1Git 2.8 Release Notes 2===================== 3 4Backward compatibility note 5--------------------------- 6 7The rsync:// transport has been removed. 8 9 10Updates since v2.7 11------------------ 12 13UI, Workflows & Features 14 15 * It turns out "git clone" over rsync transport has been broken when 16 the source repository has packed references for a long time, and 17 nobody noticed nor complained about it. 18 19 * "push" learned that its "--delete" option can be shortened to 20 "-d", just like "branch --delete" and "branch -d" are the same 21 thing. 22 23 * "git blame" learned to produce the progress eye-candy when it takes 24 too much time before emitting the first line of the result. 25 26 * "git grep" can now be configured (or told from the command line) 27 how many threads to use when searching in the working tree files. 28 29 * Some "git notes" operations, e.g. "git log --notes=<note>", should 30 be able to read notes from any tree-ish that is shaped like a notes 31 tree, but the notes infrastructure required that the argument must 32 be a ref under refs/notes/. Loosen it to require a valid ref only 33 when the operation would update the notes (in which case we must 34 have a place to store the updated notes tree, iow, a ref). 35 36 * "git grep" by default does not fall back to its "--no-index" 37 behavior outside a directory under Git's control (otherwise the 38 user may by mistake end up running a huge recursive search); with a 39 new configuration (set in $HOME/.gitconfig--by definition this 40 cannot be set in the config file per project), this safety can be 41 disabled. 42 43 * "git pull --rebase" has been extended to allow invoking 44 "rebase -i". 45 46 * "git p4" learned to cope with the type of a file getting changed. 47 48 * "git format-patch" learned to notice format.outputDirectory 49 configuration variable. This allows "-o <dir>" option to be 50 omitted on the command line if you always use the same directory in 51 your workflow. 52 53 * "interpret-trailers" has been taught to optionally update a file in 54 place, instead of always writing the result to the standard output. 55 56 * Many commands that read files that are expected to contain text 57 that is generated (or can be edited) by the end user to control 58 their behavior (e.g. "git grep -f <filename>") have been updated 59 to be more tolerant to lines that are terminated with CRLF (they 60 used to treat such a line to contain payload that ends with CR, 61 which is usually not what the users expect). 62 63 * "git notes merge" used to limit the source of the merged notes tree 64 to somewhere under refs/notes/ hierarchy, which was too limiting 65 when inventing a workflow to exchange notes with remote 66 repositories using remote-tracking notes trees (located in e.g. 67 refs/remote-notes/ or somesuch). 68 69 * "git ls-files" learned a new "--eol" option to help diagnose 70 end-of-line problems. 71 72 * "ls-remote" learned an option to show which branch the remote 73 repository advertises as its primary by pointing its HEAD at. 74 75 * New http.proxyAuthMethod configuration variable can be used to 76 specify what authentication method to use, as a way to work around 77 proxies that do not give error response expected by libcurl when 78 CURLAUTH_ANY is used. Also, the codepath for proxy authentication 79 has been taught to use credential API to store the authentication 80 material in user's keyrings. 81 82 * Update the untracked cache subsystem and change its primary UI from 83 "git update-index" to "git config". 84 85 * There were a few "now I am doing this thing" progress messages in 86 the TCP connection code that can be triggered by setting a verbose 87 option internally in the code, but "git fetch -v" and friends never 88 passed the verbose option down to that codepath. 89 90 * Clean/smudge filters defined in a configuration file of lower 91 precedence can now be overridden to be a pass-through no-op by 92 setting the variable to an empty string. 93 94 * A new "<branch>^{/!-<pattern>}" notation can be used to name a 95 commit that is reachable from <branch> that does not match the 96 given <pattern>. 97 98 * The "user.useConfigOnly" configuration variable can be used to 99 force the user to always set user.email & user.name configuration 100 variables, serving as a reminder for those who work on multiple 101 projects and do not want to put these in their $HOME/.gitconfig. 102 103 * "git fetch" and friends that make network connections can now be 104 told to only use ipv4 (or ipv6). 105 106 * Some authentication methods do not need username or password, but 107 libcurl needs some hint that it needs to perform authentication. 108 Supplying an empty username and password string is a valid way to 109 do so, but you can set the http.[<url>.]emptyAuth configuration 110 variable to achieve the same, if you find it cleaner. 111 112 * You can now set http.[<url>.]pinnedpubkey to specify the pinned 113 public key when building with recent enough versions of libcURL. 114 115 * The configuration system has been taught to phrase where it found a 116 bad configuration variable in a better way in its error messages. 117 "git config" learnt a new "--show-origin" option to indicate where 118 the values come from. 119 120 * The "credential-cache" daemon process used to run in whatever 121 directory it happened to start in, but this made umount(2)ing the 122 filesystem that houses the repository harder; now the process 123 chdir()s to the directory that house its own socket on startup. 124 125 * When "git submodule update" did not result in fetching the commit 126 object in the submodule that is referenced by the superproject, the 127 command learned to retry another fetch, specifically asking for 128 that commit that may not be connected to the refs it usually 129 fetches. 130 131 * "git merge-recursive" learned "--no-renames" option to disable its 132 rename detection logic. 133 134 * Across the transition at around Git version 2.0, the user used to 135 get a pretty loud warning when running "git push" without setting 136 push.default configuration variable. We no longer warn because the 137 transition was completed a long time ago. 138 139 * README has been renamed to README.md and its contents got tweaked 140 slightly to make it easier on the eyes. 141 142 143Performance, Internal Implementation, Development Support etc. 144 145 * Add a framework to spawn a group of processes in parallel, and use 146 it to run "git fetch --recurse-submodules" in parallel. 147 148 * A slight update to the Makefile to mark ".PHONY" targets as such 149 correctly. 150 151 * In-core storage of the reverse index for .pack files (which lets 152 you go from a pack offset to an object name) has been streamlined. 153 154 * d95138e6 (setup: set env $GIT_WORK_TREE when work tree is set, like 155 $GIT_DIR, 2015-06-26) attempted to work around a glitch in alias 156 handling by overwriting GIT_WORK_TREE environment variable to 157 affect subprocesses when set_git_work_tree() gets called, which 158 resulted in a rather unpleasant regression to "clone" and "init". 159 Try to address the same issue by always restoring the environment 160 and respawning the real underlying command when handling alias. 161 162 * The low-level code that is used to create symbolic references has 163 been updated to share more code with the code that deals with 164 normal references. 165 166 * strbuf_getline() and friends have been redefined to make it easier 167 to identify which callsite of (new) strbuf_getline_lf() should 168 allow and silently ignore carriage-return at the end of the line to 169 help users on DOSsy systems. 170 171 * "git shortlog" used to accumulate various pieces of information 172 regardless of what was asked to be shown in the final output. It 173 has been optimized by noticing what need not to be collected 174 (e.g. there is no need to collect the log messages when showing 175 only the number of changes). 176 177 * "git checkout $branch" (and other operations that share the same 178 underlying machinery) has been optimized. 179 180 * Automated tests in Travis CI environment has been optimized by 181 persisting runtime statistics of previous "prove" run, executing 182 tests that take longer before other ones; this reduces the total 183 wallclock time. 184 185 * Test scripts have been updated to remove assumptions that are not 186 portable between Git for POSIX and Git for Windows, or to skip ones 187 with expectations that are not satisfiable on Git for Windows. 188 189 * Some calls to strcpy(3) triggers a false warning from static 190 analyzers that are less intelligent than humans, and reducing the 191 number of these false hits helps us notice real issues. A few 192 calls to strcpy(3) in a couple of protrams that are already safe 193 has been rewritten to avoid false warnings. 194 195 * The "name_path" API was an attempt to reduce the need to construct 196 the full path out of a series of path components while walking a 197 tree hierarchy, but over time made less efficient because the path 198 needs to be flattened, e.g. to be compared with another path that 199 is already flat. The API has been removed and its users have been 200 rewritten to simplify the overall code complexity. 201 202 * Help those who debug http(s) part of the system. 203 (merge 0054045 sp/remote-curl-ssl-strerror later to maint). 204 205 * The internal API to interact with "remote.*" configuration 206 variables has been streamlined. 207 208 * The ref-filter's format-parsing code has been refactored, in 209 preparation for "branch --format" and friends. 210 211 * Traditionally, the tests that try commands that work on the 212 contents in the working tree were named with "worktree" in their 213 filenames, but with the recent addition of "git worktree" 214 subcommand, whose tests are also named similarly, it has become 215 harder to tell them apart. The traditional tests have been renamed 216 to use "work-tree" instead in an attempt to differentiate them. 217 (merge 5549029 mg/work-tree-tests later to maint). 218 219 * Many codepaths forget to check return value from git_config_set(); 220 the function is made to die() to make sure we do not proceed when 221 setting a configuration variable failed. 222 (merge 3d18064 ps/config-error later to maint). 223 224 * Handling of errors while writing into our internal asynchronous 225 process has been made more robust, which reduces flakiness in our 226 tests. 227 (merge 43f3afc jk/epipe-in-async later to maint). 228 229 * There is a new DEVELOPER knob that enables many compiler warning 230 options in the Makefile. 231 232 * The way the test scripts configure the Apache web server has been 233 updated to work also for Apache 2.4 running on RedHat derived 234 distros. 235 236 * Out of maintenance gcc on OSX 10.6 fails to compile the code in 237 'master'; work it around by using clang by default on the platform. 238 239 * The "name_path" API was an attempt to reduce the need to construct 240 the full path out of a series of path components while walking a 241 tree hierarchy, but over time made less efficient because the path 242 needs to be flattened, e.g. to be compared with another path that 243 is already flat, in many cases. The API has been removed and its 244 users have been rewritten to simplify the overall code complexity. 245 This incidentally also closes some heap-corruption holes. 246 247 * Recent versions of GNU grep is pickier than before to decide if a 248 file is "binary" and refuse to give line-oriented hits when we 249 expect it to, unless explicitly told with "-a" option. As our 250 scripted Porcelains use sane_grep wrapper for line-oriented data, 251 even when the line may contain non-ASCII payload we took from 252 end-user data, use "grep -a" to implement sane_grep wrapper when 253 using an implementation of "grep" that takes the "-a" option. 254 255 256 257Also contains various documentation updates and code clean-ups. 258 259 260Fixes since v2.7 261---------------- 262 263Unless otherwise noted, all the fixes since v2.7 in the maintenance 264track are contained in this release (see the maintenance releases' 265notes for details). 266 267 * An earlier change in 2.5.x-era broke users' hooks and aliases by 268 exporting GIT_WORK_TREE to point at the root of the working tree, 269 interfering when they tried to use a different working tree without 270 setting GIT_WORK_TREE environment themselves. 271 272 * The "exclude_list" structure has the usual "alloc, nr" pair of 273 fields to be used by ALLOC_GROW(), but clear_pattern_list() forgot 274 to reset 'alloc' to 0 when it cleared 'nr' to discard the managed 275 array. 276 277 * Paths that have been told the index about with "add -N" are not 278 quite yet in the index, but a few commands behaved as if they 279 already are in a harmful way. 280 281 * "git send-email" was confused by escaped quotes stored in the alias 282 files saved by "mutt", which has been corrected. 283 284 * A few non-portable C construct have been spotted by clang compiler 285 and have been fixed. 286 287 * The documentation has been updated to hint the connection between 288 the '--signoff' option and DCO. 289 290 * "git reflog" incorrectly assumed that all objects that used to be 291 at the tip of a ref must be commits, which caused it to segfault. 292 293 * The ignore mechanism saw a few regressions around untracked file 294 listing and sparse checkout selection areas in 2.7.0; the change 295 that is responsible for the regression has been reverted. 296 297 * Some codepaths used fopen(3) when opening a fixed path in $GIT_DIR 298 (e.g. COMMIT_EDITMSG) that is meant to be left after the command is 299 done. This however did not work well if the repository is set to 300 be shared with core.sharedRepository and the umask of the previous 301 user is tighter. They have been made to work better by calling 302 unlink(2) and retrying after fopen(3) fails with EPERM. 303 304 * Asking gitweb for a nonexistent commit left a warning in the server 305 log. 306 307 Somebody may want to follow this up with an additional test, perhaps? 308 IIRC, we do test that no Perl warnings are given to the server log, 309 so this should have been caught if our test coverage were good. 310 311 * "git rebase", unlike all other callers of "gc --auto", did not 312 ignore the exit code from "gc --auto". 313 314 * Many codepaths that run "gc --auto" before exiting kept packfiles 315 mapped and left the file descriptors to them open, which was not 316 friendly to systems that cannot remove files that are open. They 317 now close the packs before doing so. 318 319 * A recent optimization to filter-branch in v2.7.0 introduced a 320 regression when --prune-empty filter is used, which has been 321 corrected. 322 323 * The description for SANITY prerequisite the test suite uses has 324 been clarified both in the comment and in the implementation. 325 326 * "git tag" started listing a tag "foo" as "tags/foo" when a branch 327 named "foo" exists in the same repository; remove this unnecessary 328 disambiguation, which is a regression introduced in v2.7.0. 329 330 * The way "git svn" uses auth parameter was broken by Subversion 331 1.9.0 and later. 332 333 * The "split" subcommand of "git subtree" (in contrib/) incorrectly 334 skipped merges when it shouldn't, which was corrected. 335 336 * A few options of "git diff" did not work well when the command was 337 run from a subdirectory. 338 339 * The command line completion learned a handful of additional options 340 and command specific syntax. 341 342 * dirname() emulation has been added, as Msys2 lacks it. 343 344 * The underlying machinery used by "ls-files -o" and other commands 345 has been taught not to create empty submodule ref cache for a 346 directory that is not a submodule. This removes a ton of wasted 347 CPU cycles. 348 349 * "git worktree" had a broken code that attempted to auto-fix 350 possible inconsistency that results from end-users moving a 351 worktree to different places without telling Git (the original 352 repository needs to maintain back-pointers to its worktrees, 353 but "mv" run by end-users who are not familiar with that fact 354 will obviously not adjust them), which actually made things 355 worse when triggered. 356 357 * The low-level merge machinery has been taught to use CRLF line 358 termination when inserting conflict markers to merged contents that 359 are themselves CRLF line-terminated. 360 361 * "git push --force-with-lease" has been taught to report if the push 362 needed to force (or fast-forwarded). 363 364 * The emulated "yes" command used in our test scripts has been 365 tweaked not to spend too much time generating unnecessary output 366 that is not used, to help those who test on Windows where it would 367 not stop until it fills the pipe buffer due to lack of SIGPIPE. 368 369 * The documentation for "git clean" has been corrected; it mentioned 370 that .git/modules/* are removed by giving two "-f", which has never 371 been the case. 372 373 * The vimdiff backend for "git mergetool" has been tweaked to arrange 374 and number buffers in the order that would match the expectation of 375 majority of people who read left to right, then top down and assign 376 buffers 1 2 3 4 "mentally" to local base remote merge windows based 377 on that order. 378 379 * "git show 'HEAD:Foo[BAR]Baz'" did not interpret the argument as a 380 rev, i.e. the object named by the the pathname with wildcard 381 characters in a tree object. 382 (merge aac4fac nd/dwim-wildcards-as-pathspecs later to maint). 383 384 * "git rev-parse --git-common-dir" used in the worktree feature 385 misbehaved when run from a subdirectory. 386 (merge 17f1365 nd/git-common-dir-fix later to maint). 387 388 * "git worktree add -B <branchname>" did not work. 389 390 * The "v(iew)" subcommand of the interactive "git am -i" command was 391 broken in 2.6.0 timeframe when the command was rewritten in C. 392 (merge 708b8cc jc/am-i-v-fix later to maint). 393 394 * "git merge-tree" used to mishandle "both sides added" conflict with 395 its own "create a fake ancestor file that has the common parts of 396 what both sides have added and do a 3-way merge" logic; this has 397 been updated to use the usual "3-way merge with an empty blob as 398 the fake common ancestor file" approach used in the rest of the 399 system. 400 (merge 907681e jk/no-diff-emit-common later to maint). 401 402 * The memory ownership rule of fill_textconv() API, which was a bit 403 tricky, has been documented a bit better. 404 (merge a64e6a4 jk/more-comments-on-textconv later to maint). 405 406 * Update various codepaths to avoid manually-counted malloc(). 407 (merge 08c95df jk/tighten-alloc later to maint). 408 409 * The documentation did not clearly state that the 'simple' mode is 410 now the default for "git push" when push.default configuration is 411 not set. 412 (merge f6b1fb3 mm/push-simple-doc later to maint). 413 414 * Recent versions of GNU grep are pickier when their input contains 415 arbitrary binary data, which some of our tests uses. Rewrite the 416 tests to sidestep the problem. 417 (merge 3b1442d jk/grep-binary-workaround-in-test later to maint). 418 419 * A helper function "git submodule" uses since v2.7.0 to list the 420 modules that match the pathspec argument given to its subcommands 421 (e.g. "submodule add <repo> <path>") has been fixed. 422 (merge 2b56bb7 sb/submodule-module-list-fix later to maint). 423 424 * "git config section.var value" to set a value in per-repository 425 configuration file failed when it was run outside any repository, 426 but didn't say the reason correctly. 427 (merge 638fa62 js/config-set-in-non-repository later to maint). 428 429 * The code to read the pack data using the offsets stored in the pack 430 idx file has been made more carefully check the validity of the 431 data in the idx. 432 (merge 7465feb jk/pack-idx-corruption-safety later to maint). 433 434 * Other minor clean-ups and documentation updates 435 (merge f459823 ak/extract-argv0-last-dir-sep later to maint). 436 (merge 63ca1c0 ak/git-strip-extension-from-dashed-command later to maint). 437 (merge 4867f11 ps/plug-xdl-merge-leak later to maint). 438 (merge 4938686 dt/initial-ref-xn-commit-doc later to maint). 439 (merge 9537f21 ma/update-hooks-sample-typofix later to maint).