Documentation / RelNotes / 2.7.0.txton commit Merge branch 'master' of git://ozlabs.org/~paulus/gitk (3cb8921)
   1Git 2.7 Release Notes
   2=====================
   3
   4Updates since v2.6
   5------------------
   6
   7UI, Workflows & Features
   8
   9 * The appearance of "gitk", particularly on high DPI monitors, have
  10   been improved.  "gitk" also comes with an undated translation for
  11   Swedish and Japanese.
  12
  13 * "git remote" learned "get-url" subcommand to show the URL for a
  14   given remote name used for fetching and pushing.
  15
  16 * There was no way to defeat a configured rebase.autostash variable
  17   from the command line, as "git rebase --no-autostash" was missing.
  18
  19 * "git log --date=local" used to only show the normal (default)
  20   format in the local timezone.  The command learned to take 'local'
  21   as an instruction to use the local timezone with other formats,
  22
  23 * The refs used during a "git bisect" session is now per-worktree so
  24   that independent bisect sessions can be done in different worktrees
  25   created with "git worktree add".
  26
  27 * Users who are too busy to type three extra keystrokes to ask for
  28   "git stash show -p" can now set stash.showPatch configuration
  29   variable to true to always see the actual patch, not just the list
  30   of paths affected with feel for the extent of damage via diffstat.
  31
  32 * "quiltimport" allows to specify the series file by honoring the
  33   $QUILT_SERIES environment and also --series command line option.
  34
  35 * The use of 'good/bad' in "git bisect" made it confusing to use when
  36   hunting for a state change that is not a regression (e.g. bugfix).
  37   The command learned 'old/new' and then allows the end user to
  38   say e.g. "bisect start --term-old=fast --term-new=slow" to find a
  39   performance regression.
  40
  41 * "git interpret-trailers" can now run outside of a Git repository.
  42
  43 * "git p4" learned to reencode the pathname it uses to communicate
  44   with the p4 depot with a new option.
  45
  46 * Give progress meter to "git filter-branch".
  47
  48 * Allow a later "!/abc/def" to override an earlier "/abc" that
  49   appears in the same .gitignore file to make it easier to express
  50   "everything in /abc directory is ignored, except for ...".
  51
  52 * Teach "git p4" to send large blobs outside the repository by
  53   talking to Git LFS.
  54
  55 * Prepare for Git on-disk repository representation to undergo
  56   backward incompatible changes by introducing a new repository
  57   format version "1", with an extension mechanism.
  58
  59 * "git worktree" learned a "list" subcommand.
  60
  61 * "git clone --dissociate" learned that it can be used even when
  62   "--reference" was not used at the same time.
  63
  64 * "git blame" learnt to take "--first-parent" and "--reverse" at the
  65   same time when it makes sense.
  66
  67 * "git checkout" did not follow the usual "--[no-]progress"
  68   convention and implemented only "--quiet" that is essentially
  69   a superset of "--no-progress".  Extend the command to support the
  70   usual "--[no-]progress".
  71
  72 * The semantics of transfer.hideRefs configuration variable have been
  73   extended to work better with the ref "namespace" feature that lets
  74   you throw unrelated bunches of repositories in a single physical
  75   repository and virtually serve them as separate ones.
  76
  77 * send-email config variables whose values are pathnames now go
  78   through the ~username/ expansion.
  79
  80 * bash completion learnt to TAB-complete recipient addresses given
  81   to send-email.
  82
  83 * The credential-cache daemon can be told to ignore SIGHUP to work
  84   around issue when running Git from inside emacs.
  85
  86 * "git push" learned new configuration for doing "--recurse-submodules"
  87   on each push.
  88
  89 * "format-patch" has learned a new option to zero-out the commit
  90   object name on the mbox "From " line.
  91
  92
  93Performance, Internal Implementation, Development Support etc.
  94
  95 * The infrastructure to rewrite "git submodule" in C is being built
  96   incrementally.  Let's polish these early parts well enough and make
  97   them graduate to 'next' and 'master', so that the more involved
  98   follow-up can start cooking on a solid ground.
  99
 100 * Some features from "git tag -l" and "git branch -l" have been made
 101   available to "git for-each-ref" so that eventually the unified
 102   implementation can be shared across all three.  The version merged
 103   to the 'master' branch earlier had a performance regression in "tag
 104   --contains", which has since been corrected.
 105
 106 * Because "test_when_finished" in our test framework queues the
 107   clean-up tasks to be done in a shell variable, it should not be
 108   used inside a subshell.  Add a mechanism to allow 'bash' to catch
 109   such uses, and fix the ones that were found.
 110
 111 * The debugging infrastructure for pkt-line based communication has
 112   been improved to mark the side-band communication specifically.
 113
 114 * Update "git branch" that list existing branches, using the
 115   ref-filter API that is shared with "git tag" and "git
 116   for-each-ref".
 117
 118 * The test for various line-ending conversions has been enhanced.
 119
 120 * A few test scripts around "git p4" have been improved for
 121   portability.
 122
 123 * Many allocations that is manually counted (correctly) that are
 124   followed by strcpy/sprintf have been replaced with a less error
 125   prone constructs such as xstrfmt.
 126
 127 * The internal stripspace() function has been moved to where it
 128   logically belongs to, i.e. strbuf API, and the command line parser
 129   of "git stripspace" has been updated to use the parse_options API.
 130
 131 * "git am" used to spawn "git mailinfo" via run_command() API once
 132   per each patch, but learned to make a direct call to mailinfo()
 133   instead.
 134
 135 * The implementation of "git mailinfo" was refactored so that a
 136   mailinfo() function can be directly called from inside a process.
 137
 138 * With a "debug" helper, debugging of a single "git" invocation in
 139   our test scripts has become a lot easier.
 140
 141 * The "configure" script did not test for -lpthread correctly, which
 142   upset some linkers.
 143
 144 * Cross completed task off of subtree project's todo list.
 145
 146 * Test cleanups for the subtree project.
 147
 148 * Clean up style in an ancient test t9300.
 149
 150 * Work around some test flakiness with p4d.
 151
 152 * Fsck did not correctly detect a NUL-truncated header in a tag.
 153
 154 * Use a safer behavior when we hit errors verifying remote certificates.
 155
 156 * Speed up filter-branch for cases where we only care about rewriting
 157   commits, not tree data.
 158
 159 * The parse-options API has been updated to make "-h" command line
 160   option work more consistently in all commands.
 161
 162 * "git svn rebase/mkdirs" got optimized by keeping track of empty
 163   directories better.
 164
 165 * Fix some racy client/server tests by treating SIGPIPE the same as a
 166   normal non-zero exit.
 167
 168 * The necessary infrastructure to build topics using the free Travis
 169   CI has been added. Developers forking from this topic (and enabling
 170   Travis) can do their own builds, and we can turn on auto-builds for
 171   git/git (including build-status for pull requests that people
 172   open).
 173
 174 * The write(2) emulation for Windows learned to set errno to EPIPE
 175   when necessary.
 176
 177
 178Also contains various documentation updates and code clean-ups.
 179
 180
 181Fixes since v2.6
 182----------------
 183
 184Unless otherwise noted, all the fixes since v2.6 in the maintenance
 185track are contained in this release (see the maintenance releases'
 186notes for details).
 187
 188 * Very small number of options take a parameter that is optional
 189   (which is not a great UI element as they can only appear at the end
 190   of the command line).  Add notice to documentation of each and
 191   every one of them.
 192
 193 * "git blame --first-parent v1.0..v2.0" was not rejected but did not
 194   limit the blame to commits on the first parent chain.
 195
 196 * "git subtree" (in contrib/) now can take whitespaces in the
 197   pathnames, not only in the in-tree pathname but the name of the
 198   directory that the repository is in.
 199
 200 * The ssh transport, just like any other transport over the network,
 201   did not clear GIT_* environment variables, but it is possible to
 202   use SendEnv and AcceptEnv to leak them to the remote invocation of
 203   Git, which is not a good idea at all.  Explicitly clear them just
 204   like we do for the local transport.
 205
 206 * Correct "git p4 --detect-labels" so that it does not fail to create
 207   a tag that points at a commit that is also being imported.
 208
 209 * The Makefile always runs the library archiver with hardcoded "crs"
 210   options, which was inconvenient for exotic platforms on which
 211   people want to use programs with totally different set of command
 212   line options.
 213
 214 * Customization to change the behaviour with "make -w" and "make -s"
 215   in our Makefile was broken when they were used together.
 216
 217 * Allocation related functions and stdio are unsafe things to call
 218   inside a signal handler, and indeed killing the pager can cause
 219   glibc to deadlock waiting on allocation mutex as our signal handler
 220   tries to free() some data structures in wait_for_pager().  Reduce
 221   these unsafe calls.
 222
 223 * The way how --ref/--notes to specify the notes tree reference are
 224   DWIMmed was not clearly documented.
 225
 226 * "git gc" used to barf when a symbolic ref has gone dangling
 227   (e.g. the branch that used to be your upstream's default when you
 228   cloned from it is now gone, and you did "fetch --prune").
 229
 230 * "git clone --dissociate" runs a big "git repack" process at the
 231   end, and it helps to close file descriptors that are open on the
 232   packs and their idx files before doing so on filesystems that
 233   cannot remove a file that is still open.
 234
 235 * Description of the "log.follow" configuration variable in "git log"
 236   documentation is now also copied to "git config" documentation.
 237
 238 * "git rebase -i" had a minor regression recently, which stopped
 239   considering a line that begins with an indented '#' in its insn
 240   sheet not a comment. Further, the code was still too picky on
 241   Windows where CRLF left by the editor is turned into a trailing CR
 242   on the line read via the "read" built-in command of bash.  Both of
 243   these issues are now fixed.
 244
 245 * After "git checkout --detach", "git status" reported a fairly
 246   useless "HEAD detached at HEAD", instead of saying at which exact
 247   commit.
 248
 249 * When "git send-email" wanted to talk over Net::SMTP::SSL,
 250   Net::Cmd::datasend() did not like to be fed too many bytes at the
 251   same time and failed to send messages.  Send the payload one line
 252   at a time to work around the problem.
 253
 254 * When "git am" was rewritten as a built-in, it stopped paying
 255   attention to user.signingkey, which was fixed.
 256
 257 * It was not possible to use a repository-lookalike created by "git
 258   worktree add" as a local source of "git clone".
 259
 260 * On a case insensitive filesystems, setting GIT_WORK_TREE variable
 261   using a random cases that does not agree with what the filesystem
 262   thinks confused Git that it wasn't inside the working tree.
 263
 264 * Performance-measurement tests did not work without an installed Git.
 265
 266 * A test script for the HTTP service had a timing dependent bug,
 267   which was fixed.
 268
 269 * There were some classes of errors that "git fsck" diagnosed to its
 270   standard error that did not cause it to exit with non-zero status.
 271
 272 * Work around "git p4" failing when the P4 depot records the contents
 273   in UTF-16 without UTF-16 BOM.
 274
 275 * When "git gc --auto" is backgrounded, its diagnosis message is
 276   lost.  Save it to a file in $GIT_DIR and show it next time the "gc
 277   --auto" is run.
 278
 279 * The submodule code has been taught to work better with separate
 280   work trees created via "git worktree add".
 281
 282 * "git gc" is safe to run anytime only because it has the built-in
 283   grace period to protect young objects.  In order to run with no
 284   grace period, the user must make sure that the repository is
 285   quiescent.
 286
 287 * A recent "filter-branch --msg-filter" broke skipping of the commit
 288   object header, which is fixed.
 289
 290 * The normalize_ceiling_entry() function does not muck with the end
 291   of the path it accepts, and the real world callers do rely on that,
 292   but a test insisted that the function drops a trailing slash.
 293
 294 * A test for interaction between untracked cache and sparse checkout
 295   added in Git 2.5 days were flaky.
 296
 297 * A couple of commands still showed "[options]" in their usage string
 298   to note where options should come on their command line, but we
 299   spell that "[<options>]" in most places these days.
 300
 301 * The synopsis text and the usage string of subcommands that read
 302   list of things from the standard input are often shown as if they
 303   only take input from a file on a filesystem, which was misleading.
 304
 305 * "git am -3" had a small regression where it is aborted in its error
 306   handling codepath when underlying merge-recursive failed in certain
 307   ways, as it assumed that the internal call to merge-recursive will
 308   never die, which is not the case (yet).
 309
 310 * The linkage order of libraries was wrong in places around libcurl.
 311
 312 * The name-hash subsystem that is used to cope with case insensitive
 313   filesystems keeps track of directories and their on-filesystem
 314   cases for all the paths in the index by holding a pointer to a
 315   randomly chosen cache entry that is inside the directory (for its
 316   ce->ce_name component).  This pointer was not updated even when the
 317   cache entry was removed from the index, leading to use after free.
 318   This was fixed by recording the path for each directory instead of
 319   borrowing cache entries and restructuring the API somewhat.
 320
 321 * "git merge-file" tried to signal how many conflicts it found, which
 322   obviously would not work well when there are too many of them.
 323
 324 * The error message from "git blame --contents --reverse" incorrectly
 325   talked about "--contents --children".
 326
 327 * "git imap-send" did not compile well with older version of cURL library.
 328
 329 * Merging a branch that removes a path and another that changes the
 330   mode bits on the same path should have conflicted at the path, but
 331   it didn't and silently favoured the removal.
 332
 333 * "git --literal-pathspecs add -u/-A" without any command line
 334   argument misbehaved ever since Git 2.0.
 335
 336 * "git daemon" uses "run_command()" without "finish_command()", so it
 337   needs to release resources itself, which it forgot to do.
 338
 339 * "git status --branch --short" accessed beyond the constant string
 340   "HEAD", which has been corrected.
 341
 342 * We peek objects from submodule's object store by linking it to the
 343   list of alternate object databases, but the code to do so forgot to
 344   correctly initialize the list.
 345
 346 * The code to prepare the working tree side of temporary directory
 347   for the "dir-diff" feature forgot that symbolic links need not be
 348   copied (or symlinked) to the temporary area, as the code already
 349   special cases and overwrites them.  Besides, it was wrong to try
 350   computing the object name of the target of symbolic link, which may
 351   not even exist or may be a directory.
 352
 353 * A Range: request can be responded with a full response and when
 354   asked properly libcurl knows how to strip the result down to the
 355   requested range.  However, we were hand-crafting a range request
 356   and it did not kick in.
 357
 358 * Having a leftover .idx file without corresponding .pack file in
 359   the repository hurts performance; "git gc" learned to prune them.
 360
 361 * Apple's common crypto implementation of SHA1_Update() does not take
 362   more than 4GB at a time, and we now have a compile-time workaround
 363   for it.
 364
 365 * Produce correct "dirty" marker for shell prompts, even when we
 366   are on an orphan or an unborn branch.
 367
 368 * A build without NO_IPv6 used to use gethostbyname() when guessing
 369   user's hostname, instead of getaddrinfo() that is used in other
 370   codepaths in such a build.
 371
 372 * The exit code of git-fsck did not reflect some types of errors
 373   found in packed objects, which has been corrected.
 374
 375 * The helper used to iterate over loose object directories to prune
 376   stale objects did not closedir() immediately when it is done with a
 377   directory--a callback such as the one used for "git prune" may want
 378   to do rmdir(), but it would fail on open directory on platforms
 379   such as WinXP.
 380
 381 * "git p4" used to import Perforce CLs that touch only paths outside
 382   the client spec as empty commits.  It has been corrected to ignore
 383   them instead, with a new configuration git-p4.keepEmptyCommits as a
 384   backward compatibility knob.
 385
 386 * The completion script (in contrib/) used to list "git column"
 387   (which is not an end-user facing command) as one of the choices
 388   (merge 160fcdb sg/completion-no-column later to maint).
 389
 390 * The error reporting from "git send-email", when SMTP TLS fails, has
 391   been improved.
 392   (merge 9d60524 jk/send-email-ssl-errors later to maint).
 393
 394 * When getpwuid() on the system returned NULL (e.g. the user is not
 395   in the /etc/passwd file or other uid-to-name mappings), the
 396   codepath to find who the user is to record it in the reflog barfed
 397   and died.  Loosen the check in this codepath, which already accepts
 398   questionable ident string (e.g. host part of the e-mail address is
 399   obviously bogus), and in general when we operate fmt_ident() function
 400   in non-strict mode.
 401   (merge 92bcbb9 jk/ident-loosen-getpwuid later to maint).
 402
 403 * "git symbolic-ref" forgot to report a failure with its exit status.
 404   (merge f91b273 jk/symbolic-ref-maint later to maint).
 405
 406 * History traversal with "git log --source" that starts with an
 407   annotated tag failed to report the tag as "source", due to an
 408   old regression in the command line parser back in v2.2 days.
 409   (merge 728350b jk/pending-keep-tag-name later to maint).
 410
 411 * "git p4" when interacting with multiple depots at the same time
 412   used to incorrectly drop changes.
 413
 414 * Code clean-up, minor fixes etc.