Documentation / RelNotes / 2.13.0.txton commit Fourth batch after 2.12 (4a9b9b3)
   1Git 2.13 Release Notes
   2======================
   3
   4Backward compatibility notes.
   5
   6 * Use of an empty string as a pathspec element that is used for
   7   'everything matches' is still warned and Git asks users to use a
   8   more explicit '.' for that instead.  The hope is that existing
   9   users will not mind this change, and eventually the warning can be
  10   turned into a hard error, upgrading the deprecation into removal of
  11   this (mis)feature.  That is not scheduled to happen in the upcoming
  12   release (yet).
  13
  14 * The historical argument order "git merge <msg> HEAD <commit>..."
  15   has been deprecated for quite some time, and will be removed in a
  16   future release.
  17
  18
  19Updates since v2.12
  20-------------------
  21
  22UI, Workflows & Features
  23
  24 * "git describe" and "git name-rev" have been taught to take more
  25   than one refname patterns to restrict the set of refs to base their
  26   naming output on, and also learned to take negative patterns to
  27   name refs not to be used for naming via their "--exclude" option.
  28
  29 * Deletion of a branch "foo/bar" could remove .git/refs/heads/foo
  30   once there no longer is any other branch whose name begins with
  31   "foo/", but we didn't do so so far.  Now we do.
  32
  33 * When "git merge" detects a path that is renamed in one history
  34   while the other history deleted (or modified) it, it now reports
  35   both paths to help the user understand what is going on in the two
  36   histories being merged.
  37
  38 * The <url> part in "http.<url>.<variable>" configuration variable
  39   can now be spelled with '*' that serves as wildcard.
  40   E.g. "http.https://*.example.com.proxy" can be used to specify the
  41   proxy used for https://a.example.com, https://b.example.com, etc.,
  42   i.e. any host in the example.com domain.
  43
  44 * "git tag" did not leave useful message when adding a new entry to
  45   reflog; this was left unnoticed for a long time because refs/tags/*
  46   doesn't keep reflog by default.
  47
  48 * The "negative" pathspec feature was somewhat more cumbersome to use
  49   than necessary in that its short-hand used "!" which needed to be
  50   escaped from shells, and it required "exclude from what?" specified.
  51
  52 * The command line options for ssh invocation needs to be tweaked for
  53   some implementations of SSH (e.g. PuTTY plink wants "-P <port>"
  54   while OpenSSH wants "-p <port>" to specify port to connect to), and
  55   the variant was guessed when GIT_SSH environment variable is used
  56   to specify it.  The logic to guess now applies to the command
  57   specified by the newer GIT_SSH_COMMAND and also core.sshcommand
  58   configuration variable, and comes with an escape hatch for users to
  59   deal with misdetected cases.
  60
  61 * The "--git-path", "--git-common-dir", and "--shared-index-path"
  62   options of "git rev-parse" did not produce usable output.  They are
  63   now updated to show the path to the correct file, relative to where
  64   the caller is.
  65
  66 * "git diff -W" has been taught to handle the case where a new
  67   function is added at the end of the file better.
  68
  69 * "git update-ref -d" and other operations to delete references did
  70   not leave any entry in HEAD's reflog when the reference being
  71   deleted was the current branch.  This is not a problem in practice
  72   because you do not want to delete the branch you are currently on,
  73   but caused renaming of the current branch to something else not to
  74   be logged in a useful way.
  75
  76 * "Cc:" on the trailer part does not have to conform to RFC strictly,
  77   unlike in the e-mail header.  "git send-email" has been updated to
  78   ignore anything after '>' when picking addresses, to allow non-address
  79   cruft like " # stable 4.4" after the address.
  80   (merge 9d3343961b jh/send-email-one-cc later to maint).
  81
  82 * When "git submodule init" decides that the submodule in the working
  83   tree is its upstream, it now gives a warning as it is not a very
  84   common setup.
  85   (merge d1b3b81aab sb/submodule-init-url-selection later to maint).
  86
  87 * "git stash save" takes a pathspec so that the local changes can be
  88   stashed away only partially.
  89   (merge 9e140909f6 tg/stash-push later to maint).
  90
  91 * Documentation for "git ls-files" did not refer to core.quotePath.
  92
  93
  94Performance, Internal Implementation, Development Support etc.
  95
  96 * The code to list branches in "git branch" has been consolidated
  97   with the more generic ref-filter API.
  98
  99 * Resource usage while enumerating refs from alternate object store
 100   has been optimized to help receiving end of "push" that hosts a
 101   repository with many "forks".
 102
 103 * The gitattributes machinery is being taught to work better in a
 104   multi-threaded environment.
 105
 106 * "git rebase -i" starts using the recently updated "sequencer" code.
 107
 108 * Code and design clean-up for the refs API.
 109
 110 * The preload-index code has been taught not to bother with the index
 111   entries that are paths that are not checked out by "sparse checkout".
 112
 113 * Some warning() messages from "git clean" were updated to show the
 114   errno from failed system calls.
 115
 116 * The "parse_config_key()" API function has been cleaned up.
 117   (merge ad8c7cdadd jk/parse-config-key-cleanup later to maint).
 118
 119 * A test that creates a confusing branch whose name is HEAD has been
 120   corrected not to do so.
 121   (merge f0252ca23c jk/t6300-cleanup later to maint).
 122
 123 * The code that parses header fields in the commit object has been
 124   updated for (micro)performance and code hygiene.
 125   (merge b072504ce1 rs/commit-parsing-optim later to maint).
 126
 127 * An helper function to make it easier to append the result from
 128   real_path() to a strbuf has been added.
 129   (merge 33ad9ddd0b rs/strbuf-add-real-path later to maint).
 130
 131 * Reduce authentication round-trip over HTTP when the server supports
 132   just a single authentication method.  This also improves the
 133   behaviour when Git is misconfigured to enable http.emptyAuth
 134   against a server that does not authenticate without a username
 135   (i.e. not using Kerberos etc., which makes http.emptyAuth
 136   pointless).
 137   (merge 40a18fc77c jk/http-auth later to maint).
 138
 139 * Windows port wants to use OpenSSL's implementation of SHA-1
 140   routines, so let them.
 141   (merge 2cfc70f0de jh/mingw-openssl-sha1 later to maint).
 142
 143 * The t/perf performance test suite was not prepared to test not so
 144   old versions of Git, but now it covers versions of Git that are not
 145   so ancient.
 146   (merge 28e1fb5466 jt/perf-updates later to maint).
 147
 148 * Add 32-bit Linux variant to the set of platforms to be tested with
 149   Travis CI.
 150   (merge 88dedd5e72 js/travis-32bit-linux later to maint).
 151
 152 * "git branch --list" takes the "--abbrev" and "--no-abbrev" options
 153   to control the output of the object name in its "-v"(erbose)
 154   output, but a recent update started ignoring them; fix it before
 155   the breakage reaches to any released version.
 156
 157
 158Also contains various documentation updates and code clean-ups.
 159
 160
 161Fixes since v2.12
 162-----------------
 163
 164Unless otherwise noted, all the fixes since v2.9 in the maintenance
 165track are contained in this release (see the maintenance releases'
 166notes for details).
 167
 168 * "git repack --depth=<n>" for a long time busted the specified depth
 169   when reusing delta from existing packs.  This has been corrected.
 170   (merge 42b766d765 jk/delta-chain-limit later to maint).
 171
 172 * The code to parse the command line "git grep <patterns>... <rev>
 173   [[--] <pathspec>...]" has been cleaned up, and a handful of bugs
 174   have been fixed (e.g. we used to check "--" if it is a rev).
 175   (merge 131f3c96d2 jk/grep-no-index-fix later to maint).
 176
 177 * "git ls-remote" and "git archive --remote" are designed to work
 178   without being in a directory under Git's control.  However, recent
 179   updates revealed that we randomly look into a directory called
 180   .git/ without actually doing necessary set-up when working in a
 181   repository.  Stop doing so.
 182   (merge 4b0c3c7735 jn/remote-helpers-with-git-dir later to maint).
 183
 184 * "git show-branch" expected there were only very short branch names
 185   in the repository and used a fixed-length buffer to hold them
 186   without checking for overflow.
 187   (merge d3cc5f4c44 jk/show-branch-lift-name-len-limit later to maint).
 188
 189 * A caller of tempfile API that uses stdio interface to write to
 190   files may ignore errors while writing, which is detected when
 191   tempfile is closed (with a call to ferror()).  By that time, the
 192   original errno that may have told us what went wrong is likely to
 193   be long gone and was overwritten by an irrelevant value.
 194   close_tempfile() now resets errno to EIO to make errno at least
 195   predictable.
 196   (merge 7e8c9355b7 jk/tempfile-ferror-fclose-confusion later to maint).
 197
 198 * "git remote rm X", when a branch has remote X configured as the
 199   value of its branch.*.remote, tried to remove branch.*.remote and
 200   branch.*.merge and failed if either is unset.
 201   (merge 20690b2139 rl/remote-allow-missing-branch-name-merge later to maint).
 202
 203 * A "gc.log" file left by a backgrounded "gc --auto" disables further
 204   automatic gc; it has been taught to run at least once a day (by
 205   default) by ignoring a stale "gc.log" file that is too old.
 206   (merge a831c06a2b dt/gc-ignore-old-gc-logs later to maint).
 207
 208 * The code to parse "git -c VAR=VAL cmd" and set configuration
 209   variable for the duration of cmd had two small bugs, which have
 210   been fixed.
 211   (merge 1274a155af jc/config-case-cmdline-take-2 later to maint).
 212
 213 * user.email that consists of only cruft chars should consistently
 214   error out, but didn't.
 215   (merge 94425552f3 jk/ident-empty later to maint).
 216
 217 * "git upload-pack", which is a counter-part of "git fetch", did not
 218   report a request for a ref that was not advertised as invalid.
 219   This is generally not a problem (because "git fetch" will stop
 220   before making such a request), but is the right thing to do.
 221   (merge bdb31eada7 jt/upload-pack-error-report later to maint).
 222
 223 * A leak in a codepath to read from a packed object in (rare) cases
 224   has been plugged.
 225   (merge 886ddf4777 rs/sha1-file-plug-fallback-base-leak later to maint).
 226
 227 * When a redirected http transport gets an error during the
 228   redirected request, we ignored the error we got from the server,
 229   and ended up giving a not-so-useful error message.
 230   (merge 8e27391a5f jt/http-base-url-update-upon-redirect later to maint).
 231
 232 * The patch subcommand of "git add -i" was meant to have paths
 233   selection prompt just like other subcommand, unlike "git add -p"
 234   directly jumps to hunk selection.  Recently, this was broken and
 235   "add -i" lost the paths selection dialog, but it now has been
 236   fixed.
 237   (merge c852bd54bd jk/add-i-patch-do-prompt later to maint).
 238
 239 * Git v2.12 was shipped with an embarrassing breakage where various
 240   operations that verify paths given from the user stopped dying when
 241   seeing an issue, and instead later triggering segfault.
 242   (merge ce83eadd9a js/realpath-pathdup-fix later to maint).
 243
 244 * There is no need for Python only to give a few messages to the
 245   standard error stream, but we somehow did.
 246   (merge b8686c661d ss/remote-bzr-hg-placeholder-wo-python later to maint).
 247
 248 * The code to parse "git log -L..." command line was buggy when there
 249   are many ranges specified with -L; overrun of the allocated buffer
 250   has been fixed.
 251   (merge aaae0bf787 ax/line-log-range-merge-fix later to maint).
 252
 253 * The command-line parsing of "git log -L" copied internal data
 254   structures using incorrect size on ILP32 systems.
 255   (merge 07f546cda5 vn/line-log-memcpy-size-fix later to maint).
 256
 257 * "git diff --quiet" relies on the size field in diff_filespec to be
 258   correctly populated, but diff_populate_filespec() helper function
 259   made an incorrect short-cut when asked only to populate the size
 260   field for paths that need to go through convert_to_git() (e.g. CRLF
 261   conversion).
 262   (merge 12426e114b jc/diff-populate-filespec-size-only-fix later to maint).
 263
 264 * A few tests were run conditionally under (rare) conditions where
 265   they cannot be run (like running cvs tests under 'root' account).
 266   (merge c6507484a2 ab/cond-skip-tests later to maint).
 267
 268 * "git branch @" created refs/heads/@ as a branch, and in general the
 269   code that handled @{-1} and @{upstream} was a bit too loose in
 270   disambiguating.
 271   (merge fd4692ff70 jk/interpret-branch-name later to maint).
 272
 273 * "git fetch" that requests a commit by object name, when the other
 274   side does not allow such an request, failed without much
 275   explanation.
 276   (merge d56583ded6 mm/fetch-show-error-message-on-unadvertised-object later to maint).
 277
 278 * "git filter-branch --prune-empty" drops a single-parent commit that
 279   becomes a no-op, but did not drop a root commit whose tree is empty.
 280   (merge 32da7467eb dp/filter-branch-prune-empty later to maint).
 281
 282 * Recent versions of Git treats http alternates (used in dumb http
 283   transport) just like HTTP redirects and requires the client to
 284   enable following it, due to security concerns.  But we forgot to
 285   give a warning when we decide not to honor the alternates.
 286   (merge 5cae73d5d2 ew/http-alternates-as-redirects-warning later to maint).
 287
 288 * "git push" had a handful of codepaths that could lead to a deadlock
 289   when unexpected error happened, which has been fixed.
 290   (merge d1a13d3fcb jk/push-deadlock-regression-fix later to maint).
 291
 292 * Other minor doc, test and build updates and code cleanups.
 293   (merge 2cfa83574c mm/two-more-xstrfmt later to maint).
 294   (merge b803ae4427 ps/docs-diffcore later to maint).
 295   (merge bcd886d897 ew/markdown-url-in-readme later to maint).
 296   (merge b2d593a779 rj/remove-unused-mktemp later to maint).
 297   (merge 3255e512a8 jk/ewah-use-right-type-in-sizeof later to maint).