Documentation / RelNotes / 2.13.0.txton commit Merge branch 'jk/prefix-filename' (a026bde)
   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 * The default location "~/.git-credential-cache/socket" for the
  19   socket used to communicate with the credential-cache daemon has
  20   been moved to "~/.cache/git/credential/socket".
  21
  22
  23Updates since v2.12
  24-------------------
  25
  26UI, Workflows & Features
  27
  28 * "git describe" and "git name-rev" have been taught to take more
  29   than one refname patterns to restrict the set of refs to base their
  30   naming output on, and also learned to take negative patterns to
  31   name refs not to be used for naming via their "--exclude" option.
  32
  33 * Deletion of a branch "foo/bar" could remove .git/refs/heads/foo
  34   once there no longer is any other branch whose name begins with
  35   "foo/", but we didn't do so so far.  Now we do.
  36
  37 * When "git merge" detects a path that is renamed in one history
  38   while the other history deleted (or modified) it, it now reports
  39   both paths to help the user understand what is going on in the two
  40   histories being merged.
  41
  42 * The <url> part in "http.<url>.<variable>" configuration variable
  43   can now be spelled with '*' that serves as wildcard.
  44   E.g. "http.https://*.example.com.proxy" can be used to specify the
  45   proxy used for https://a.example.com, https://b.example.com, etc.,
  46   i.e. any host in the example.com domain.
  47
  48 * "git tag" did not leave useful message when adding a new entry to
  49   reflog; this was left unnoticed for a long time because refs/tags/*
  50   doesn't keep reflog by default.
  51
  52 * The "negative" pathspec feature was somewhat more cumbersome to use
  53   than necessary in that its short-hand used "!" which needed to be
  54   escaped from shells, and it required "exclude from what?" specified.
  55
  56 * The command line options for ssh invocation needs to be tweaked for
  57   some implementations of SSH (e.g. PuTTY plink wants "-P <port>"
  58   while OpenSSH wants "-p <port>" to specify port to connect to), and
  59   the variant was guessed when GIT_SSH environment variable is used
  60   to specify it.  The logic to guess now applies to the command
  61   specified by the newer GIT_SSH_COMMAND and also core.sshcommand
  62   configuration variable, and comes with an escape hatch for users to
  63   deal with misdetected cases.
  64
  65 * The "--git-path", "--git-common-dir", and "--shared-index-path"
  66   options of "git rev-parse" did not produce usable output.  They are
  67   now updated to show the path to the correct file, relative to where
  68   the caller is.
  69
  70 * "git diff -W" has been taught to handle the case where a new
  71   function is added at the end of the file better.
  72
  73 * "git update-ref -d" and other operations to delete references did
  74   not leave any entry in HEAD's reflog when the reference being
  75   deleted was the current branch.  This is not a problem in practice
  76   because you do not want to delete the branch you are currently on,
  77   but caused renaming of the current branch to something else not to
  78   be logged in a useful way.
  79
  80 * "Cc:" on the trailer part does not have to conform to RFC strictly,
  81   unlike in the e-mail header.  "git send-email" has been updated to
  82   ignore anything after '>' when picking addresses, to allow non-address
  83   cruft like " # stable 4.4" after the address.
  84
  85 * When "git submodule init" decides that the submodule in the working
  86   tree is its upstream, it now gives a warning as it is not a very
  87   common setup.
  88   (merge d1b3b81aab sb/submodule-init-url-selection later to maint).
  89
  90 * "git stash save" takes a pathspec so that the local changes can be
  91   stashed away only partially.
  92   (merge 9e140909f6 tg/stash-push later to maint).
  93
  94 * Documentation for "git ls-files" did not refer to core.quotePath.
  95
  96 * The experimental "split index" feature has gained a few
  97   configuration variables to make it easier to use.
  98
  99 * From a working tree of a repository, a new option of "rev-parse"
 100   lets you ask if the repository is used as a submodule of another
 101   project, and where the root level of the working tree of that
 102   project (i.e. your superproject) is.
 103
 104 * The pathspec mechanism learned to further limit the paths that
 105   match the pattern to those that have specified attributes attached
 106   via the gitattributes mechanism.
 107
 108 * Our source code has used the SHA1_HEADER cpp macro after "#include"
 109   in the C code to switch among the SHA-1 implementations. Instead,
 110   list the exact header file names and switch among implementations
 111   using "#ifdef BLK_SHA1/#include "block-sha1/sha1.h"/.../#endif";
 112   this helps some IDE tools.
 113
 114 * The start-up sequence of "git" needs to figure out some configured
 115   settings before it finds and set itself up in the location of the
 116   repository and was quite messy due to its "chicken-and-egg" nature.
 117   The code has been restructured.
 118
 119 * The command line prompt (in contrib/) learned a new 'tag' style
 120   that can be specified with GIT_PS1_DESCRIBE_STYLE, to describe a
 121   detached HEAD with "git describe --tags".
 122
 123 * The configuration file learned a new "includeIf.<condition>.path"
 124   that includes the contents of the given path only when the
 125   condition holds.  This allows you to say "include this work-related
 126   bit only in the repositories under my ~/work/ directory".
 127
 128 * Recent update to "rebase -i" started showing a message that is not
 129   a warning with "warning:" prefix by mistake.  This has been fixed.
 130
 131
 132Performance, Internal Implementation, Development Support etc.
 133
 134 * The code to list branches in "git branch" has been consolidated
 135   with the more generic ref-filter API.
 136
 137 * Resource usage while enumerating refs from alternate object store
 138   has been optimized to help receiving end of "push" that hosts a
 139   repository with many "forks".
 140
 141 * The gitattributes machinery is being taught to work better in a
 142   multi-threaded environment.
 143
 144 * "git rebase -i" starts using the recently updated "sequencer" code.
 145
 146 * Code and design clean-up for the refs API.
 147
 148 * The preload-index code has been taught not to bother with the index
 149   entries that are paths that are not checked out by "sparse checkout".
 150
 151 * Some warning() messages from "git clean" were updated to show the
 152   errno from failed system calls.
 153
 154 * The "parse_config_key()" API function has been cleaned up.
 155   (merge ad8c7cdadd jk/parse-config-key-cleanup later to maint).
 156
 157 * A test that creates a confusing branch whose name is HEAD has been
 158   corrected not to do so.
 159
 160 * The code that parses header fields in the commit object has been
 161   updated for (micro)performance and code hygiene.
 162
 163 * An helper function to make it easier to append the result from
 164   real_path() to a strbuf has been added.
 165   (merge 33ad9ddd0b rs/strbuf-add-real-path later to maint).
 166
 167 * Reduce authentication round-trip over HTTP when the server supports
 168   just a single authentication method.  This also improves the
 169   behaviour when Git is misconfigured to enable http.emptyAuth
 170   against a server that does not authenticate without a username
 171   (i.e. not using Kerberos etc., which makes http.emptyAuth
 172   pointless).
 173
 174 * Windows port wants to use OpenSSL's implementation of SHA-1
 175   routines, so let them.
 176
 177 * The t/perf performance test suite was not prepared to test not so
 178   old versions of Git, but now it covers versions of Git that are not
 179   so ancient.
 180   (merge 28e1fb5466 jt/perf-updates later to maint).
 181
 182 * Add 32-bit Linux variant to the set of platforms to be tested with
 183   Travis CI.
 184
 185 * "git branch --list" takes the "--abbrev" and "--no-abbrev" options
 186   to control the output of the object name in its "-v"(erbose)
 187   output, but a recent update started ignoring them; fix it before
 188   the breakage reaches to any released version.
 189
 190 * Picking two versions of Git and running tests to make sure the
 191   older one and the newer one interoperate happily has now become
 192   possible.
 193   (merge bd4d9d993c jk/interop-test later to maint).
 194
 195 * "uchar [40]" to "struct object_id" conversion continues.
 196
 197 * "git tag --contains" used to (ab)use the object bits to keep track
 198   of the state of object reachability without clearing them after
 199   use; this has been cleaned up and made to use the newer commit-slab
 200   facility.
 201
 202 * The "debug" helper used in the test framework learned to run
 203   a command under "gdb" interactively.
 204   (merge 59210dd56c sg/test-with-stdin later to maint).
 205
 206 * The "detect attempt to create collisions" variant of SHA-1
 207   implementation by Marc Stevens (CWI) and Dan Shumow (Microsoft)
 208   has been integrated and made the default.
 209
 210Also contains various documentation updates and code clean-ups.
 211
 212
 213Fixes since v2.12
 214-----------------
 215
 216Unless otherwise noted, all the fixes since v2.12 in the maintenance
 217track are contained in this release (see the maintenance releases'
 218notes for details).
 219
 220 * "git repack --depth=<n>" for a long time busted the specified depth
 221   when reusing delta from existing packs.  This has been corrected.
 222   (merge 42b766d765 jk/delta-chain-limit later to maint).
 223
 224 * The code to parse the command line "git grep <patterns>... <rev>
 225   [[--] <pathspec>...]" has been cleaned up, and a handful of bugs
 226   have been fixed (e.g. we used to check "--" if it is a rev).
 227
 228 * "git ls-remote" and "git archive --remote" are designed to work
 229   without being in a directory under Git's control.  However, recent
 230   updates revealed that we randomly look into a directory called
 231   .git/ without actually doing necessary set-up when working in a
 232   repository.  Stop doing so.
 233
 234 * "git show-branch" expected there were only very short branch names
 235   in the repository and used a fixed-length buffer to hold them
 236   without checking for overflow.
 237
 238 * A caller of tempfile API that uses stdio interface to write to
 239   files may ignore errors while writing, which is detected when
 240   tempfile is closed (with a call to ferror()).  By that time, the
 241   original errno that may have told us what went wrong is likely to
 242   be long gone and was overwritten by an irrelevant value.
 243   close_tempfile() now resets errno to EIO to make errno at least
 244   predictable.
 245
 246 * "git remote rm X", when a branch has remote X configured as the
 247   value of its branch.*.remote, tried to remove branch.*.remote and
 248   branch.*.merge and failed if either is unset.
 249
 250 * A "gc.log" file left by a backgrounded "gc --auto" disables further
 251   automatic gc; it has been taught to run at least once a day (by
 252   default) by ignoring a stale "gc.log" file that is too old.
 253
 254 * The code to parse "git -c VAR=VAL cmd" and set configuration
 255   variable for the duration of cmd had two small bugs, which have
 256   been fixed.
 257
 258 * user.email that consists of only cruft chars should consistently
 259   error out, but didn't.
 260   (merge 94425552f3 jk/ident-empty later to maint).
 261
 262 * "git upload-pack", which is a counter-part of "git fetch", did not
 263   report a request for a ref that was not advertised as invalid.
 264   This is generally not a problem (because "git fetch" will stop
 265   before making such a request), but is the right thing to do.
 266
 267 * A leak in a codepath to read from a packed object in (rare) cases
 268   has been plugged.
 269
 270 * When a redirected http transport gets an error during the
 271   redirected request, we ignored the error we got from the server,
 272   and ended up giving a not-so-useful error message.
 273
 274 * The patch subcommand of "git add -i" was meant to have paths
 275   selection prompt just like other subcommand, unlike "git add -p"
 276   directly jumps to hunk selection.  Recently, this was broken and
 277   "add -i" lost the paths selection dialog, but it now has been
 278   fixed.
 279
 280 * Git v2.12 was shipped with an embarrassing breakage where various
 281   operations that verify paths given from the user stopped dying when
 282   seeing an issue, and instead later triggering segfault.
 283
 284 * There is no need for Python only to give a few messages to the
 285   standard error stream, but we somehow did.
 286
 287 * The code to parse "git log -L..." command line was buggy when there
 288   are many ranges specified with -L; overrun of the allocated buffer
 289   has been fixed.
 290
 291 * The command-line parsing of "git log -L" copied internal data
 292   structures using incorrect size on ILP32 systems.
 293
 294 * "git diff --quiet" relies on the size field in diff_filespec to be
 295   correctly populated, but diff_populate_filespec() helper function
 296   made an incorrect short-cut when asked only to populate the size
 297   field for paths that need to go through convert_to_git() (e.g. CRLF
 298   conversion).
 299
 300 * A few tests were run conditionally under (rare) conditions where
 301   they cannot be run (like running cvs tests under 'root' account).
 302   (merge c6507484a2 ab/cond-skip-tests later to maint).
 303
 304 * "git branch @" created refs/heads/@ as a branch, and in general the
 305   code that handled @{-1} and @{upstream} was a bit too loose in
 306   disambiguating.
 307   (merge fd4692ff70 jk/interpret-branch-name later to maint).
 308
 309 * "git fetch" that requests a commit by object name, when the other
 310   side does not allow such an request, failed without much
 311   explanation.
 312   (merge d56583ded6 mm/fetch-show-error-message-on-unadvertised-object later to maint).
 313
 314 * "git filter-branch --prune-empty" drops a single-parent commit that
 315   becomes a no-op, but did not drop a root commit whose tree is empty.
 316   (merge 32da7467eb dp/filter-branch-prune-empty later to maint).
 317
 318 * Recent versions of Git treats http alternates (used in dumb http
 319   transport) just like HTTP redirects and requires the client to
 320   enable following it, due to security concerns.  But we forgot to
 321   give a warning when we decide not to honor the alternates.
 322   (merge 5cae73d5d2 ew/http-alternates-as-redirects-warning later to maint).
 323
 324 * "git push" had a handful of codepaths that could lead to a deadlock
 325   when unexpected error happened, which has been fixed.
 326
 327 * "Dumb http" transport used to misparse a nonsense http-alternates
 328   response, which has been fixed.
 329
 330 * "git add -p <pathspec>" unnecessarily expanded the pathspec to a
 331   list of individual files that matches the pathspec by running "git
 332   ls-files <pathspec>", before feeding it to "git diff-index" to see
 333   which paths have changes, because historically the pathspec
 334   language supported by "diff-index" was weaker.  These days they are
 335   equivalent and there is no reason to internally expand it.  This
 336   helps both performance and avoids command line argument limit on
 337   some platforms.
 338   (merge 7288e12cce jk/add-i-use-pathspecs later to maint).
 339
 340 * "git status --porcelain" is supposed to give a stable output, but a
 341   few strings were left as translatable by mistake.
 342
 343 * "git revert -m 0 $merge_commit" complained that reverting a merge
 344   needs to say relative to which parent the reversion needs to
 345   happen, as if "-m 0" weren't given.  The correct diagnosis is that
 346   "-m 0" does not refer to the first parent ("-m 1" does).  This has
 347   been fixed.
 348
 349 * Code to read submodule.<name>.ignore config did not state the
 350   variable name correctly when giving an error message diagnosing
 351   misconfiguration.
 352
 353 * Fix for NO_PTHREADS build.
 354   (merge 7b91929ba0 jk/execv-dashed-external later to maint).
 355
 356 * Fix for potential segv introduced in v2.11.0 and later (also
 357   v2.10.2) to "git log --pickaxe-regex -S".
 358   (merge f53c5de29c js/regexec-buf later to maint).
 359
 360 * Other minor doc, test and build updates and code cleanups.
 361   (merge dfa3ad3238 rs/blame-code-cleanup later to maint).
 362   (merge ffddfc6328 jk/rev-parse-cleanup later to maint).
 363   (merge f20754802a jk/pack-name-cleanups later to maint).
 364   (merge d4aae459cd sb/wt-status-cleanup later to maint).
 365   (merge e94eac49e6 rs/http-push-cleanup later to maint).
 366   (merge ba6746c08f rs/path-name-safety-cleanup later to maint).
 367   (merge d41626ff9e rs/shortlog-cleanup later to maint).
 368   (merge dce96c41f9 rs/update-hook-optim later to maint).