1Git 2.9 Release Notes 2===================== 3 4Backward compatibility note 5--------------------------- 6 7The end-user facing Porcelain level commands in the "git diff" and 8"git log" by default enables the rename detection; you can still use 9"diff.renames" configuration variable to disable this. 10 11Merging two branches that have no common ancestor with "git merge" is 12by default forbidden now to prevent creating such an unusual merge by 13mistake. 14 15The output formats of "git log" that indents the commit log message by 164 spaces now expands HT in the log message by default. You can use 17the "--no-expand-tabs" option to disable this. 18 19"git commit-tree" plumbing command required the user to always sign 20its result when the user sets the commit.gpgsign configuration 21variable, which was an ancient mistake, which this release corrects. 22A script that drives commit-tree, if it relies on this mistake, now 23needs to read commit.gpgsign and pass the -S option as necessary. 24 25 26Updates since v2.8 27------------------ 28 29UI, Workflows & Features 30 31 * Comes with git-multimail 1.3.1 (in contrib/). 32 33 * The end-user facing Porcelain level commands like "diff" and "log" 34 now enables the rename detection by default. 35 36 * The credential.helper configuration variable is cumulative and 37 there is no good way to override it from the command line. As 38 a special case, giving an empty string as its value now serves 39 as the signal to clear the values specified in various files. 40 41 * A new "interactive.diffFilter" configuration can be used to 42 customize the diff shown in "git add -i" session. 43 44 * "git p4" now allows P4 author names to be mapped to Git author 45 names. 46 47 * "git rebase -x" can be used without passing "-i" option. 48 49 * "git -c credential.<var>=<value> submodule" can now be used to 50 propagate configuration variables related to credential helper 51 down to the submodules. 52 53 * "git tag" can create an annotated tag without explicitly given an 54 "-a" (or "-s") option (i.e. when a tag message is given). A new 55 configuration variable, tag.forceSignAnnotated, can be used to tell 56 the command to create signed tag in such a situation. 57 58 * "git merge" used to allow merging two branches that have no common 59 base by default, which led to a brand new history of an existing 60 project created and then get pulled by an unsuspecting maintainer, 61 which allowed an unnecessary parallel history merged into the 62 existing project. The command has been taught not to allow this by 63 default, with an escape hatch "--allow-unrelated-histories" option 64 to be used in a rare event that merges histories of two projects 65 that started their lives independently. 66 67 * "git pull" has been taught to pass --allow-unrelated-histories 68 option to underlying "git merge". 69 70 * "git apply -v" learned to report paths in the patch that were 71 skipped via --include/--exclude mechanism or being outside the 72 current working directory. 73 74 * Shell completion (in contrib/) updates. 75 76 * The commit object name reported when "rebase -i" stops has been 77 shortened. 78 79 * "git worktree add" can be given "--no-checkout" option to only 80 create an empty worktree without checking out the files. 81 82 * "git mergetools" learned to drive ExamDiff. 83 84 * "git pull --rebase" learned "--[no-]autostash" option, so that 85 the rebase.autostash configuration variable set to true can be 86 overridden from the command line. 87 88 * When "git log" shows the log message indented by 4-spaces, the 89 remainder of a line after a HT does not align in the way the author 90 originally intended. The command now expands tabs by default in 91 such a case, and allows the users to override it with a new option, 92 "--no-expand-tabs". 93 94 * "git send-email" now uses a more readable timestamps when 95 formulating a message ID. 96 97 * "git rerere" can encounter two or more files with the same conflict 98 signature that have to be resolved in different ways, but there was 99 no way to record these separate resolutions. 100 (merge d9d501b068 jc/rerere-multi later to maint). 101 102 * "git p4" learned to record P4 jobs in Git commit that imports from 103 the history in Perforce. 104 105 * "git describe --contains" often made a hard-to-justify choice of 106 tag to give name to a given commit, because it tried to come up 107 with a name with smallest number of hops from a tag, causing an old 108 commit whose close descendant that is recently tagged were not 109 described with respect to an old tag but with a newer tag. It did 110 not help that its computation of "hop" count was further tweaked to 111 penalize being on a side branch of a merge. The logic has been 112 updated to favor using the tag with the oldest tagger date, which 113 is a lot easier to explain to the end users: "We describe a commit 114 in terms of the (chronologically) oldest tag that contains the 115 commit." 116 (merge 7550424 js/name-rev-use-oldest-ref later to maint). 117 118 * "git clone" learned "--shallow-submodules" option. 119 120 * HTTP transport clients learned to throw extra HTTP headers at the 121 server, specified via http.extraHeader configuration variable. 122 123 * Patch output from "git diff" and friends has been tweaked to be 124 more readable by using a blank line as a strong hint that the 125 contents before and after it belong to a logically separate unit. 126 127 * A new configuration variable core.hooksPath allows customizing 128 where the hook directory is. 129 130 * An earlier addition of "sanitize_submodule_env" with 14111fc4 (git: 131 submodule honor -c credential.* from command line, 2016-02-29) 132 turned out to be a convoluted no-op; implement what it wanted to do 133 correctly, and stop filtering settings given via "git -c var=val". 134 135 * "git commit --dry-run" reported "No, no, you cannot commit." in one 136 case where "git commit" would have allowed you to commit, and this 137 improves it a little bit ("git commit --dry-run --short" still does 138 not give you the correct answer, for example). This is a stop-gap 139 measure in that "commit --short --dry-run" still gives an incorrect 140 result. 141 142 * The experimental "multiple worktree" feature gains more safety to 143 forbid operations on a branch that is checked out or being actively 144 worked on elsewhere, by noticing that e.g. it is being rebased. 145 146 * "git format-patch" learned a new "--base" option to record what 147 (public, well-known) commit the original series was built on in 148 its output. 149 150 * "git commit" learned to pay attention to "commit.verbose" 151 configuration variable and act as if "--verbose" option was 152 given from the command line. 153 154 * Give hints to GMail users with two-factor auth enabled that 155 they need app-specific-password when using send-email. 156 157 158Performance, Internal Implementation, Development Support etc. 159 160 * The embedded args argv-array in the child process is used to build 161 the command line to run pack-objects instead of using a separate 162 array of strings. 163 164 * A test for tags has been restructured so that more parts of it can 165 easily be run on a platform without a working GnuPG. 166 167 * The startup_info data, which records if we are working inside a 168 repository (among other things), are now uniformly available to Git 169 subcommand implementations, and Git avoids attempting to touch 170 references when we are not in a repository. 171 172 * The command line argument parser for "receive-pack" has been 173 rewritten to use parse-options. 174 175 * A major part of "git submodule update" has been ported to C to take 176 advantage of the recently added framework to run download tasks in 177 parallel. 178 179 * Rename bunch of tests on "git clone" for better organization. 180 181 * The tests that involve running httpd leaked the system-wide 182 configuration in /etc/gitconfig to the tested environment. 183 184 * Build updates for MSVC. 185 186 * The repository set-up sequence has been streamlined (the biggest 187 change is that there is no longer git_config_early()), so that we 188 do not attempt to look into refs/* when we know we do not have a 189 Git repository. 190 191 * Code restructuring around the "refs" area to prepare for pluggable 192 refs backends. 193 194 * Sources to many test helper binaries (and the generated helpers) 195 have been moved to t/helper/ subdirectory to reduce clutter at the 196 top level of the tree. 197 198 * Unify internal logic between "git tag -v" and "git verify-tag" 199 commands by making one directly call into the other. 200 (merge bef234b st/verify-tag later to maint). 201 202 * "merge-recursive" strategy incorrectly checked if a path that is 203 involved in its internal merge exists in the working tree. 204 205 * The test scripts for "git p4" (but not "git p4" implementation 206 itself) has been updated so that they would work even on a system 207 where the installed version of Python is python 3. 208 209 * As nobody maintains our in-tree git.spec.in and distros use their 210 own spec file, we stopped pretending that we support "make rpm". 211 212 * Move from unsigned char[20] to struct object_id continues. 213 214 * Update of "git submodule" to move pieces of logic to C continues. 215 216 * The code for warning_errno/die_errno has been refactored and a new 217 error_errno() reporting helper is introduced. 218 (merge 1da045f nd/error-errno later to maint). 219 220 * Running tests with '-x' option to trace the individual command 221 executions is a useful way to debug test scripts, but some tests 222 that capture the standard error stream and check what the command 223 said can be broken with the trace output mixed in. When running 224 our tests under "bash", however, we can redirect the trace output 225 to another file descriptor to keep the standard error of programs 226 being tested intact. 227 (merge d88785e jk/test-send-sh-x-trace-elsewhere later to maint). 228 229 * t0040 had too many unnecessary repetitions in its test data. Teach 230 test-parse-options program so that a caller can tell what it 231 expects in its output, so that these repetitions can be cleaned up. 232 233 * Add perf test for "rebase -i" 234 235 * Common mistakes when writing gitlink: in our documentation are 236 found by "make check-docs". 237 238 * t9xxx series has been updated primarily for readability, while 239 fixing small bugs in it. A few scripted Porcelains have also been 240 updated to fix possible bugs around their use of "test -z" and 241 "test -n". 242 243 * CI test was taught to run git-svn tests. 244 245 246Also contains various documentation updates and code clean-ups. 247 248 249Fixes since v2.8 250---------------- 251 252Unless otherwise noted, all the fixes since v2.8 in the maintenance 253track are contained in this release (see the maintenance releases' 254notes for details). 255 256 * "git config --get-urlmatch", unlike other variants of the "git 257 config --get" family, did not signal error with its exit status 258 when there was no matching configuration. 259 260 * The "--local-env-vars" and "--resolve-git-dir" options of "git 261 rev-parse" failed to work outside a repository when the command's 262 option parsing was rewritten in 1.8.5 era. 263 264 * "git index-pack --keep[=<msg>] pack-$name.pack" simply did not work. 265 266 * Fetching of history by naming a commit object name directly didn't 267 work across remote-curl transport. 268 269 * A small memory leak in an error codepath has been plugged in xdiff 270 code. 271 272 * strbuf_getwholeline() did not NUL-terminate the buffer on certain 273 corner cases in its error codepath. 274 275 * "git mergetool" did not work well with conflicts that both sides 276 deleted. 277 278 * "git send-email" had trouble parsing alias file in mailrc format 279 when lines in it had trailing whitespaces on them. 280 281 * When "git merge --squash" stopped due to conflict, the concluding 282 "git commit" failed to read in the SQUASH_MSG that shows the log 283 messages from all the squashed commits. 284 285 * "git merge FETCH_HEAD" dereferenced NULL pointer when merging 286 nothing into an unborn history (which is arguably unusual usage, 287 which perhaps was the reason why nobody noticed it). 288 289 * When "git worktree" feature is in use, "git branch -d" allowed 290 deletion of a branch that is checked out in another worktree, 291 which was wrong. 292 293 * When "git worktree" feature is in use, "git branch -m" renamed a 294 branch that is checked out in another worktree without adjusting 295 the HEAD symbolic ref for the worktree. 296 297 * "git diff -M" used to work better when two originally identical 298 files A and B got renamed to X/A and X/B by pairing A to X/A and B 299 to X/B, but this was broken in the 2.0 timeframe. 300 301 * "git send-pack --all <there>" was broken when its command line 302 option parsing was written in the 2.6 timeframe. 303 304 * "git format-patch --help" showed `-s` and `--no-patch` as if these 305 are valid options to the command. We already hide `--patch` option 306 from the documentation, because format-patch is about showing the 307 diff, and the documentation now hides these options as well. 308 309 * When running "git blame $path" with unnormalized data in the index 310 for the path, the data in the working tree was blamed, even though 311 "git add" would not have changed what is already in the index, due 312 to "safe crlf" that disables the line-end conversion. It has been 313 corrected. 314 315 * A change back in version 2.7 to "git branch" broke display of a 316 symbolic ref in a non-standard place in the refs/ hierarchy (we 317 expect symbolic refs to appear in refs/remotes/*/HEAD to point at 318 the primary branch the remote has, and as .git/HEAD to point at the 319 branch we locally checked out). 320 321 * A partial rewrite of "git submodule" in the 2.7 timeframe changed 322 the way the gitdir: pointer in the submodules point at the real 323 repository location to use absolute paths by accident. This has 324 been corrected. 325 326 * "git commit" misbehaved in a few minor ways when an empty message 327 is given via -m '', all of which has been corrected. 328 329 * Support for CRAM-MD5 authentication method in "git imap-send" did 330 not work well. 331 332 * Upcoming OpenSSL 1.1.0 will break compilation b updating a few APIs 333 we use in imap-send, which has been adjusted for the change. 334 335 * The socks5:// proxy support added back in 2.6.4 days was not aware 336 that socks5h:// proxies behave differently. 337 338 * "git config" had a codepath that tried to pass a NULL to 339 printf("%s"), which nobody seems to have noticed. 340 341 * On Cygwin, object creation uses the "create a temporary and then 342 rename it to the final name" pattern, not "create a temporary, 343 hardlink it to the final name and then unlink the temporary" 344 pattern. 345 346 This is necessary to use Git on Windows shared directories, and is 347 already enabled for the MinGW and plain Windows builds. It also 348 has been used in Cygwin packaged versions of Git for quite a while. 349 See http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/291853 350 351 * "merge-octopus" strategy did not ensure that the index is clean 352 when merge begins. 353 354 * When "git merge" notices that the merge can be resolved purely at 355 the tree level (without having to merge blobs) and the resulting 356 tree happens to already exist in the object store, it forgot to 357 update the index, which lead to an inconsistent state for later 358 operations. 359 360 * "git submodule" reports the paths of submodules the command 361 recurses into, but this was incorrect when the command was not run 362 from the root level of the superproject. 363 364 * The "user.useConfigOnly" configuration variable makes it an error 365 if users do not explicitly set user.name and user.email. However, 366 its check was not done early enough and allowed another error to 367 trigger, reporting that the default value we guessed from the 368 system setting was unusable. This was a suboptimal end-user 369 experience as we want the users to set user.name/user.email without 370 relying on the auto-detection at all. 371 372 * "git mv old new" did not adjust the path for a submodule that lives 373 as a subdirectory inside old/ directory correctly. 374 375 * "git replace -e" did not honour "core.editor" configuration. 376 377 * "git push" from a corrupt repository that attempts to push a large 378 number of refs deadlocked; the thread to relay rejection notices 379 for these ref updates blocked on writing them to the main thread, 380 after the main thread at the receiving end notices that the push 381 failed and decides not to read these notices and return a failure. 382 383 * mmap emulation on Windows has been optimized and work better without 384 consuming paging store when not needed. 385 386 * A question by "git send-email" to ask the identity of the sender 387 has been updated. 388 389 * UI consistency improvements for "git mergetool". 390 391 * "git rebase -m" could be asked to rebase an entire branch starting 392 from the root, but failed by assuming that there always is a parent 393 commit to the first commit on the branch. 394 (merge 79f4344 bw/rebase-merge-entire-branch later to maint). 395 396 * Fix a broken "p4 lfs" test. 397 398 * Recent update to Git LFS broke "git p4" by changing the output from 399 its "lfs pointer" subcommand. 400 401 * "git fetch" test t5510 was flaky while running a (forced) automagic 402 garbage collection. 403 404 * Documentation updates to help contributors setting up Travis CI 405 test for their patches. 406 407 * Some multi-byte encoding can have a backslash byte as a later part 408 of one letter, which would confuse "highlight" filter used in 409 gitweb. 410 411 * "git commit-tree" plumbing command required the user to always sign 412 its result when the user sets the commit.gpgsign configuration 413 variable, which was an ancient mistake. Rework "git rebase" that 414 relied on this mistake so that it reads commit.gpgsign and pass (or 415 not pass) the -S option to "git commit-tree" to keep the end-user 416 expectation the same, while teaching "git commit-tree" to ignore 417 the configuration variable. This will stop requiring the users to 418 sign commit objects used internally as an implementation detail of 419 "git stash". 420 (merge 6694856 jc/commit-tree-ignore-commit-gpgsign later to maint). 421 422 * "http.cookieFile" configuration variable clearly wants a pathname, 423 but we forgot to treat it as such by e.g. applying tilde expansion. 424 (merge e5a39ad bn/http-cookiefile-config later to maint). 425 426 * Consolidate description of tilde-expansion that is done to 427 configuration variables that take pathname to a single place. 428 (merge dca83ab jc/config-pathname-type later to maint). 429 430 * Correct faulty recommendation to use "git submodule deinit ." when 431 de-initialising all submodules, which would result in a strange 432 error message in a pathological corner case. 433 (merge f6a5279 sb/submodule-deinit-all later to maint). 434 435 * Many 'linkgit:<git documentation page>' references were broken, 436 which are all fixed with this. 437 (merge 1cca17d jc/linkgit-fix later to maint). 438 439 * "git rerere" can get confused by conflict markers deliberately left 440 by the inner merge step, because they are indistinguishable from 441 the real conflict markers left by the outermost merge which are 442 what the end user and "rerere" need to look at. This was fixed by 443 making the conflict markers left by the inner merges a bit longer. 444 (merge 0f9fd5c jc/ll-merge-internal later to maint). 445 446 * CI test was taught to build documentation pages. 447 (merge b98712b ls/travis-build-doc later to maint). 448 449 * "git fsck" learned to catch NUL byte in a commit object as 450 potential error and warn. 451 (merge 6d2d780 jc/fsck-nul-in-commit later to maint). 452 453 * Portability enhancement for "rebase -i" to help platforms whose 454 shell does not like "for i in <empty>" (which is not POSIX-kosher). 455 (merge 8e98b35 jk/rebase-interative-eval-fix later to maint). 456 457 * On Windows, .git and optionally any files whose name starts with a 458 dot are now marked as hidden, with a core.hideDotFiles knob to 459 customize this behaviour. 460 (merge ebf31e7 js/windows-dotgit later to maint). 461 462 * Documentation for "git merge --verify-signatures" has been updated 463 to clarify that the signature of only the commit at the tip is 464 verified. Also the phrasing used for signature and key validity is 465 adjusted to align with that used by OpenPGP. 466 (merge 05a5869 kf/gpg-sig-verification-doc later to maint). 467 468 * A couple of bugs around core.autocrlf have been fixed. 469 (merge caa47ad tb/core-eol-fix later to maint). 470 471 * Many commands normalize command line arguments from NFD to NFC 472 variant of UTF-8 on OSX, but commands in the "diff" family did 473 not, causing "git diff $path" to complain that no such path is 474 known to Git. They have been taught to do the normalization. 475 (merge 90a78b8 ar/diff-args-osx-precompose later to maint). 476 477 * "git difftool" learned to handle unmerged paths correctly in 478 dir-diff mode. 479 (merge 366f9ce da/difftool later to maint). 480 481 * The "are we talking with TTY, doing an interactive session?" 482 detection has been updated to work better for "Git for Windows". 483 (merge f7f90e0 kb/msys2-tty later to maint). 484 485 * We forgot to add "git log --decorate=auto" to documentation when we 486 added the feature back in v2.1.0 timeframe. 487 (merge 462cbb4 rj/log-decorate-auto later to maint). 488 489 * Other minor clean-ups and documentation updates 490 (merge 832c0e5 lp/typofixes later to maint). 491 (merge f5ee54a sb/z-is-gnutar-ism later to maint). 492 (merge 2e3926b va/i18n-misc-updates later to maint). 493 (merge f212dcc bn/config-doc-tt-varnames later to maint). 494 (merge f54bea4 nd/remote-plural-ours-plus-theirs later to maint). 495 (merge 2bb0518 ak/t4151-ls-files-could-be-empty later to maint). 496 (merge 4df4313 jc/test-seq later to maint). 497 (merge a75a308 tb/t5601-sed-fix later to maint). 498 (merge 6c1fbe1 va/i18n-remote-comment-to-align later to maint). 499 (merge dee2303 va/mailinfo-doc-typofix later to maint).