Documentation / RelNotes / 2.8.0.txton commit Merge branch 'jk/drop-rsync-transport' (9f03176)
   1Git 2.8 Release Notes
   2=====================
   3
   4Updates since v2.7
   5------------------
   6
   7UI, Workflows & Features
   8
   9 * "branch --delete" has "branch -d" but "push --delete" does not.
  10
  11 * "git blame" learned to produce the progress eye-candy when it takes
  12   too much time before emitting the first line of the result.
  13
  14 * "git grep" can now be configured (or told from the command line)
  15   how many threads to use when searching in the working tree files.
  16
  17 * Some "git notes" operations, e.g. "git log --notes=<note>", should
  18   be able to read notes from any tree-ish that is shaped like a notes
  19   tree, but the notes infrastructure required that the argument must
  20   be a ref under refs/notes/.  Loosen it to require a valid ref only
  21   when the operation would update the notes (in which case we must
  22   have a place to store the updated notes tree, iow, a ref).
  23
  24 * "git grep" by default does not fall back to its "--no-index"
  25   behaviour outside a directory under Git's control (otherwise the
  26   user may by mistake end up running a huge recursive search); with a
  27   new configuration (set in $HOME/.gitconfig--by definition this
  28   cannot be set in the config file per project), this safety can be
  29   disabled.
  30
  31 * "git pull --rebase" has been extended to allow invoking
  32   "rebase -i".
  33
  34 * "git p4" learned to cope with the type of a file getting changed.
  35
  36 * "git format-patch" learned to notice format.outputDirectory
  37   configuration variable.  This allows "-o <dir>" option to be
  38   omitted on the command line if you always use the same directory in
  39   your workflow.
  40
  41 * "interpret-trailers" has been taught to optionally update a file in
  42   place, instead of always writing the result to the standard output.
  43
  44 * Many commands that read files that are expected to contain text
  45   that is generated (or can be edited) by the end user to control
  46   their behaviour (e.g. "git grep -f <filename>") have been updated
  47   to be more tolerant to lines that are terminated with CRLF (they
  48   used to treat such a line to contain payload that ends with CR,
  49   which is usually not what the users expect).
  50
  51 * "git notes merge" used to limit the source of the merged notes tree
  52   to somewhere under refs/notes/ hierarchy, which was too limiting
  53   when inventing a workflow to exchange notes with remote
  54   repositories using remote-tracking notes trees (located in e.g.
  55   refs/remote-notes/ or somesuch).
  56
  57 * "git ls-files" learned a new "--eol" option to help diagnose
  58   end-of-line problems.
  59
  60 * "ls-remote" learned an option to show which branch the remote
  61   repository advertises as its primary by pointing its HEAD at.
  62
  63 * New http.proxyAuthMethod configuration variable can be used to
  64   specify what authentication method to use, as a way to work around
  65   proxies that do not give error response expected by libcurl when
  66   CURLAUTH_ANY is used.  Also, the codepath for proxy authentication
  67   has been taught to use credential API to store the authentication
  68   material in user's keyrings.
  69
  70 * Update the untracked cache subsystem and change its primary UI from
  71   "git update-index" to "git config".
  72
  73 * There were a few "now I am doing this thing" progress messages in
  74   the TCP connection code that can be triggered by setting a verbose
  75   option internally in the code, but "git fetch -v" and friends never
  76   passed the verbose option down to that codepath.
  77
  78 * Clean/smudge filters defined in a configuration file of lower
  79   precedence can now be overridden to be a pass-through no-op by
  80   setting the variable to an empty string.
  81
  82 * A new "<branch>^{/!-<pattern>}" notation can be used to name a
  83   commit that is reachable from <branch> that does not match the
  84   given <pattern>.
  85
  86
  87Performance, Internal Implementation, Development Support etc.
  88
  89 * Add a framework to spawn a group of processes in parallel, and use
  90   it to run "git fetch --recurse-submodules" in parallel.
  91
  92 * A slight update to the Makefile to mark "phoney" targets
  93   as such correctly.
  94
  95 * In-core storage of the reverse index for .pack files (which lets
  96   you go from a pack offset to an object name) has been streamlined.
  97
  98 * d95138e6 (setup: set env $GIT_WORK_TREE when work tree is set, like
  99   $GIT_DIR, 2015-06-26) attempted to work around a glitch in alias
 100   handling by overwriting GIT_WORK_TREE environment variable to
 101   affect subprocesses when set_git_work_tree() gets called, which
 102   resulted in a rather unpleasant regression to "clone" and "init".
 103   Try to address the same issue by always restoring the environment
 104   and respawning the real underlying command when handling alias.
 105
 106 * The low-level code that is used to create symbolic references has
 107   been updated to share more code with the code that deals with
 108   normal references.
 109
 110 * strbuf_getline() and friends have been redefined to make it easier
 111   to identify which callsite of (new) strbuf_getline_lf() should
 112   allow and silently ignore carriage-return at the end of the line to
 113   help users on DOSsy systems.
 114
 115 * "git shortlog" used to accumulate various pieces of information
 116   regardless of what was asked to be shown in the final output.  It
 117   has been optimized by noticing what need not to be collected
 118   (e.g. there is no need to collect the log messages when showing
 119   only the number of changes).
 120
 121 * "git checkout $branch" (and other operations that share the same
 122   underlying machinery) has been optimized.
 123
 124 * Automated tests in Travis CI environment has been optimized by
 125   persisting runtime statistics of previous "prove" run, executing
 126   tests that take longer before other ones; this reduces the total
 127   wallclock time.
 128
 129
 130Also contains various documentation updates and code clean-ups.
 131
 132
 133Fixes since v2.7
 134----------------
 135
 136Unless otherwise noted, all the fixes since v2.7 in the maintenance
 137track are contained in this release (see the maintenance releases'
 138notes for details).
 139
 140 * An earlier change in 2.5.x-era broke users' hooks and aliases by
 141   exporting GIT_WORK_TREE to point at the root of the working tree,
 142   interfering when they tried to use a different working tree without
 143   setting GIT_WORK_TREE environment themselves.
 144   (merge df1e6ea nd/stop-setenv-work-tree later to maint).
 145
 146 * The "exclude_list" structure has the usual "alloc, nr" pair of
 147   fields to be used by ALLOC_GROW(), but clear_exclude_list() forgot
 148   to reset 'alloc' to 0 when it cleared 'nr' to discard the managed
 149   array.
 150   (merge 2653a8c nd/dir-exclude-cleanup later to maint).
 151
 152 * Paths that have been told the index about with "add -N" are not
 153   quite yet in the index, but a few commands behaved as if they
 154   already are in a harmful way.
 155   (merge 4d55200 nd/ita-cleanup later to maint).
 156
 157 * "git send-email" was confused by escaped quotes stored in the alias
 158   files saved by "mutt", which has been corrected.
 159   (merge 2c510f2 ew/send-email-mutt-alias-fix later to maint).
 160
 161 * A few unportable C construct have been spotted by clang compiler
 162   and have been fixed.
 163   (merge a0df2e5 jk/clang-pedantic later to maint).
 164
 165 * The documentation has been updated to hint the connection between
 166   the '--signoff' option and DCO.
 167   (merge b2c150d dw/signoff-doc later to maint).
 168
 169 * "git reflog" incorrectly assumed that all objects that used to be
 170   at the tip of a ref must be commits, which caused it to segfault.
 171   (merge aecad37 dk/reflog-walk-with-non-commit later to maint).
 172
 173 * The ignore mechanism saw a few regressions around untracked file
 174   listing and sparse checkout selection areas in 2.7.0; the change
 175   that is responsible for the regression has been reverted.
 176   (merge 8c72236 nd/exclusion-regression-fix later to maint).
 177
 178 * Some codepaths used fopen(3) when opening a fixed path in $GIT_DIR
 179   (e.g. COMMIT_EDITMSG) that is meant to be left after the command is
 180   done.  This however did not work well if the repository is set to
 181   be shared with core.sharedRepository and the umask of the previous
 182   user is tighter.  They have been made to work better by calling
 183   unlink(2) and retrying after fopen(3) fails with EPERM.
 184   (merge ea56518 js/fopen-harder later to maint).
 185
 186 * Asking gitweb for a nonexistent commit left a warning in the server
 187   log.
 188
 189   Somebody may want to follow this up with an additional test, perhaps?
 190   IIRC, we do test that no Perl warnings are given to the server log,
 191   so this should have been caught if our test coverage were good.
 192   (merge a9eb90a ho/gitweb-squelch-undef-warning later to maint).
 193
 194 * "git rebase", unlike all other callers of "gc --auto", did not
 195   ignore the exit code from "gc --auto".
 196   (merge 8c24f5b jk/ok-to-fail-gc-auto-in-rebase later to maint).
 197
 198 * Many codepaths that run "gc --auto" before exiting kept packfiles
 199   mapped and left the file descriptors to them open, which was not
 200   friendly to systems that cannot remove files that are open.  They
 201   now close the packs before doing so.
 202   (merge d562102 js/close-packs-before-gc later to maint).
 203
 204 * A recent optimization to filter-branch in v2.7.0 introduced a
 205   regression when --prune-empty filter is used, which has been
 206   corrected.
 207   (merge 1dc413e jk/filter-branch-no-index later to maint).
 208
 209 * The description for SANITY prerequisite the test suite uses has
 210   been clarified both in the comment and in the implementation.
 211   (merge 719c3da jk/sanity later to maint).
 212
 213 * "git tag" started listing a tag "foo" as "tags/foo" when a branch
 214   named "foo" exists in the same repository; remove this unnecessary
 215   disambiguation, which is a regression introduced in v2.7.0.
 216   (merge 0571979 jk/list-tag-2.7-regression later to maint).
 217
 218 * The way "git svn" uses auth parameter was broken by Subversion
 219   1.9.0 and later.
 220   (merge 0b66415 ew/svn-1.9.0-auth later to maint).
 221
 222 * The "split" subcommand of "git subtree" (in contrib/) incorrectly
 223   skipped merges when it shouldn't, which was corrected.
 224   (merge 933cfeb dw/subtree-split-do-not-drop-merge later to maint).
 225
 226 * A few options of "git diff" did not work well when the command was
 227   run from a subdirectory.
 228   (merge a97262c nd/diff-with-path-params later to maint).
 229
 230 * The command line completion learned a handful of additional options
 231   and command specific syntax.
 232   (merge fa4b5e3 jk/completion-rebase later to maint).
 233   (merge f7c2e1a pw/completion-show-branch later to maint).
 234   (merge d7d4ca8 pw/completion-stash later to maint).
 235   (merge e6414b4 tb/complete-word-diff-regex later to maint).
 236
 237 * dirname() emulation has been added, as Msys2 lacks it.
 238   (merge e7d5ce8 js/dirname-basename later to maint).
 239
 240 * The underlying machinery used by "ls-files -o" and other commands
 241   have been taught not to create empty submodule ref cache for a
 242   directory that is not a submodule.  This removes a ton of wasted
 243   CPU cycles.
 244   (merge a2d5156 jk/ref-cache-non-repository-optim later to maint).
 245
 246 * "git worktree" had a broken code that attempted to auto-fix
 247   possible inconsistency that results from end-users moving a
 248   worktree to different places without telling Git (the original
 249   repository needs to maintain backpointers to its worktrees, but
 250   "mv" run by end-users who are not familiar with that fact will
 251   obviously not adjust them), which actually made things worse
 252   when triggered.
 253   (merge 618244e nd/do-not-move-worktree-manually later to maint).
 254
 255 * The low-level merge machinery has been taught to use CRLF line
 256   termination when inserting conflict markers to merged contents that
 257   are themselves CRLF line-terminated.
 258   (merge 15980de js/xmerge-marker-eol later to maint).
 259
 260 * "git push --force-with-lease" has been taught to report if the push
 261   needed to force (or fast-forwarded).
 262   (merge b2e93f8 aw/push-force-with-lease-reporting later to maint).
 263
 264 * The emulated "yes" command used in our test scripts has been
 265   tweaked not to spend too much time generating unnecessary output
 266   that is not used, to help those who test on Windows where it would
 267   not stop until it fills the pipe buffer due to lack of SIGPIPE.
 268   (merge 6129c93 js/test-lib-windows-emulated-yes later to maint).
 269
 270 * Other minor clean-ups and documentation updates
 271   (merge 99487cf ss/user-manual later to maint).
 272   (merge e914ef0 ew/for-each-ref-doc later to maint).
 273   (merge 36fc7d8 sg/t6050-failing-editor-test-fix later to maint).
 274   (merge 60253a6 ss/clone-depth-single-doc later to maint).
 275   (merge bd02e97 lv/add-doc-working-tree later to maint).