Documentation / RelNotes / 2.14.0.txton commit Merge branch 'cc/shared-index-permfix' (8e90578)
   1Git 2.14 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 * Git now avoids blindly falling back to ".git" when the setup
  15   sequence said we are _not_ in Git repository.  A corner case that
  16   happens to work right now may be broken by a call to die("BUG").
  17   We've tried hard to locate such cases and fixed them, but there
  18   might still be cases that need to be addressed--bug reports are
  19   greatly appreciated.
  20
  21 * The experiment to improve the hunk-boundary selection of textual
  22   diff output has finished, and the "indent heuristics" has now
  23   become the default.
  24
  25
  26Updates since v2.13
  27-------------------
  28
  29UI, Workflows & Features
  30
  31 * The colors in which "git status --short --branch" showed the names
  32   of the current branch and its remote-tracking branch are now
  33   configurable.
  34
  35 * "git clone" learned the "--no-tags" option not to fetch all tags
  36   initially, and also set up the tagopt not to follow any tags in
  37   subsequent fetches.
  38
  39 * "git archive --format=zip" learned to use zip64 extension when
  40   necessary to go beyond the 4GB limit.
  41
  42 * "git reset" learned "--recurse-submodules" option.
  43
  44 * "git diff --submodule=diff" now recurses into nested submodules.
  45
  46 * "git repack" learned to accept the --threads=<n> option and pass it
  47   to pack-objects.
  48
  49 * "git send-email" learned to run sendemail-validate hook to inspect
  50   and reject a message before sending it out.
  51
  52 * There is no good reason why "git fetch $there $sha1" should fail
  53   when the $sha1 names an object at the tip of an advertised ref,
  54   even when the other side hasn't enabled allowTipSHA1InWant.
  55
  56 * The recently introduced "[includeIf "gitdir:$dir"] path=..."
  57   mechanism has further been taught to take symlinks into account.
  58   The directory "$dir" specified in "gitdir:$dir" may be a symlink to
  59   a real location, not something that $(getcwd) may return.  In such
  60   a case, a realpath of "$dir" is compared with the real path of the
  61   current repository to determine if the contents from the named path
  62   should be included.
  63
  64 * Make the "indent" heuristics the default in "diff" and diff.indentHeuristics
  65   configuration variable an escape hatch for those who do no want it.
  66
  67 * Many commands learned to pay attention to submodule.recurse
  68   configuration.
  69
  70 * The convention for a command line is to follow "git cmdname
  71   --options" with revisions followed by an optional "--"
  72   disambiguator and then finally pathspecs.  When "--" is not there,
  73   we make sure early ones are all interpretable as revs (and do not
  74   look like paths) and later ones are the other way around.  A
  75   pathspec with "magic" (e.g. ":/p/a/t/h" that matches p/a/t/h from
  76   the top-level of the working tree, no matter what subdirectory you
  77   are working from) are conservatively judged as "not a path", which
  78   required disambiguation more often.  The command line parser
  79   learned to say "it's a pathspec" a bit more often when the syntax
  80   looks like so.
  81
  82 * Update "perl-compatible regular expression" support to enable JIT
  83   and also allow linking with the newer PCRE v2 library.
  84
  85 * "filter-branch" learned a pseudo filter "--setup" that can be used
  86   to define common functions/variables that can be used by other
  87   filters.
  88
  89 * Using "git add d/i/r" when d/i/r is the top of the working tree of
  90   a separate repository would create a gitlink in the index, which
  91   would appear as a not-quite-initialized submodule to others.  We
  92   learned to give warnings when this happens.
  93
  94 * "git status" learned to optionally give how many stash entries the
  95   user has in its output.
  96
  97 * "git status" has long shown essentially the same message as "git
  98   commit"; the message it gives while preparing for the root commit,
  99   i.e. "Initial commit", was hard to understand for some new users.
 100   Now it says "No commits yet" to stress more on the current status
 101   (rather than the commit the user is preparing for, which is more in
 102   line with the focus of "git commit").
 103
 104Performance, Internal Implementation, Development Support etc.
 105
 106 * The default packed-git limit value has been raised on larger
 107   platforms to save "git fetch" from a (recoverable) failure while
 108   "gc" is running in parallel.
 109
 110 * Code to update the cache-tree has been tightened so that we won't
 111   accidentally write out any 0{40} entry in the tree object.
 112
 113 * Attempt to allow us notice "fishy" situation where we fail to
 114   remove the temporary directory used during the test.
 115
 116 * Travis CI gained a task to format the documentation with both
 117   AsciiDoc and AsciiDoctor.
 118
 119 * Some platforms have ulong that is smaller than time_t, and our
 120   historical use of ulong for timestamp would mean they cannot
 121   represent some timestamp that the platform allows.  Invent a
 122   separate and dedicated timestamp_t (so that we can distingiuish
 123   timestamps and a vanilla ulongs, which along is already a good
 124   move), and then declare uintmax_t is the type to be used as the
 125   timestamp_t.
 126
 127 * We can trigger Windows auto-build tester (credits: Dscho &
 128   Microsoft) from our existing Travis CI tester now.
 129
 130 * Conversion from uchar[20] to struct object_id continues.
 131
 132 * Simplify parse_pathspec() codepath and stop it from looking at the
 133   default in-core index.
 134
 135 * Add perf-test for wildmatch.
 136
 137 * Code from "conversion using external process" codepath has been
 138   extracted to a separate sub-process.[ch] module.
 139
 140 * When "git checkout", "git merge", etc. manipulates the in-core
 141   index, various pieces of information in the index extensions are
 142   discarded from the original state, as it is usually not the case
 143   that they are kept up-to-date and in-sync with the operation on the
 144   main index.  The untracked cache extension is copied across these
 145   operations now, which would speed up "git status" (as long as the
 146   cache is properly invalidated).
 147
 148 * The internal implementation of "git grep" has seen some clean-up.
 149
 150 * Update the C style recommendation for notes for translators, as
 151   recent versions of gettext tools can work with our style of
 152   multi-line comments.
 153
 154 * The implementation of "ref" API around the "packed refs" have been
 155   cleaned up, in preparation for further changes.
 156
 157 * The internal logic used in "git blame" has been libified to make it
 158   easier to use by cgit.
 159
 160 * Our code often opens a path to an optional file, to work on its
 161   contents when we can successfully open it.  We can ignore a failure
 162   to open if such an optional file does not exist, but we do want to
 163   report a failure in opening for other reasons (e.g. we got an I/O
 164   error, or the file is there, but we lack the permission to open).
 165
 166   The exact errors we need to ignore are ENOENT (obviously) and
 167   ENOTDIR (less obvious).  Instead of repeating comparison of errno
 168   with these two constants, introduce a helper function to do so.
 169
 170 * We often try to open a file for reading whose existence is
 171   optional, and silently ignore errors from open/fopen; report such
 172   errors if they are not due to missing files.
 173
 174 * When an existing repository is used for t/perf testing, we first
 175   create bit-for-bit copy of it, which may grab a transient state of
 176   the repository and freeze it into the repository used for testing,
 177   which then may cause Git operations to fail.  Single out "the index
 178   being locked" case and forcibly drop the lock from the copy.
 179
 180 * Three instances of the same helper function have been consolidated
 181   to one.
 182
 183 * "fast-import" uses a default pack chain depth that is consistent
 184   with other parts of the system.
 185
 186 * A new test to show the interaction between the pattern [^a-z]
 187   (which matches '/') and a slash in a path has been added.  The
 188   pattern should not match the slash with "pathmatch", but should
 189   with "wildmatch".
 190
 191 * The 'diff-highlight' program (in contrib/) has been restructured
 192   for easier reuse by an external project 'diff-so-fancy'.
 193   (merge 0c977dbc81 jk/diff-highlight-module later to maint).
 194
 195 * A common pattern to free a piece of memory and assign NULL to the
 196   pointer that used to point at it has been replaced with a new
 197   FREE_AND_NULL() macro.
 198
 199 * Traditionally, the default die() routine had a code to prevent it
 200   from getting called multiple times, which interacted badly when a
 201   threaded program used it (one downside is that the real error may
 202   be hidden and instead the only error message given to the user may
 203   end up being "die recursion detected", which is not very useful).
 204
 205
 206Also contains various documentation updates and code clean-ups.
 207
 208
 209Fixes since v2.13
 210-----------------
 211
 212Unless otherwise noted, all the fixes since v2.13 in the maintenance
 213track are contained in this release (see the maintenance releases'
 214notes for details).
 215
 216 * "git gc" did not interact well with "git worktree"-managed
 217   per-worktree refs.
 218
 219 * "git cherry-pick" and other uses of the sequencer machinery
 220   mishandled a trailer block whose last line is an incomplete line.
 221   This has been fixed so that an additional sign-off etc. are added
 222   after completing the existing incomplete line.
 223
 224 * The codepath in "git am" that is used when running "git rebase"
 225   leaked memory held for the log message of the commits being rebased.
 226
 227 * "git clone --config var=val" is a way to populate the
 228   per-repository configuration file of the new repository, but it did
 229   not work well when val is an empty string.  This has been fixed.
 230
 231 * Setting "log.decorate=false" in the configuration file did not take
 232   effect in v2.13, which has been corrected.
 233
 234 * A few codepaths in "checkout" and "am" working on an unborn branch
 235   tried to access an uninitialized piece of memory.
 236
 237 * The Web interface to gmane news archive is long gone, even though
 238   the articles are still accessible via NTTP.  Replace the links with
 239   ones to public-inbox.org.  Because their message identification is
 240   based on the actual message-id, it is likely that it will be easier
 241   to migrate away from it if/when necessary.
 242
 243 * The receive-pack program now makes sure that the push certificate
 244   records the same set of push options used for pushing.
 245
 246 * Tests have been updated to pass under GETTEXT_POISON (a mechanism
 247   to ensure that output strings that should not be translated are
 248   not translated by mistake), and TravisCI is told to run them.
 249
 250 * "git checkout --recurse-submodules" did not quite work with a
 251   submodule that itself has submodules.
 252
 253 * "pack-objects" can stream a slice of an existing packfile out when
 254   the pack bitmap can tell that the reachable objects are all needed
 255   in the output, without inspecting individual objects.  This
 256   strategy however would not work well when "--local" and other
 257   options are in use, and need to be disabled.
 258
 259 * Fix memory leaks pointed out by Coverity (and people).
 260
 261 * "git read-tree -m" (no tree-ish) gave a nonsense suggestion "use
 262   --empty if you want to clear the index".  With "-m", such a request
 263   will still fail anyway, as you'd need to name at least one tree-ish
 264   to be merged.
 265
 266 * Make sure our tests would pass when the sources are checked out
 267   with "platform native" line ending convention by default on
 268   Windows.  Some "text" files out tests use and the test scripts
 269   themselves that are meant to be run with /bin/sh, ought to be
 270   checked out with eol=LF even on Windows.
 271
 272 * Introduce the BUG() macro to improve die("BUG: ...").
 273
 274 * Clarify documentation for include.path and includeIf.<condition>.path
 275   configuration variables.
 276
 277 * Git sometimes gives an advice in a rhetorical question that does
 278   not require an answer, which can confuse new users and non native
 279   speakers.  Attempt to rephrase them.
 280
 281 * A few http:// links that are redirected to https:// in the
 282   documentation have been updated to https:// links.
 283
 284 * "git for-each-ref --format=..." with %(HEAD) in the format used to
 285   resolve the HEAD symref as many times as it had processed refs,
 286   which was wasteful, and "git branch" shared the same problem.
 287
 288 * Regression fix to topic recently merged to 'master'.
 289
 290 * The shell completion script (in contrib/) learned "git stash" has
 291   a new "push" subcommand.
 292
 293 * "git interpret-trailers", when used as GIT_EDITOR for "git commit
 294   -v", looked for and appended to a trailer block at the very end,
 295   i.e. at the end of the "diff" output.  The command has been
 296   corrected to pay attention to the cut-mark line "commit -v" adds to
 297   the buffer---the real trailer block should appear just before it.
 298
 299 * A test allowed both "git push" and "git receive-pack" on the other
 300   end write their traces into the same file.  This is OK on platforms
 301   that allows atomically appending to a file opened with O_APPEND,
 302   but on other platforms led to a mangled output, causing
 303   intermittent test failures.  This has been fixed by disabling
 304   traces from "receive-pack" in the test.
 305
 306 * Tag objects, which are not reachable from any ref, that point at
 307   missing objects were mishandled by "git gc" and friends (they
 308   should silently be ignored instead)
 309
 310 * "git describe --contains" penalized light-weight tags so much that
 311   they were almost never considered.  Instead, give them about the
 312   same chance to be considered as an annotated tag that is the same
 313   age as the underlying commit would.
 314
 315 * The "run-command" API implementation has been made more robust
 316   against dead-locking in a threaded environment.
 317
 318 * A recent update to t5545-push-options.sh started skipping all the
 319   tests in the script when a web server testing is disabled or
 320   unavailable, not just the ones that require a web server.  Non HTTP
 321   tests have been salvaged to always run in this script.
 322
 323 * "git send-email" now uses Net::SMTP::SSL, which is obsolete, only
 324   when needed.  Recent versions of Net::SMTP can do TLS natively.
 325
 326 * "foo\bar\baz" in "git fetch foo\bar\baz", even though there is no
 327   slashes in it, cannot be a nickname for a remote on Windows, as
 328   that is likely to be a pathname on a local filesystem.
 329
 330 * "git clean -d" used to clean directories that has ignored files,
 331   even though the command should not lose ignored ones without "-x".
 332   "git status --ignored"  did not list ignored and untracked files
 333   without "-uall".  These have been corrected.
 334
 335 * The result from "git diff" that compares two blobs, e.g. "git diff
 336   $commit1:$path $commit2:$path", used to be shown with the full
 337   object name as given on the command line, but it is more natural to
 338   use the $path in the output and use it to look up .gitattributes.
 339
 340 * The "collision detecting" SHA-1 implementation shipped with 2.13
 341   was quite broken on some big-endian platforms and/or platforms that
 342   do not like unaligned fetches.  Update to the upstream code which
 343   has already fixed these issues.
 344
 345 * "git am -h" triggered a BUG().
 346
 347 * The interaction of "url.*.insteadOf" and custom URL scheme's
 348   whitelisting is now documented better.
 349
 350 * The timestamp of the index file is now taken after the file is
 351   closed, to help Windows, on which a stale timestamp is reported by
 352   fstat() on a file that is opened for writing and data was written
 353   but not yet closed.
 354
 355 * "git pull --rebase --autostash" didn't auto-stash when the local history
 356   fast-forwards to the upstream.
 357
 358 * A flaky test has been corrected.
 359
 360 * "git $cmd -h" for builtin commands calls the implementation of the
 361   command (i.e. cmd_$cmd() function) without doing any repository
 362   set-up, and the commands that expect RUN_SETUP is done by the Git
 363   potty needs to be prepared to show the help text without barfing.
 364   (merge d691551192 jk/consistent-h later to maint).
 365
 366 * Help contributors that visit us at GitHub.
 367
 368 * "git stash push <pathspec>" did not work from a subdirectory at all.
 369   Bugfix for a topic in v2.13
 370
 371 * As there is no portable way to pass timezone information to
 372   strftime, some output format from "git log" and friends are
 373   impossible to produce.  Teach our own strbuf_addftime to replace %z
 374   and %Z with caller-supplied values to help working around this.
 375   (merge 6eced3ec5e rs/strbuf-addftime-zZ later to maint).
 376
 377 * "git mergetool" learned to work around a wrapper MacOS X adds
 378   around underlying meld.
 379   (merge 0af85f84bd da/mergetools-meld-output-opt-on-macos later to maint).
 380
 381 * An example in documentation that does not work in multi worktree
 382   configuration has been corrected.
 383   (merge 773a88914f ah/doc-gitattributes-empty-index later to maint).
 384
 385 * The pretty-format specifiers like '%h', '%t', etc. had an
 386   optimization that no longer works correctly.  In preparation/hope
 387   of getting it correctly implemented, first discard the optimization
 388   that is broken.
 389   (merge fe9e2aefd4 rs/pretty-add-again later to maint).
 390
 391 * The code to pick up and execute command alias definition from the
 392   configuration used to switch to the top of the working tree and
 393   then come back when the expanded alias was executed, which was
 394   unnecessarilyl complex.  Attempt to simplify the logic by using the
 395   early-config mechanism that does not chdir around.
 396   (merge a9bcf6586d js/alias-early-config later to maint).
 397
 398 * Fix configuration codepath to pay proper attention to commondir
 399   that is used in multi-worktree situation, and isolate config API
 400   into its own header file.
 401   (merge dc8441fdb4 bw/config-h later to maint).
 402
 403 * "git add -p" were updated in 2.12 timeframe to cope with custom
 404   core.commentchar but the implementation was buggy and a
 405   metacharacter like $ and * did not work.
 406   (merge d85d7ecb80 jk/add-p-commentchar-fix later to maint).
 407
 408 * A recent regression in "git rebase -i" has been fixed and tests
 409   that would have caught it and others have been added.
 410   (merge adf16c08cb pw/rebase-i-regression-fix-tests later to maint).
 411
 412 * An unaligned 32-bit access in pack-bitmap code ahs been corrected.
 413   (merge da41c942b3 jc/pack-bitmap-unaligned later to maint).
 414
 415 * Tighten error checks for invalid "git apply" input.
 416   (merge d70e9c5c8c rs/apply-validate-input later to maint).
 417
 418 * Other minor doc, test and build updates and code cleanups.
 419   (merge 68241cb9dd sb/t4005-modernize later to maint).
 420   (merge 4fced24712 ks/t7508-indent-fix later to maint).
 421   (merge 968b1fe263 mb/reword-autocomplete-message later to maint).
 422   (merge 8592c95cdf ah/doc-pretty-color-auto-prefix later to maint).