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 81 * When "git submodule init" decides that the submodule in the working 82 tree is its upstream, it now gives a warning as it is not a very 83 common setup. 84 (merge d1b3b81aab sb/submodule-init-url-selection later to maint). 85 86 * "git stash save" takes a pathspec so that the local changes can be 87 stashed away only partially. 88 (merge 9e140909f6 tg/stash-push later to maint). 89 90 * Documentation for "git ls-files" did not refer to core.quotePath. 91 92 * The experimental "split index" feature has gained a few 93 configuration variables to make it easier to use. 94 95 * From a working tree of a repository, a new option of "rev-parse" 96 lets you ask if the repository is used as a submodule of another 97 project, and where the root level of the working tree of that 98 project (i.e. your superproject) is. 99 100 * The pathspec mechanism learned to further limit the paths that 101 match the pattern to those that have specified attributes attached 102 via the gitattributes mechanism. 103 104 * Our source code has used the SHA1_HEADER cpp macro after "#include" 105 in the C code to switch among the SHA-1 implementations. Instead, 106 list the exact header file names and switch among implementations 107 using "#ifdef BLK_SHA1/#include "block-sha1/sha1.h"/.../#endif"; 108 this helps some IDE tools. 109 110 * The start-up sequence of "git" needs to figure out some configured 111 settings before it finds and set itself up in the location of the 112 repository and was quite messy due to its "chicken-and-egg" nature. 113 The code has been restructured. 114 115 * The command line prompt (in contrib/) learned a new 'tag' style 116 that can be specified with GIT_PS1_DESCRIBE_STYLE, to describe a 117 detached HEAD with "git describe --tags". 118 119 * The configuration file learned a new "includeIf.<condition>.path" 120 that includes the contents of the given path only when the 121 condition holds. This allows you to say "include this work-related 122 bit only in the repositories under my ~/work/ directory". 123 124 * Recent update to "rebase -i" started showing a message that is not 125 a warning with "warning:" prefix by mistake. This has been fixed. 126 127 128Performance, Internal Implementation, Development Support etc. 129 130 * The code to list branches in "git branch" has been consolidated 131 with the more generic ref-filter API. 132 133 * Resource usage while enumerating refs from alternate object store 134 has been optimized to help receiving end of "push" that hosts a 135 repository with many "forks". 136 137 * The gitattributes machinery is being taught to work better in a 138 multi-threaded environment. 139 140 * "git rebase -i" starts using the recently updated "sequencer" code. 141 142 * Code and design clean-up for the refs API. 143 144 * The preload-index code has been taught not to bother with the index 145 entries that are paths that are not checked out by "sparse checkout". 146 147 * Some warning() messages from "git clean" were updated to show the 148 errno from failed system calls. 149 150 * The "parse_config_key()" API function has been cleaned up. 151 (merge ad8c7cdadd jk/parse-config-key-cleanup later to maint). 152 153 * A test that creates a confusing branch whose name is HEAD has been 154 corrected not to do so. 155 156 * The code that parses header fields in the commit object has been 157 updated for (micro)performance and code hygiene. 158 159 * An helper function to make it easier to append the result from 160 real_path() to a strbuf has been added. 161 (merge 33ad9ddd0b rs/strbuf-add-real-path later to maint). 162 163 * Reduce authentication round-trip over HTTP when the server supports 164 just a single authentication method. This also improves the 165 behaviour when Git is misconfigured to enable http.emptyAuth 166 against a server that does not authenticate without a username 167 (i.e. not using Kerberos etc., which makes http.emptyAuth 168 pointless). 169 170 * Windows port wants to use OpenSSL's implementation of SHA-1 171 routines, so let them. 172 173 * The t/perf performance test suite was not prepared to test not so 174 old versions of Git, but now it covers versions of Git that are not 175 so ancient. 176 (merge 28e1fb5466 jt/perf-updates later to maint). 177 178 * Add 32-bit Linux variant to the set of platforms to be tested with 179 Travis CI. 180 181 * "git branch --list" takes the "--abbrev" and "--no-abbrev" options 182 to control the output of the object name in its "-v"(erbose) 183 output, but a recent update started ignoring them; fix it before 184 the breakage reaches to any released version. 185 186 * Picking two versions of Git and running tests to make sure the 187 older one and the newer one interoperate happily has now become 188 possible. 189 (merge bd4d9d993c jk/interop-test later to maint). 190 191 * "uchar [40]" to "struct object_id" conversion continues. 192 193 * "git tag --contains" used to (ab)use the object bits to keep track 194 of the state of object reachability without clearing them after 195 use; this has been cleaned up and made to use the newer commit-slab 196 facility. 197 198 199Also contains various documentation updates and code clean-ups. 200 201 202Fixes since v2.12 203----------------- 204 205Unless otherwise noted, all the fixes since v2.9 in the maintenance 206track are contained in this release (see the maintenance releases' 207notes for details). 208 209 * "git repack --depth=<n>" for a long time busted the specified depth 210 when reusing delta from existing packs. This has been corrected. 211 (merge 42b766d765 jk/delta-chain-limit later to maint). 212 213 * The code to parse the command line "git grep <patterns>... <rev> 214 [[--] <pathspec>...]" has been cleaned up, and a handful of bugs 215 have been fixed (e.g. we used to check "--" if it is a rev). 216 (merge 131f3c96d2 jk/grep-no-index-fix later to maint). 217 218 * "git ls-remote" and "git archive --remote" are designed to work 219 without being in a directory under Git's control. However, recent 220 updates revealed that we randomly look into a directory called 221 .git/ without actually doing necessary set-up when working in a 222 repository. Stop doing so. 223 (merge 4b0c3c7735 jn/remote-helpers-with-git-dir later to maint). 224 225 * "git show-branch" expected there were only very short branch names 226 in the repository and used a fixed-length buffer to hold them 227 without checking for overflow. 228 229 * A caller of tempfile API that uses stdio interface to write to 230 files may ignore errors while writing, which is detected when 231 tempfile is closed (with a call to ferror()). By that time, the 232 original errno that may have told us what went wrong is likely to 233 be long gone and was overwritten by an irrelevant value. 234 close_tempfile() now resets errno to EIO to make errno at least 235 predictable. 236 237 * "git remote rm X", when a branch has remote X configured as the 238 value of its branch.*.remote, tried to remove branch.*.remote and 239 branch.*.merge and failed if either is unset. 240 241 * A "gc.log" file left by a backgrounded "gc --auto" disables further 242 automatic gc; it has been taught to run at least once a day (by 243 default) by ignoring a stale "gc.log" file that is too old. 244 245 * The code to parse "git -c VAR=VAL cmd" and set configuration 246 variable for the duration of cmd had two small bugs, which have 247 been fixed. 248 (merge 1274a155af jc/config-case-cmdline-take-2 later to maint). 249 250 * user.email that consists of only cruft chars should consistently 251 error out, but didn't. 252 (merge 94425552f3 jk/ident-empty later to maint). 253 254 * "git upload-pack", which is a counter-part of "git fetch", did not 255 report a request for a ref that was not advertised as invalid. 256 This is generally not a problem (because "git fetch" will stop 257 before making such a request), but is the right thing to do. 258 259 * A leak in a codepath to read from a packed object in (rare) cases 260 has been plugged. 261 262 * When a redirected http transport gets an error during the 263 redirected request, we ignored the error we got from the server, 264 and ended up giving a not-so-useful error message. 265 266 * The patch subcommand of "git add -i" was meant to have paths 267 selection prompt just like other subcommand, unlike "git add -p" 268 directly jumps to hunk selection. Recently, this was broken and 269 "add -i" lost the paths selection dialog, but it now has been 270 fixed. 271 272 * Git v2.12 was shipped with an embarrassing breakage where various 273 operations that verify paths given from the user stopped dying when 274 seeing an issue, and instead later triggering segfault. 275 276 * There is no need for Python only to give a few messages to the 277 standard error stream, but we somehow did. 278 279 * The code to parse "git log -L..." command line was buggy when there 280 are many ranges specified with -L; overrun of the allocated buffer 281 has been fixed. 282 283 * The command-line parsing of "git log -L" copied internal data 284 structures using incorrect size on ILP32 systems. 285 286 * "git diff --quiet" relies on the size field in diff_filespec to be 287 correctly populated, but diff_populate_filespec() helper function 288 made an incorrect short-cut when asked only to populate the size 289 field for paths that need to go through convert_to_git() (e.g. CRLF 290 conversion). 291 292 * A few tests were run conditionally under (rare) conditions where 293 they cannot be run (like running cvs tests under 'root' account). 294 (merge c6507484a2 ab/cond-skip-tests later to maint). 295 296 * "git branch @" created refs/heads/@ as a branch, and in general the 297 code that handled @{-1} and @{upstream} was a bit too loose in 298 disambiguating. 299 (merge fd4692ff70 jk/interpret-branch-name later to maint). 300 301 * "git fetch" that requests a commit by object name, when the other 302 side does not allow such an request, failed without much 303 explanation. 304 (merge d56583ded6 mm/fetch-show-error-message-on-unadvertised-object later to maint). 305 306 * "git filter-branch --prune-empty" drops a single-parent commit that 307 becomes a no-op, but did not drop a root commit whose tree is empty. 308 (merge 32da7467eb dp/filter-branch-prune-empty later to maint). 309 310 * Recent versions of Git treats http alternates (used in dumb http 311 transport) just like HTTP redirects and requires the client to 312 enable following it, due to security concerns. But we forgot to 313 give a warning when we decide not to honor the alternates. 314 (merge 5cae73d5d2 ew/http-alternates-as-redirects-warning later to maint). 315 316 * "git push" had a handful of codepaths that could lead to a deadlock 317 when unexpected error happened, which has been fixed. 318 (merge d1a13d3fcb jk/push-deadlock-regression-fix later to maint). 319 320 * "Dumb http" transport used to misparse a nonsense http-alternates 321 response, which has been fixed. 322 323 * "git add -p <pathspec>" unnecessarily expanded the pathspec to a 324 list of individual files that matches the pathspec by running "git 325 ls-files <pathspec>", before feeding it to "git diff-index" to see 326 which paths have changes, because historically the pathspec 327 language supported by "diff-index" was weaker. These days they are 328 equivalent and there is no reason to internally expand it. This 329 helps both performance and avoids command line argument limit on 330 some platforms. 331 (merge 7288e12cce jk/add-i-use-pathspecs later to maint). 332 333 * "git status --porcelain" is supposed to give a stable output, but a 334 few strings were left as translatable by mistake. 335 336 * Code to read submodule.<name>.ignore config did not state the 337 variable name correctly when giving an error message diagnosing 338 misconfiguration. 339 (merge 5ea304896e sb/submodule-config-parse-ignore-fix later to maint). 340 341 * Other minor doc, test and build updates and code cleanups. 342 (merge dfa3ad3238 rs/blame-code-cleanup later to maint). 343 (merge ffddfc6328 jk/rev-parse-cleanup later to maint). 344 (merge f20754802a jk/pack-name-cleanups later to maint). 345 (merge d4aae459cd sb/wt-status-cleanup later to maint). 346 (merge 2c7ee986c7 ab/doc-no-option-notation-fix later to maint). 347 (merge e4e016f65d ab/push-default-doc-fix later to maint). 348 (merge baced9e4e5 nd/commit-hook-doc-fix later to maint).