Documentation / RelNotes / 2.12.0.txton commit The sixth batch (9c9b961)
   1Git 2.12 Release Notes
   2======================
   3
   4Backward compatibility notes.
   5
   6 * Use of an empty string that is used for 'everything matches' is
   7   still warned and Git asks users to use a more explicit '.' for that
   8   instead.  The hope is that existing users will not mind this
   9   change, and eventually the warning can be turned into a hard error,
  10   upgrading the deprecation into removal of this (mis)feature.  That
  11   is not scheduled to happen in the upcoming release (yet).
  12
  13 * The historical argument order "git merge <msg> HEAD <commit>..."
  14   has been deprecated for quite some time, and will be removed in a
  15   future release.
  16
  17 * An ancient script "git relink" has been removed.
  18
  19
  20Updates since v2.11
  21-------------------
  22
  23UI, Workflows & Features
  24
  25 * Various updates to "git p4".
  26
  27 * "git p4" didn't interact with the internal of .git directory
  28   correctly in the modern "git-worktree"-enabled world.
  29
  30 * "git branch --list" and friends learned "--ignore-case" option to
  31   optionally sort branches and tags case insensitively.
  32
  33 * In addition to %(subject), %(body), "log --pretty=format:..."
  34   learned a new placeholder %(trailers).
  35
  36 * "git rebase" learned "--quit" option, which allows a user to
  37   remove the metadata left by an earlier "git rebase" that was
  38   manually aborted without using "git rebase --abort".
  39
  40 * "git clone --reference $there --recurse-submodules $super" has been
  41   taught to guess repositories usable as references for submodules of
  42   $super that are embedded in $there while making a clone of the
  43   superproject borrow objects from $there; extend the mechanism to
  44   also allow submodules of these submodules to borrow repositories
  45   embedded in these clones of the submodules embedded in the clone of
  46   the superproject.
  47
  48 * Porcelain scripts written in Perl are getting internationalized.
  49
  50 * "git merge --continue" has been added as a synonym to "git commit"
  51   to conclude a merge that has stopped due to conflicts.
  52
  53 * Finer-grained control of what protocols are allowed for transports
  54   during clone/fetch/push have been enabled via a new configuration
  55   mechanism.
  56
  57 * "git shortlog" learned "--committer" option to group commits by
  58   committer, instead of author.
  59
  60 * GitLFS integration with "git p4" has been updated.
  61
  62 * The isatty() emulation for Windows has been updated to eradicate
  63   the previous hack that depended on internals of (older) MSVC
  64   runtime.
  65
  66 * Some platforms no longer understand "latin-1" that is still seen in
  67   the wild in e-mail headers; replace them with "iso-8859-1" that is
  68   more widely known when conversion fails from/to it.
  69
  70 * "git grep" has been taught to optionally recurse into submodules.
  71
  72 * "git rm" used to refuse to remove a submodule when it has its own
  73   git repository embedded in its working tree.  It learned to move
  74   the repository away to $GIT_DIR/modules/ of the superproject
  75   instead, and allow the submodule to be deleted (as long as there
  76   will be no loss of local modifications, that is).
  77
  78 * A recent updates to "git p4" was not usable for older p4 but it
  79   could be made to work with minimum changes.  Do so.
  80
  81 * "git diff" learned diff.interHunkContext configuration variable
  82   that gives the default value for its --inter-hunk-context option.
  83
  84 * The prereleaseSuffix feature of version comparison that is used in
  85   "git tag -l" did not correctly when two or more prereleases for the
  86   same release were present (e.g. when 2.0, 2.0-beta1, and 2.0-beta2
  87   are there and the code needs to compare 2.0-beta1 and 2.0-beta2).
  88
  89 * "git submodule push" learned "--recurse-submodules=only option to
  90   push submodules out without pushing the top-level superproject.
  91
  92 * "git tag" and "git verify-tag" learned to put GPG verification
  93   status in their "--format=<placeholders>" output format.
  94
  95 * An ancient repository conversion tool left in contrib/ has been
  96   removed.
  97
  98 * "git show-ref HEAD" used with "--verify" because the user is not
  99   interested in seeing refs/remotes/origin/HEAD, and used with
 100   "--head" because the user does not want HEAD to be filtered out,
 101   i.e. "git show-ref --head --verify HEAD", did not work as expected.
 102
 103 * "git submodule add" used to be confused and refused to add a
 104   locally created repository; users can now use "--force" option
 105   to add them.
 106   (merge 619acfc78c sb/submodule-add-force later to maint).
 107
 108 * Some people feel the default set of colors used by "git log --graph"
 109   rather limiting.  A mechanism to customize the set of colors has
 110   been introduced.
 111
 112 * "git read-tree" and its underlying unpack_trees() machinery learned
 113   to report problematic paths prefixed with the --super-prefix option.
 114
 115 * When a submodule "A", which has another submodule "B" nested within
 116   it, is "absorbed" into the top-level superproject, the inner
 117   submodule "B" used to be left in a strange state.  The logic to
 118   adjust the .git pointers in these submodules has been corrected.
 119
 120 * The user can specify a custom update method that is run when
 121   "submodule update" updates an already checked out submodule.  This
 122   was ignored when checking the submodule out for the first time and
 123   we instead always just checked out the commit that is bound to the
 124   path in the superproject's index.
 125
 126 * The command line completion (in contrib/) learned that
 127   "git diff --submodule=" can take "diff" as a recently added option.
 128
 129 * The "core.logAllRefUpdates" that used to be boolean has been
 130   enhanced to take 'always' as well, to record ref updates to refs
 131   other than the ones that are expected to be updated (i.e. branches,
 132   remote-tracking branches and notes).
 133
 134 * Comes with more command line completion (in contrib/) for recently
 135   introduced options.
 136
 137
 138Performance, Internal Implementation, Development Support etc.
 139
 140 * Commands that operate on a log message and add lines to the trailer
 141   blocks, such as "format-patch -s", "cherry-pick (-x|-s)", and
 142   "commit -s", have been taught to use the logic of and share the
 143   code with "git interpret-trailer".
 144
 145 * The default Travis-CI configuration specifies newer P4 and GitLFS.
 146
 147 * The "fast hash" that had disastrous performance issues in some
 148   corner cases has been retired from the internal diff.
 149
 150 * The character width table has been updated to match Unicode 9.0
 151
 152 * Update the procedure to generate "tags" for developer support.
 153
 154 * The codeflow of setting NOATIME and CLOEXEC on file descriptors Git
 155   opens has been simplified.
 156
 157 * "git diff" and its family had two experimental heuristics to shift
 158   the contents of a hunk to make the patch easier to read.  One of
 159   them turns out to be better than the other, so leave only the
 160   "--indent-heuristic" option and remove the other one.
 161
 162 * A new submodule helper "git submodule embedgitdirs" to make it
 163   easier to move embedded .git/ directory for submodules in a
 164   superproject to .git/modules/ (and point the latter with the former
 165   that is turned into a "gitdir:" file) has been added.
 166
 167 * "git push \\server\share\dir" has recently regressed and then
 168   fixed.  A test has retroactively been added for this breakage.
 169
 170 * Build updates for Cygwin.
 171
 172 * The implementation of "real_path()" was to go there with chdir(2)
 173   and call getcwd(3), but this obviously wouldn't be usable in a
 174   threaded environment.  Rewrite it to manually resolve relative
 175   paths including symbolic links in path components.
 176
 177 * Adjust documentation to help AsciiDoctor render better while not
 178   breaking the rendering done by AsciiDoc.
 179
 180 * The sequencer machinery has been further enhanced so that a later
 181   set of patches can start using it to reimplement "rebase -i".
 182
 183 * Update the definition of the MacOSX test environment used by
 184   TravisCI.
 185
 186 * Rewrite a scripted porcelain "git difftool" in C.
 187
 188 * "make -C t failed" will now run only the tests that failed in the
 189   previous run.  This is usable only when prove is not use, and gives
 190   a useless error message when run after "make clean", but otherwise
 191   is serviceable.
 192
 193 * "uchar [40]" to "struct object_id" conversion continues.
 194
 195
 196Also contains various documentation updates and code clean-ups.
 197
 198Fixes since v2.10
 199-----------------
 200
 201Unless otherwise noted, all the fixes since v2.9 in the maintenance
 202track are contained in this release (see the maintenance releases'
 203notes for details).
 204
 205 * We often decide if a session is interactive by checking if the
 206   standard I/O streams are connected to a TTY, but isatty() that
 207   comes with Windows incorrectly returned true if it is used on NUL
 208   (i.e. an equivalent to /dev/null).  This has been fixed.
 209
 210 * "git svn" did not work well with path components that are "0", and
 211   some configuration variable it uses were not documented.
 212
 213 * "git rev-parse --symbolic" failed with a more recent notation like
 214   "HEAD^-1" and "HEAD^!".
 215
 216 * An empty directory in a working tree that can simply be nuked used
 217   to interfere while merging or cherry-picking a change to create a
 218   submodule directory there, which has been fixed..
 219
 220 * The code in "git push" to compute if any commit being pushed in the
 221   superproject binds a commit in a submodule that hasn't been pushed
 222   out was overly inefficient, making it unusable even for a small
 223   project that does not have any submodule but have a reasonable
 224   number of refs.
 225
 226 * "git push --dry-run --recurse-submodule=on-demand" wasn't
 227   "--dry-run" in the submodules.
 228
 229 * The output from "git worktree list" was made in readdir() order,
 230   and was unstable.
 231
 232 * mergetool.<tool>.trustExitCode configuration variable did not apply
 233   to built-in tools, but now it does.
 234
 235 * "git p4" LFS support was broken when LFS stores an empty blob.
 236
 237 * A corner case in merge-recursive regression that crept in
 238   during 2.10 development cycle has been fixed.
 239
 240 * Transport with dumb http can be fooled into following foreign URLs
 241   that the end user does not intend to, especially with the server
 242   side redirects and http-alternates mechanism, which can lead to
 243   security issues.  Tighten the redirection and make it more obvious
 244   to the end user when it happens.
 245
 246 * Update the error messages from the dumb-http client when it fails
 247   to obtain loose objects; we used to give sensible error message
 248   only upon 404 but we now forbid unexpected redirects that needs to
 249   be reported with something sensible.
 250
 251 * When diff.renames configuration is on (and with Git 2.9 and later,
 252   it is enabled by default, which made it worse), "git stash"
 253   misbehaved if a file is removed and another file with a very
 254   similar content is added.
 255
 256 * "git diff --no-index" did not take "--no-abbrev" option.
 257
 258 * "git difftool --dir-diff" had a minor regression when started from
 259   a subdirectory, which has been fixed.
 260
 261 * "git commit --allow-empty --only" (no pathspec) with dirty index
 262   ought to be an acceptable way to create a new commit that does not
 263   change any paths, but it was forbidden, perhaps because nobody
 264   needed it so far.
 265
 266 * Git 2.11 had a minor regression in "merge --ff-only" that competed
 267   with another process that simultaneously attempted to update the
 268   index. We used to explain what went wrong with an error message,
 269   but the new code silently failed.  The error message has been
 270   resurrected.
 271
 272 * A pathname that begins with "//" or "\\" on Windows is special but
 273   path normalization logic was unaware of it.
 274
 275 * "git pull --rebase", when there is no new commits on our side since
 276   we forked from the upstream, should be able to fast-forward without
 277   invoking "git rebase", but it didn't.
 278
 279 * The way to specify hotkeys to "xxdiff" that is used by "git
 280   mergetool" has been modernized to match recent versions of xxdiff.
 281
 282 * Unlike "git am --abort", "git cherry-pick --abort" moved HEAD back
 283   to where cherry-pick started while picking multiple changes, when
 284   the cherry-pick stopped to ask for help from the user, and the user
 285   did "git reset --hard" to a different commit in order to re-attempt
 286   the operation.
 287
 288 * Code cleanup in shallow boundary computation.
 289
 290 * A recent update to receive-pack to make it easier to drop garbage
 291   objects made it clear that GIT_ALTERNATE_OBJECT_DIRECTORIES cannot
 292   have a pathname with a colon in it (no surprise!), and this in turn
 293   made it impossible to push into a repository at such a path.  This
 294   has been fixed by introducing a quoting mechanism used when
 295   appending such a path to the colon-separated list.
 296
 297 * The function usage_msg_opt() has been updated to say "fatal:"
 298   before the custom message programs give, when they want to die
 299   with a message about wrong command line options followed by the
 300   standard usage string.
 301
 302 * "git index-pack --stdin" needs an access to an existing repository,
 303   but "git index-pack file.pack" to generate an .idx file that
 304   corresponds to a packfile does not.
 305
 306 * Fix for NDEBUG builds.
 307
 308 * A lazy "git push" without refspec did not internally use a fully
 309   specified refspec to perform 'current', 'simple', or 'upstream'
 310   push, causing unnecessary "ambiguous ref" errors.
 311
 312 * "git p4" misbehaved when swapping a directory and a symbolic link.
 313
 314 * Even though an fix was attempted in Git 2.9.3 days, but running
 315   "git difftool --dir-diff" from a subdirectory never worked. This
 316   has been fixed.
 317
 318 * "git p4" that tracks multile p4 paths imported a single changelist
 319   that touches files in these multiple paths as one commit, followed
 320   by many empty commits.  This has been fixed.
 321
 322 * A potential but unlikely buffer overflow in Windows port has been
 323   fixed.
 324
 325 * When the http server gives an incomplete response to a smart-http
 326   rpc call, it could lead to client waiting for a full response that
 327   will never come.  Teach the client side to notice this condition
 328   and abort the transfer.
 329
 330 * Compression setting for producing packfiles were spread across
 331   three codepaths, one of which did not honor any configuration.
 332   Unify these so that all of them honor core.compression and
 333   pack.compression variables the same way.
 334
 335 * "git fast-import" sometimes mishandled while rebalancing notes
 336   tree, which has been fixed.
 337
 338 * Recent update to the default abbreviation length that auto-scales
 339   lacked documentation update, which has been corrected.
 340
 341 * Leakage of lockfiles in the config subsystem has been fixed.
 342
 343 * It is natural that "git gc --auto" may not attempt to pack
 344   everything into a single pack, and there is no point in warning
 345   when the user has configured the system to use the pack bitmap,
 346   leading to disabling further "gc".
 347
 348 * "git archive" did not read the standard configuration files, and
 349   failed to notice a file that is marked as binary via the userdiff
 350   driver configuration.
 351
 352 * "git blame --porcelain" misidentified the "previous" <commit, path>
 353   pair (aka "source") when contents came from two or more files.
 354
 355 * "git rebase -i" with a recent update started showing an incorrect
 356   count when squashing more than 10 commits.
 357
 358 * "git <cmd> @{push}" on a detached HEAD used to segfault; it has
 359   been corrected to error out with a message.
 360
 361 * Running "git add a/b" when "a" is a submodule correctly errored
 362   out, but without a meaningful error message.
 363   (merge 2d81c48fa7 sb/pathspec-errors later to maint).
 364
 365 * Typing ^C to pager, which usually does not kill it, killed Git and
 366   took the pager down as a collateral damage in certain process-tree
 367   structure.  This has been fixed.
 368
 369 * "git mergetool" without any pathspec on the command line that is
 370   run from a subdirectory became no-op in Git v2.11 by mistake, which
 371   has been fixed.
 372
 373 * Retire long unused/unmaintained gitview from the contrib/ area.
 374   (merge 3120925c25 sb/remove-gitview later to maint).
 375
 376 * Tighten a test to avoid mistaking an extended ERE regexp engine as
 377   a PRE regexp engine.
 378
 379 * An error message with an ASCII control character like '\r' in it
 380   can alter the message to hide its early part, which is problematic
 381   when a remote side gives such an error message that the local side
 382   will relay with a "remote: " prefix.
 383   (merge f290089879 jk/vreport-sanitize later to maint).
 384
 385 * "git fsck" inspects loose objects more carefully now.
 386   (merge cce044df7f jk/loose-object-fsck later to maint).
 387
 388 * A crashing bug introduced in v2.11 timeframe has been found (it is
 389   triggerable only in fast-import) and fixed.
 390   (merge abd5a00268 jk/clear-delta-base-cache-fix later to maint).
 391
 392 * With an anticipatory tweak for remotes defined in ~/.gitconfig
 393   (e.g. "remote.origin.prune" set to true, even though there may or
 394   may not actually be "origin" remote defined in a particular Git
 395   repository), "git remote rename" and other commands misinterpreted
 396   and behaved as if such a non-existing remote actually existed.
 397   (merge e459b073fb js/remote-rename-with-half-configured-remote later to maint).
 398
 399 * A few codepaths had to rely on a global variable when sorting
 400   elements of an array because sort(3) API does not allow extra data
 401   to be passed to the comparison function.  Use qsort_s() when
 402   natively available, and a fallback implementation of it when not,
 403   to eliminate the need, which is a prerequisite for making the
 404   codepath reentrant.
 405
 406 * "git fsck --connectivity-check" was not working at all.
 407   (merge a2b22854bd jk/fsck-connectivity-check-fix later to maint).
 408
 409 * After starting "git rebase -i", which first opens the user's editor
 410   to edit the series of patches to apply, but before saving the
 411   contents of that file, "git status" failed to show the current
 412   state (i.e. you are in an interactive rebase session, but you have
 413   applied no steps yet) correctly.
 414   (merge df9ded4984 js/status-pre-rebase-i later to maint).
 415
 416 * Test tweak for FreeBSD where /usr/bin/unzip is unsuitable to run
 417   our tests but /usr/local/bin/unzip is usable.
 418   (merge d98b2c5fce js/unzip-in-usr-bin-workaround later to maint).
 419
 420 * "git p4" did not work well with multiple git-p4.mapUser entries on
 421   Windows.
 422   (merge c3c2b05776 gv/mingw-p4-mapuser later to maint).
 423
 424 * "git help" enumerates executable files in $PATH; the implementation
 425   of "is this file executable?" on Windows has been optimized.
 426   (merge c755015f79 hv/mingw-help-is-executable later to maint).
 427
 428 * Test tweaks for those who have default ACL in their git source tree
 429   that interfere with the umask test.
 430   (merge d549d21307 mm/reset-facl-before-umask-test later to maint).
 431
 432 * Names of the various hook scripts must be spelled exactly, but on
 433   Windows, an .exe binary must be named with .exe suffix; notice
 434   $GIT_DIR/hooks/<hookname>.exe as a valid <hookname> hook.
 435   (merge 235be51fbe js/mingw-hooks-with-exe-suffix later to maint).
 436
 437 * Asciidoctor, an alternative reimplementation of AsciiDoc, still
 438   needs some changes to work with documents meant to be formatted
 439   with AsciiDoc.  "make USE_ASCIIDOCTOR=YesPlease" to use it out of
 440   the box to document our pages is getting closer to reality.
 441
 442 * Correct command line completion (in contrib/) on "git svn"
 443   (merge 2cbad17642 ew/complete-svn-authorship-options later to maint).
 444
 445 * Incorrect usage help message for "git worktree prune" has been fixed.
 446   (merge 2488dcab22 ps/worktree-prune-help-fix later to maint).
 447
 448 * Adjust a perf test to new world order where commands that do
 449   require a repository are really strict about having a repository.
 450   (merge c86000c1a7 rs/p5302-create-repositories-before-tests later to maint).
 451
 452 * "git log --graph" did not work well with "--name-only", even though
 453   other forms of "diff" output were handled correctly.
 454   (merge f5022b5fed jk/log-graph-name-only later to maint).
 455
 456 * The push-options given via the "--push-options" option were not
 457   passed through to external remote helpers such as "smart HTTP" that
 458   are invoked via the transport helper.
 459
 460 * The documentation explained what "git stash" does to the working
 461   tree (after stashing away the local changes) in terms of "reset
 462   --hard", which was exposing an unnecessary implementation detail.
 463   (merge 20a7e06172 tg/stash-doc-cleanup later to maint).
 464
 465 * When "git p4" imports changelist that removes paths, it failed to
 466   convert pathnames when the p4 used encoding different from the one
 467   used on the Git side.  This has been corrected.
 468   (merge a8b05162e8 ls/p4-path-encoding later to maint).
 469
 470 * A new coccinelle rule that catches a check of !pointer before the
 471   pointer is free(3)d, which most likely is a bug.
 472   (merge ec6cd14c7a rs/cocci-check-free-only-null later to maint).
 473
 474 * "ls-files" run with pathspec has been micro-optimized to avoid
 475   having to memmove(3) unnecessary bytes.
 476   (merge 96f6d3f61a rs/ls-files-partial-optim later to maint).
 477
 478 * A hotfix for a topic already in 'master'.
 479   (merge a4d92d579f js/mingw-isatty later to maint).
 480
 481 * Other minor doc, test and build updates and code cleanups.
 482   (merge f2627d9b19 sb/submodule-config-cleanup later to maint).
 483   (merge 384f1a167b sb/unpack-trees-cleanup later to maint).
 484   (merge 874444b704 rh/diff-orderfile-doc later to maint).
 485   (merge eafd5d9483 cw/doc-sign-off later to maint).
 486   (merge 0aaad415bc rs/absolute-pathdup later to maint).
 487   (merge 4432dd6b5b rs/receive-pack-cleanup later to maint).
 488   (merge 540a398e9c sg/mailmap-self later to maint).
 489   (merge 209df269a6 nd/rev-list-all-includes-HEAD-doc later to maint).
 490   (merge 941b9c5270 sb/doc-unify-bottom later to maint).
 491   (merge 2aaf37b62c jk/doc-remote-helpers-markup-fix later to maint).
 492   (merge e91461b332 jk/doc-submodule-markup-fix later to maint).
 493   (merge 8ab9740d9f dp/submodule-doc-markup-fix later to maint).
 494   (merge 0838cbc22f jk/tempfile-ferror-fclose-confusion later to maint).
 495   (merge 115a40add6 dr/doc-check-ref-format-normalize later to maint).
 496   (merge 133f0a299d gp/document-dotfiles-in-templates-are-not-copied later to maint).
 497   (merge 2b35a9f4c7 bc/blame-doc-fix later to maint).
 498   (merge 7e82388024 ps/doc-gc-aggressive-depth-update later to maint).
 499   (merge 9993a7c5f1 bc/worktree-doc-fix-detached later to maint).
 500   (merge e519eccdf4 rt/align-add-i-help-text later to maint).