386c75d0b30dcdf25fc9375602cf85cee7022c27
   1Git 2.4 Release Notes
   2=====================
   3
   4Backward compatibility warning(s)
   5---------------------------------
   6
   7This release has a few changes in the user-visible output from
   8Porcelain commands, which the users may want to be aware of.
   9
  10 * Output from "git log --decorate" (and "%d" format specifier used in
  11   the userformat "--format=<string>" parameter "git log" family of
  12   command takes) used to list "HEAD" just like other tips of branch
  13   names, separated with a comma in between.  E.g.
  14
  15     $ git log --decorate -1 master
  16     commit bdb0f6788fa5e3cacc4315e9ff318a27b2676ff4 (HEAD, master)
  17     ...
  18
  19   This release updates the output slightly when HEAD refers to the tip
  20   of a branch whose name is also shown in the output.  The above is
  21   shown as:
  22
  23     $ git log --decorate -1 master
  24     commit bdb0f6788fa5e3cacc4315e9ff318a27b2676ff4 (HEAD -> master)
  25     ...
  26
  27 * The phrasing "git branch" uses to describe a detached HEAD has been
  28   updated to match that of "git status":
  29
  30    - When the HEAD is at the same commit as it was originally
  31      detached, they now both show "detached at <commit object name>".
  32
  33    - When the HEAD has moved since it was originally detached,
  34      they now both show "detached from <commit object name>".
  35
  36    Earlier "git branch" always used "from"
  37
  38
  39Updates since v2.3
  40------------------
  41
  42Ports
  43
  44 * Our default I/O size (8 MiB) for large files was too large for some
  45   platforms with smaller SSIZE_MAX, leading to read(2)/write(2)
  46   failures.
  47
  48 * We did not check the curl library version before using
  49   CURLOPT_PROXYAUTH feature that may not exist.
  50
  51 * We now detect number of CPUs on older BSD-derived systems.
  52
  53 * Portability fixes and workarounds for shell scripts have been added
  54   to help BSD-derived systems.
  55
  56
  57UI, Workflows & Features
  58
  59 * The command usage info strings given by "git cmd -h" and in
  60   documentation have been tweaked for consistency.
  61
  62 * The "sync" subcommand of "git p4" now allows users to exclude
  63   subdirectories like its "clone" subcommand does.
  64
  65 * "git log --invert-grep --grep=WIP" will show only commits that do
  66   not have the string "WIP" in their messages.
  67
  68 * "git push" has been taught a "--atomic" option that makes push to
  69   update more than one ref an "all-or-none" affair.
  70
  71 * Extending the "push to deploy" added in 2.3, the behaviour of "git
  72   push" when updating the branch that is checked out can now be
  73   tweaked by push-to-checkout hook.
  74
  75 * Using environment variable LANGUAGE and friends on the client side,
  76   HTTP-based transports now send Accept-Language when making requests.
  77
  78 * "git send-email" used to accept a mistaken "y" (or "yes") as an
  79   answer to "What encoding do you want to use [UTF-8]? " without
  80   questioning.  Now it asks for confirmation when the answer looks
  81   too short to be a valid encoding name.
  82
  83 * When "git apply --whitespace=fix" fixed whitespace errors in the
  84   common context lines, the command reports that it did so.
  85
  86 * "git status" now allows the "-v" to be given twice to show the
  87   differences that are left in the working tree not to be committed.
  88
  89 * "git cherry-pick" used to clean-up the log message even when it is
  90   merely replaying an existing commit.  It now replays the message
  91   verbatim unless you are editing the message of resulting commits.
  92
  93 * "git archive" can now be told to set the 'text' attribute in the
  94   resulting zip archive.
  95
  96 * Output from "git log --decorate" mentions HEAD when it points at a
  97   tip of an branch differently from a detached HEAD.
  98
  99   This is a potentially backward-incompatible change.
 100
 101 * "git branch" on a detached HEAD always said "(detached from xyz)",
 102   even when "git status" would report "detached at xyz".  The HEAD is
 103   actually at xyz and haven't been moved since it was detached in
 104   such a case, but the user cannot read what the current value of
 105   HEAD is when "detached from" is used.
 106
 107 * "git -C '' subcmd" refused to work in the current directory, unlike
 108   "cd ''" which silently behaves as a no-op.
 109   (merge 6a536e2 kn/git-cd-to-empty later to maint).
 110
 111 * The versionsort.prerelease configuration variable can be used to
 112   specify that v1.0-pre1 comes before v1.0.
 113
 114 * A new "push.followTags" configuration turns the "--follow-tags"
 115   option on by default for the "git push" command.
 116
 117 * "git log --graph --no-walk A B..." is a conflicting request that
 118   asks nonsense; no-walk tells us show discrete points in the
 119   history, while graph asks to draw connections between these
 120   discrete points. Forbid the combination.
 121
 122 * "git rev-list --bisect --first-parent" does not work (yet) and can
 123   even cause SEGV; forbid it.  "git log --bisect --first-parent"
 124   would not be useful until "git bisect --first-parent" materializes,
 125   so it is also forbidden for now.
 126
 127
 128Performance, Internal Implementation, Development Support etc.
 129
 130 * Implementation of N_() macro has been updated slightly to help us
 131   detect mistakes.
 132
 133 * Implementation of "reflog expire" has been restructured to fit the
 134   reflogs better with the recently updated ref API.
 135
 136 * The transport-helper did not give transport options such as
 137   verbosity, progress, cloning, etc. to import and export based
 138   helpers, like it did for fetch and push based helpers, robbing them
 139   the chance to honor the wish of the end-users better.
 140
 141 * The tests that wanted to see that file becomes unreadable after
 142   running "chmod a-r file", and the tests that wanted to make sure it
 143   is not run as root, we used "can we write into the / directory?" as
 144   a cheap substitute, but on some platforms that is not a good
 145   heuristics.  The tests and their prerequisites have been updated to
 146   check what they really require.
 147   (merge f400e51 jk/sanity later to maint).
 148
 149 * Various issues around "reflog expire", e.g. using --updateref when
 150   expiring a reflog for a symbolic reference, have been corrected
 151   and/or made saner.
 152
 153 * The strbuf API was explained between the API documentation and in
 154   the header file.  Move missing bits to strbuf.h so that programmers
 155   can check only one place for all necessary information.
 156
 157 * The error handling functions and conventions are now documented in
 158   the API manual.
 159
 160 * Optimize attribute look-up, mostly useful in "git grep" on a
 161   project that does not use many attributes, by avoiding it when we
 162   (should) know that the attributes are not defined in the first
 163   place.
 164
 165 * Typofix in comments.
 166   (merge ef2956a ak/git-pm-typofix later to maint).
 167
 168 * Code clean-up.
 169   (merge 0b868f0 sb/hex-object-name-is-at-most-41-bytes-long later to maint).
 170   (merge 5d30851 dp/remove-duplicated-header-inclusion later to maint).
 171
 172 * Simplify the ref transaction API around how "the ref should be
 173   pointing at this object" is specified.
 174
 175 * Code in "git daemon" to parse out and hold hostnames used in
 176   request interpolation has been simplified.
 177
 178 * "git push" codepath has been restructured to make it easier to add
 179   new configuration bits.
 180
 181 * The run-command interface was easy to abuse and make a pipe for us
 182   to read from the process, wait for the process to finish and then
 183   attempt to read its output, which is a pattern that lead to a
 184   deadlock.  Fix such uses by introducing a helper to do this
 185   correctly (i.e. we need to read first and then wait the process to
 186   finish) and also add code to prevent such abuse in the run-command
 187   helper.
 188
 189
 190Also contains various documentation updates and code clean-ups.
 191
 192
 193Fixes since v2.3
 194----------------
 195
 196Unless otherwise noted, all the fixes since v2.3 in the maintenance
 197track are contained in this release (see the maintenance releases'
 198notes for details).
 199
 200 * "git blame HEAD -- missing" failed to correctly say "HEAD" when it
 201   tried to say "No such path 'missing' in HEAD".
 202   (merge a46442f jk/blame-commit-label later to maint).
 203
 204 * "git rerere" (invoked internally from many mergy operations) did
 205   not correctly signal errors when told to update the working tree
 206   files and failed to do so for whatever reason.
 207   (merge 89ea903 jn/rerere-fail-on-auto-update-failure later to maint).
 208
 209 * Setting diff.submodule to 'log' made "git format-patch" produce
 210   broken patches.
 211   (merge 339de50 dk/format-patch-ignore-diff-submodule later to maint).
 212
 213 * After attempting and failing a password-less authentication
 214   (e.g. kerberos), libcURL refuses to fall back to password based
 215   Basic authentication without a bit of help/encouragement.
 216   (merge 4dbe664 bc/http-fallback-to-password-after-krb-fails later to maint).
 217
 218 * The "git push" documentation made the "--repo=<there>" option
 219   easily misunderstood.
 220   (merge 57b92a7 mg/push-repo-option-doc later to maint).
 221
 222 * Code to read branch name from various files in .git/ directory
 223   would have misbehaved if the code to write them left an empty file.
 224   (merge 66ec904 jk/status-read-branch-name-fix later to maint).
 225
 226 * A misspelled conditional that is always true has been fixed.
 227   (merge 94ee8e2 jk/remote-curl-an-array-in-struct-cannot-be-null later to maint).
 228
 229 * The documentation incorrectly said that C(opy) and R(ename) are the
 230   only ones that can be followed by the score number in the output in
 231   the --raw format.
 232   (merge ac1c2d9 jc/diff-format-doc later to maint).
 233
 234 * A broken pack .idx file in the receiving repository prevented the
 235   dumb http transport from fetching a good copy of it from the other
 236   side.
 237   (merge 8b9c2dd jk/dumb-http-idx-fetch-fix later to maint).
 238
 239 * The error message from "git commit", when a non-existing author
 240   name was given as value to the "--author=" parameter, has been
 241   reworded to avoid misunderstanding.
 242   (merge 1044b1f mg/commit-author-no-match-malformed-message later to maint).
 243
 244 * "git log --help" used to show rev-list options that are irrelevant
 245   to the "log" command.
 246   (merge 3cab02d jc/doc-log-rev-list-options later to maint).
 247
 248 * "git apply --whitespace=fix" used to under-allocate the memory when
 249   the fix resulted in a longer text than the original patch.
 250   (merge 407a792 jc/apply-ws-fix-expands later to maint).
 251
 252 * The interactive "show a list and let the user choose from it"
 253   interface "add -i" used showed and prompted to the user even when
 254   the candidate list was empty, against which the only "choice" the
 255   user could have made was to choose nothing.
 256   (merge a9c4641 ak/add-i-empty-candidates later to maint).
 257
 258 * The insn sheet "git rebase -i" creates did not fully honor
 259   core.abbrev settings.
 260   (merge edb72d5 ks/rebase-i-abbrev later to maint).
 261
 262 * "git fetch" over a remote-helper that cannot respond to "list"
 263   command could not fetch from a symbolic reference e.g. HEAD.
 264   (merge 33cae54 mh/deref-symref-over-helper-transport later to maint).
 265
 266 * "git push --signed" gave an incorrectly worded error message when
 267   the other side did not support the capability.
 268   (merge 45917f0 jc/push-cert later to maint).
 269
 270 * We didn't format an integer that wouldn't fit in "int" but in
 271   "uintmax_t" correctly.
 272   (merge d306f3d jk/decimal-width-for-uintmax later to maint).
 273
 274 * Reading configuration from a blob object, when it ends with a lone
 275   CR, use to confuse the configuration parser.
 276   (merge 1d0655c jk/config-no-ungetc-eof later to maint).
 277
 278 * The pack bitmap support did not build with older versions of GCC.
 279   (merge bd4e882 jk/pack-bitmap later to maint).
 280
 281 * The documentation wasn't clear that "remote.<nick>.pushURL" and
 282   "remote.<nick>.URL" are there to name the same repository accessed
 283   via different transports, not two separate repositories.
 284   (merge 697f652 jc/remote-set-url-doc later to maint).
 285
 286 * Older GnuPG implementations may not correctly import the keyring
 287   material we prepare for the tests to use.
 288   (merge 1f985d6 ch/new-gpg-drops-rfc-1991 later to maint).
 289
 290 * The credential helper for Windows (in contrib/) used to mishandle
 291   a user name with an at-sign in it.
 292   (merge 13d261e av/wincred-with-at-in-username-fix later to maint).
 293
 294 * Longstanding configuration variable naming rules has been added to
 295   the documentation.
 296   (merge 35840a3 jc/conf-var-doc later to maint).
 297
 298 * An earlier workaround to squelch unhelpful deprecation warnings
 299   from the complier on Mac OSX unnecessarily set minimum required
 300   version of the OS, which the user might want to raise (or lower)
 301   for other reasons.
 302   (merge 88c03eb es/squelch-openssl-warnings-on-macosx later to maint).
 303
 304 * Certain older vintages of cURL give irregular output from
 305   "curl-config --vernum", which confused our build system.
 306   (merge 3af6792 tc/curl-vernum-output-broken-in-7.11 later to maint).
 307
 308 * In v2.2.0, we broke "git prune" that runs in a repository that
 309   borrows from an alternate object store.
 310   (merge b0a4264 jk/prune-mtime later to maint).
 311
 312 * "git submodule add" failed to squash "path/to/././submodule" to
 313   "path/to/submodule".
 314   (merge 8196e72 ps/submodule-sanitize-path-upon-add later to maint).
 315
 316 * "git merge-file" did not work correctly in a subdirectory.
 317   (merge 204a8ff ab/merge-file-prefix later to maint).
 318
 319 * "git blame" died, trying to free an uninitialized piece of memory.
 320   (merge e600592 es/blame-commit-info-fix later to maint).
 321
 322 * "git fast-import" used to crash when it could not close and
 323   conclude the resulting packfile cleanly.
 324   (merge 5e915f3 jk/fast-import-die-nicely-fix later to maint).
 325
 326 * "update-index --refresh" used to leak when an entry cannot be
 327   refreshed for whatever reason.
 328   (merge bc1c2ca sb/plug-leak-in-make-cache-entry later to maint).
 329
 330 * The "interpolated-path" option of "git daemon" inserted any string
 331   client declared on the "host=" capability request without checking.
 332   Sanitize and limit %H and %CH to a saner and a valid DNS name.
 333   (merge b485373 jk/daemon-interpolate later to maint).
 334
 335 * "git daemon" looked up the hostname even when "%CH" and "%IP"
 336   interpolations are not requested, which was unnecessary.
 337   (merge dc8edc8 rs/daemon-interpolate later to maint).
 338
 339 * Even though we officially haven't dropped Perl 5.8 support, the
 340   Getopt::Long package that came with it does not support "--no-"
 341   prefix to negate a boolean option; manually add support to help
 342   people with older Getopt::Long package.
 343   (merge f471494 km/send-email-getopt-long-workarounds later to maint).
 344
 345 * "git apply" was not very careful about reading from, removing,
 346   updating and creating paths outside the working tree (under
 347   --index/--cached) or the current directory (when used as a
 348   replacement for GNU patch).
 349   (merge e0d201b jc/apply-beyond-symlink later to maint).
 350
 351 * A breakage to git-svn around v2.2 era that triggers premature
 352   closing of FileHandle has been corrected.
 353   (merge e426311 ew/svn-maint-fixes later to maint).
 354
 355 * We did not parse username followed by literal IPv6 address in SSH
 356   transport URLs, e.g. ssh://user@[2001:db8::1]:22/repo.git
 357   correctly.
 358   (merge 3f55cca tb/connect-ipv6-parse-fix later to maint).
 359
 360 * The configuration variable 'mailinfo.scissors' was hard to
 361   discover in the documentation.
 362   (merge afb5de7 mm/am-c-doc later to maint).
 363
 364 * The interaction between "git submodule update" and the
 365   submodule.*.update configuration was not clearly documented.
 366   (merge 5c31acf ms/submodule-update-config-doc later to maint).
 367
 368 * "git diff --shortstat --dirstat=changes" showed a dirstat based on
 369   lines that was never asked by the end user in addition to the
 370   dirstat that the user asked for.
 371   (merge ab27389 mk/diff-shortstat-dirstat-fix later to maint).
 372
 373 * "git remote add" mentioned "--tags" and "--no-tags" and was not
 374   clear that fetch from the remote in the future will use the default
 375   behaviour when neither is given to override it.
 376   (merge aaba0ab mg/doc-remote-tags-or-not later to maint).
 377
 378 * Description given by "grep -h" for its --exclude-standard option
 379   was phrased poorly.
 380   (merge 77fdb8a nd/grep-exclude-standard-help-fix later to maint).
 381
 382 * "git rebase -i" recently started to include the number of
 383   commits in the insn sheet to be processed, but on a platform
 384   that prepends leading whitespaces to "wc -l" output, the numbers
 385   are shown with extra whitespaces that aren't necessary.
 386   (merge 2185d3b es/rebase-i-count-todo later to maint).
 387
 388 * The borrowed code in kwset API did not follow our usual convention
 389   to use "unsigned char" to store values that range from 0-255.
 390   (merge 189c860 bw/kwset-use-unsigned later to maint).
 391
 392 * A corrupt input to "git diff -M" used to cause it to segfault.
 393   (merge 4d6be03 jk/diffcore-rename-duplicate later to maint).
 394
 395 * Certain builds of GPG triggered false breakages in a test.
 396   (merge 3f88c1b mg/verify-commit later to maint).
 397
 398 * "git imap-send" learned to optionally talk with an IMAP server via
 399   libcURL; because there is no other option when Git is built with
 400   NO_OPENSSL option, use that codepath by default under such
 401   configuration.
 402   (merge dcd01ea km/imap-send-libcurl-options later to maint).
 403
 404 * "git log --decorate" did not reset colors correctly around the
 405   branch names.
 406   (merge 5ee8758 jc/decorate-leaky-separator-color later to maint).
 407
 408 * The code that reads from the ctags file in the completion script
 409   (in contrib/) did not spell ${param/pattern/string} substitution
 410   correctly, which happened to work with bash but not with zsh.
 411   (merge db8d750 js/completion-ctags-pattern-substitution-fix later to maint).
 412
 413 * The transfer.hiderefs support did not quite work for smart-http
 414   transport.
 415   (merge 8ddf3ca jk/smart-http-hide-refs later to maint).
 416
 417 * "git tag -h" used to show the "--column" and "--sort" options
 418   that are about listing in a wrong section.
 419   (merge dd059c6 jk/tag-h-column-is-a-listing-option later to maint).
 420
 421 * "git prune" used to largely ignore broken refs when deciding which
 422   objects are still being used, which could spread an existing small
 423   damage and make it a larger one.
 424   (merge ea56c4e jk/prune-with-corrupt-refs later to maint).
 425
 426 * The split-index mode introduced at v2.3.0-rc0~41 was broken in the
 427   codepath to protect us against a broken reimplementation of Git
 428   that writes an invalid index with duplicated index entries, etc.
 429   (merge 03f15a7 tg/fix-check-order-with-split-index later to maint).
 430
 431 * "git fetch" that fetches a commit using the allow-tip-sha1-in-want
 432   extension could have failed to fetch all the requested refs.
 433   (merge 32d0462 jk/fetch-pack later to maint).
 434
 435 * An failure early in the "git clone" that started creating the
 436   working tree and repository could have resulted in some directories
 437   and files left without getting cleaned up.
 438   (merge 16eff6c jk/cleanup-failed-clone later to maint).
 439
 440 * Recommend format-patch and send-email for those who want to submit
 441   patches to this project.
 442   (merge b25c469 jc/submitting-patches-mention-send-email later to maint).
 443
 444 * Even though "git grep --quiet" is run merely to ask for the exit
 445   status, we spawned the pager regardless.  Stop doing that.
 446   (merge c2048f0 ws/grep-quiet-no-pager later to maint).
 447
 448 * The prompt script (in contrib/) did not show the untracked sign
 449   when working in a subdirectory without any untracked files.
 450   (merge 9bdc517 ct/prompt-untracked-fix later to maint).
 451
 452 * Code cleanups and documentation updates.
 453   (merge 2ce63e9 rs/simple-cleanups later to maint).
 454   (merge 33baa69 rj/no-xopen-source-for-cygwin later to maint).
 455   (merge 817d03e jc/diff-test-updates later to maint).
 456   (merge eb32c66 ak/t5516-typofix later to maint).
 457   (merge bcd57cb mr/doc-clean-f-f later to maint).
 458   (merge 0d6accc mg/doc-status-color-slot later to maint).
 459   (merge 53e53c7 sg/completion-remote later to maint).
 460   (merge 8fa7975 ak/git-done-help-cleanup later to maint).
 461   (merge 9a6f128 rs/deflate-init-cleanup later to maint).
 462   (merge 6f75d45 rs/use-isxdigit later to maint).
 463   (merge 376e4b3 jk/test-annoyances later to maint).
 464   (merge 7032054 nd/doc-git-index-version later to maint).
 465   (merge e869c5e tg/test-index-v4 later to maint).
 466   (merge 599d223 jk/simplify-csum-file-sha1fd-check later to maint).