true-fix later to maint).
 209
 210 * "git fsck" failed to report that it found corrupt objects via its
 211   exit status in some cases.
 212   (merge 30d1038 jk/fsck-exit-code-fix later to maint).
 213
 214 * Use of "--verbose" option used to break "git branch --merged".
 215   (merge 12994dd jk/maint-branch-verbose-merged later to maint).
 216
 217 * Some MUAs mangled a line in a message that begins with "From " to
 218   ">From " when writing to a mailbox file and feeding such an input
 219   to "git am" used to lose such a line.
 220   (merge 85de86a jk/mbox-from-line later to maint).
 221
 222 * "rev-parse --verify --quiet $name" is meant to quietly exit with a
 223   non-zero status when $name is not a valid object name, but still
 224   gave error messages in some cases.
 225
 226 * A handful of C source files have been updated to include
 227   "git-compat-util.h" as the first thing, to conform better to our
 228   coding guidelines.
 229   (merge 1c4b660 da/include-compat-util-first-in-c later to maint).
 230
 231 * t7004 test, which tried to run Git with small stack space, has been
 232   updated to give a bit larger stack to avoid false breakage on some
 233   platforms.
 234   (merge b9a1907 sk/tag-contains-wo-recursion later to maint).
 235
 236 * A few documentation pages had example sections marked up not quite
 237   correctly, which passed AsciiDoc but failed with AsciiDoctor.
 238   (merge c30c43c bc/asciidoc-pretty-formats-fix later to maint).