Documentation / RelNotes / 2.2.0.txton commit Merge branch 'maint' (a9583af)
   1Git v2.2 Release Notes
   2======================
   3
   4Updates since v2.1
   5------------------
   6
   7Ports
   8
   9 * Building on older MacOS X systems automatically sets
  10   the necessary NO_APPLE_COMMON_CRYPTO build-time option.
  11
  12
  13UI, Workflows & Features
  14
  15 * "git config --edit --global" starts from a skeletal per-user
  16   configuration file contents, instead of a total blank, when the
  17   user does not already have any.  This immediately reduces the
  18   need for a later "Have you forgotten setting core.user?" and we
  19   can add more to the template as we gain more experience.
  20
  21 * "git stash list -p" used to be almost always a no-op because each
  22   stash entry is represented as a merge commit.  It learned to show
  23   the difference between the base commit version and the working tree
  24   version, which is in line with what "git show" gives.
  25
  26 * Sometimes users want to report a bug they experience on their
  27   repository, but they are not at liberty to share the contents of
  28   the repository.  "fast-export" was taught an "--anonymize" option
  29   to replace blob contents, names of people and paths and log
  30   messages with bland and simple strings to help them.
  31
  32 * "log --date=iso" uses a slight variant of ISO 8601 format that is
  33   made more human readable.  A new "--date=iso-strict" option gives
  34   datetime output that is more strictly conformant.
  35
  36 * A broken reimplementation of Git could write an invalid index that
  37   records both stage #0 and higher stage entries for the same path.
  38   We now notice and reject such an index, as there is no sensible
  39   fallback (we do not know if the broken tool wanted to resolve and
  40   forgot to remove higher stage entries, or if it wanted to unresolve
  41   and forgot to remove the stage#0 entry).
  42
  43 * The "pre-receive" and "post-receive" hooks are no longer required
  44   to consume their input fully (not following this requirement used
  45   to result in intermittent errors in "git push").
  46
  47
  48Performance, Internal Implementation, etc.
  49
  50 * The API to manipulate the "refs" is currently undergoing a revamp
  51   to make it more transactional, with the eventual goal to allow
  52   all-or-none atomic updates and migrating the storage to something
  53   other than the traditional filesystem based one (e.g. databases).
  54
  55 * We no longer attempt to keep track of individual dependencies to
  56   the header files in the build procedure, relying on automated
  57   dependency generation support from modern compilers.
  58
  59 * In tests, we have been using NOT_{MINGW,CYGWIN} test prerequisites
  60   long before negated prerequisites e.g. !MINGW were invented.
  61   The former has been converted to the latter to avoid confusion.
  62
  63 * Looking up remotes configuration in a repository with very many
  64   remotes defined has been optimized.
  65
  66 * There are cases where you lock and open to write a file, close it
  67   to show the updated contents to external processes, and then have
  68   to update the file again while still holding the lock, but the
  69   lockfile API lacked support for such an access pattern.
  70
  71 * The API to allocate the structure to keep track of commit
  72   decoration has been updated to make it less cumbersome to use.
  73
  74 * An in-core caching layer to let us avoid reading the same
  75   configuration files number of times has been added.  A few commands
  76   have been converted to use this subsystem.
  77
  78 * Various code paths have been cleaned up and simplified by using
  79   "strbuf", "starts_with()", and "skip_prefix()" APIs more.
  80
  81 * A few codepaths that died when large blobs that would not fit in
  82   core are involved in their operation have been taught to punt
  83   instead, by e.g. marking too large a blob as not to be diffed.
  84
  85 * A few more code paths in "commit" and "checkout" have been taught
  86   to repopulate the cache-tree in the index, to help speed up later
  87   "write-tree" (used in "commit") and "diff-index --cached" (used in
  88   "status").
  89
  90 * A common programming mistake to assign the same short option name
  91   to two separate options is detected by parse_options() API to help
  92   developers.
  93
  94 * The code path to write out the packed-refs file has been optimized,
  95   which especially matters in a repository with a large number of
  96   refs.
  97
  98 * The check to see if a ref $F can be created by making sure no
  99   existing ref has $F/ as its prefix has been optimized, which
 100   especially matters in a repository with a large number of existing
 101   refs.
 102
 103 * "git fsck" was taught to check contents of tag objects a bit more.
 104
 105 * "git hash-object" was taught a "--literally" option to help
 106   debugging.
 107
 108
 109Also contains various documentation updates and code clean-ups.
 110
 111
 112Fixes since v2.1
 113----------------
 114
 115Unless otherwise noted, all the fixes since v2.1 in the maintenance
 116track are contained in this release (see the maintenance releases'
 117notes for details).
 118
 119 * "git log --pretty/format=" with an empty format string did not
 120   mean the more obvious "No output whatsoever" but "Use default
 121   format", which was counterintuitive.
 122
 123 * Implementations of "tar" that do not understand an extended pax
 124   header would extract the contents of it in a regular file; make
 125   sure the permission bits of this file follows the same tar.umask
 126   configuration setting.
 127
 128 * "git -c section.var command" and "git -c section.var= command"
 129   should pass the configuration differently (the former should be a
 130   boolean true, the latter should be an empty string).
 131
 132 * Applying a patch not generated by Git in a subdirectory used to
 133   check the whitespace breakage using the attributes for incorrect
 134   paths. Also whitespace checks were performed even for paths
 135   excluded via "git apply --exclude=<path>" mechanism.
 136
 137 * "git bundle create" with date-range specification were meant to
 138   exclude tags outside the range, but it didn't.
 139
 140 * "git add x" where x that used to be a directory has become a
 141   symbolic link to a directory misbehaved.
 142
 143 * The prompt script checked $GIT_DIR/ref/stash file to see if there
 144   is a stash, which was a no-no.
 145
 146 * Pack-protocol documentation had a minor typo.
 147
 148 * "git checkout -m" did not switch to another branch while carrying
 149   the local changes forward when a path was deleted from the index.
 150
 151 * With sufficiently long refnames, "git fast-import" could have
 152   overflown an on-stack buffer.
 153
 154 * After "pack-refs --prune" packed refs at the top-level, it failed
 155   to prune them.
 156
 157 * Progress output from "git gc --auto" was visible in "git fetch -q".
 158
 159 * We used to pass -1000 to poll(2), expecting it to also mean "no
 160   timeout", which should be spelled as -1.
 161
 162 * "git rebase" documentation was unclear that it is required to
 163   specify on what <upstream> the rebase is to be done when telling it
 164   to first check out <branch>.
 165   (merge 95c6826 so/rebase-doc later to maint).
 166
 167 * "git push" over HTTP transport had an artificial limit on number of
 168   refs that can be pushed imposed by the command line length.
 169   (merge 26be19b jk/send-pack-many-refspecs later to maint).
 170
 171 * When receiving an invalid pack stream that records the same object
 172   twice, multiple threads got confused due to a race.
 173   (merge ab791dd jk/index-pack-threading-races later to maint).
 174
 175 * An attempt to remove the entire tree in the "git fast-import" input
 176   stream caused it to misbehave.
 177   (merge 2668d69 mb/fast-import-delete-root later to maint).
 178
 179 * Reachability check (used in "git prune" and friends) did not add a
 180   detached HEAD as a starting point to traverse objects still in use.
 181   (merge c40fdd0 mk/reachable-protect-detached-head later to maint).
 182
 183 * "git config --add section.var val" used to lose existing
 184   section.var whose value was an empty string.
 185   (merge c1063be ta/config-add-to-empty-or-true-fix later to maint).
 186
 187 * "git fsck" failed to report that it found corrupt objects via its
 188   exit status in some cases.
 189   (merge 30d1038 jk/fsck-exit-code-fix later to maint).
 190
 191 * Use of "--verbose" option used to break "git branch --merged".
 192   (merge 12994dd jk/maint-branch-verbose-merged later to maint).