1Git 2.9 Release Notes 2===================== 3 4Backward compatibility notes 5---------------------------- 6 7The end-user facing Porcelain level commands in the "git diff" and 8"git log" family by default enable the rename detection; you can still 9use "diff.renames" configuration variable to disable this. 10 11Merging two branches that have no common ancestor with "git merge" is 12by default forbidden now to prevent creating such an unusual merge by 13mistake. 14 15The output formats of "git log" that indents the commit log message by 164 spaces now expands HT in the log message by default. You can use 17the "--no-expand-tabs" option to disable this. 18 19"git commit-tree" plumbing command required the user to always sign 20its result when the user sets the commit.gpgsign configuration 21variable, which was an ancient mistake, which this release corrects. 22A script that drives commit-tree, if it relies on this mistake, now 23needs to read commit.gpgsign and pass the -S option as necessary. 24 25 26Updates since v2.8 27------------------ 28 29UI, Workflows & Features 30 31 * Comes with git-multimail 1.3.1 (in contrib/). 32 33 * The end-user facing commands like "git diff" and "git log" 34 now enable the rename detection by default. 35 36 * The credential.helper configuration variable is cumulative and 37 there is no good way to override it from the command line. As 38 a special case, giving an empty string as its value now serves 39 as the signal to clear the values specified in various files. 40 41 * A new "interactive.diffFilter" configuration can be used to 42 customize the diff shown in "git add -i" sessions. 43 44 * "git p4" now allows P4 author names to be mapped to Git author 45 names. 46 47 * "git rebase -x" can be used without passing "-i" option. 48 49 * "git -c credential.<var>=<value> submodule" can now be used to 50 propagate configuration variables related to credential helper 51 down to the submodules. 52 53 * "git tag" can create an annotated tag without explicitly given an 54 "-a" (or "-s") option (i.e. when a tag message is given). A new 55 configuration variable, tag.forceSignAnnotated, can be used to tell 56 the command to create signed tag in such a situation. 57 58 * "git merge" used to allow merging two branches that have no common 59 base by default, which led to a brand new history of an existing 60 project created and then get pulled by an unsuspecting maintainer, 61 which allowed an unnecessary parallel history merged into the 62 existing project. The command has been taught not to allow this by 63 default, with an escape hatch "--allow-unrelated-histories" option 64 to be used in a rare event that merges histories of two projects 65 that started their lives independently. 66 67 * "git pull" has been taught to pass the "--allow-unrelated-histories" 68 option to underlying "git merge". 69 70 * "git apply -v" learned to report paths in the patch that were 71 skipped via --include/--exclude mechanism or being outside the 72 current working directory. 73 74 * Shell completion (in contrib/) updates. 75 76 * The commit object name reported when "rebase -i" stops has been 77 shortened. 78 79 * "git worktree add" can be given "--no-checkout" option to only 80 create an empty worktree without checking out the files. 81 82 * "git mergetools" learned to drive ExamDiff. 83 84 * "git pull --rebase" learned "--[no-]autostash" option, so that 85 the rebase.autostash configuration variable set to true can be 86 overridden from the command line. 87 88 * When "git log" shows the log message indented by 4-spaces, the 89 remainder of a line after a HT does not align in the way the author 90 originally intended. The command now expands tabs by default to help 91 such a case, and allows the users to override it with a new option, 92 "--no-expand-tabs". 93 94 * "git send-email" now uses a more readable timestamps when 95 formulating a message ID. 96 97 * "git rerere" can encounter two or more files with the same conflict 98 signature that have to be resolved in different ways, but there was 99 no way to record these separate resolutions. 100 101 * "git p4" learned to record P4 jobs in Git commit that imports from 102 the history in Perforce. 103 104 * "git describe --contains" often made a hard-to-justify choice of 105 tag to name a given commit, because it tried to come up 106 with a name with smallest number of hops from a tag, causing an old 107 commit whose close descendant that is recently tagged were not 108 described with respect to an old tag but with a newer tag. It did 109 not help that its computation of "hop" count was further tweaked to 110 penalize being on a side branch of a merge. The logic has been 111 updated to favor using the tag with the oldest tagger date, which 112 is a lot easier to explain to the end users: "We describe a commit 113 in terms of the (chronologically) oldest tag that contains the 114 commit." 115 116 * "git clone" learned the "--shallow-submodules" option. 117 118 * HTTP transport clients learned to throw extra HTTP headers at the 119 server, specified via http.extraHeader configuration variable. 120 121 * The "--compaction-heuristic" option to "git diff" family of 122 commands enables a heuristic to make the patch output more readable 123 by using a blank line as a strong hint that the contents before and 124 after it belong to logically separate units. It is still 125 experimental. 126 127 * A new configuration variable core.hooksPath allows customizing 128 where the hook directory is. 129 130 * An earlier addition of "sanitize_submodule_env" with 14111fc4 (git: 131 submodule honor -c credential.* from command line, 2016-02-29) 132 turned out to be a convoluted no-op; implement what it wanted to do 133 correctly, and stop filtering settings given via "git -c var=val". 134 135 * "git commit --dry-run" reported "No, no, you cannot commit." in one 136 case where "git commit" would have allowed you to commit, and this 137 improves it a little bit ("git commit --dry-run --short" still does 138 not give you the correct answer, for example). This is a stop-gap 139 measure in that "commit --short --dry-run" still gives an incorrect 140 result. 141 142 * The experimental "multiple worktree" feature gains more safety to 143 forbid operations on a branch that is checked out or being actively 144 worked on elsewhere, by noticing that e.g. it is being rebased. 145 146 * "git format-patch" learned a new "--base" option to record what 147 (public, well-known) commit the original series was built on in 148 its output. 149 150 * "git commit" learned to pay attention to the "commit.verbose" 151 configuration variable and act as if the "--verbose" option 152 was given from the command line. 153 154 * Updated documentation gives hints to GMail users with two-factor 155 auth enabled that they need app-specific-password when using 156 "git send-email". 157 158 * The manpage output of our documentation did not render well in 159 terminal; typeset literals in bold by default to make them stand 160 out more. 161 162 * The mark-up in the top-level README.md file has been updated to 163 typeset CLI command names differently from the body text. 164 165 166Performance, Internal Implementation, Development Support etc. 167 168 * The embedded args argv-array in the child process is used to build 169 the command line to run pack-objects instead of using a separate 170 array of strings. 171 172 * A test for tags has been restructured so that more parts of it can 173 easily be run on a platform without a working GnuPG. 174 175 * The startup_info data, which records if we are working inside a 176 repository (among other things), are now uniformly available to Git 177 subcommand implementations, and Git avoids attempting to touch 178 references when we are not in a repository. 179 180 * The command line argument parser for "receive-pack" has been 181 rewritten to use parse-options. 182 183 * A major part of "git submodule update" has been ported to C to take 184 advantage of the recently added framework to run download tasks in 185 parallel. Other updates to "git submodule" that move pieces of 186 logic to C continues. 187 188 * Rename bunch of tests on "git clone" for better organization. 189 190 * The tests that involve running httpd leaked the system-wide 191 configuration in /etc/gitconfig to the tested environment. 192 193 * Build updates for MSVC. 194 195 * The repository set-up sequence has been streamlined (the biggest 196 change is that there is no longer git_config_early()), so that we 197 do not attempt to look into refs/* when we know we do not have a 198 Git repository. 199 200 * Code restructuring around the "refs" API to prepare for pluggable 201 refs backends. 202 203 * Sources to many test helper binaries and the generated helpers 204 have been moved to t/helper/ subdirectory to reduce clutter at the 205 top level of the tree. 206 207 * Unify internal logic between "git tag -v" and "git verify-tag" 208 commands by making one directly call into the other. 209 210 * "merge-recursive" strategy incorrectly checked if a path that is 211 involved in its internal merge exists in the working tree. 212 213 * The test scripts for "git p4" (but not "git p4" implementation 214 itself) has been updated so that they would work even on a system 215 where the installed version of Python is python 3. 216 217 * As nobody maintains our in-tree git.spec.in and distros use their 218 own spec file, we stopped pretending that we support "make rpm". 219 220 * Move from "unsigned char[20]" to "struct object_id" continues. 221 222 * The code for warning_errno/die_errno has been refactored and a new 223 error_errno() reporting helper is introduced. 224 (merge 1da045f nd/error-errno later to maint). 225 226 * Running tests with '-x' option to trace the individual command 227 executions is a useful way to debug test scripts, but some tests 228 that capture the standard error stream and check what the command 229 said can be broken with the trace output mixed in. When running 230 our tests under "bash", however, we can redirect the trace output 231 to another file descriptor to keep the standard error of programs 232 being tested intact. 233 234 * t0040 had too many unnecessary repetitions in its test data. Teach 235 test-parse-options program so that a caller can tell what it 236 expects in its output, so that these repetitions can be cleaned up. 237 238 * Add perf test for "rebase -i". 239 240 * Common mistakes when writing gitlink: in our documentation are 241 found by "make check-docs". 242 243 * t9xxx series has been updated primarily for readability, while 244 fixing small bugs in it. A few scripted Porcelain commands have 245 also been updated to fix possible bugs around their use of 246 "test -z" and "test -n". 247 248 * CI test was taught to run git-svn tests. 249 250 * "git cat-file --batch-all" has been sped up, by taking advantage 251 of the fact that it does not have to read a list of objects, in two 252 ways. 253 254 * test updates to make it more readable and maintainable. 255 (merge e6273f4 es/t1500-modernize later to maint). 256 257 * "make DEVELOPER=1" worked as expected; setting DEVELOPER=1 in 258 config.mak didn't. 259 (merge 51dd3e8 mm/makefile-developer-can-be-in-config-mak later to maint). 260 261 * The way how "submodule--helper list" signals unmatch error to its 262 callers has been updated. 263 264 * A bash-ism "local" has been removed from "git submodule" scripted 265 Porcelain. 266 267 268Also contains various documentation updates and code clean-ups. 269 270 271Fixes since v2.8 272---------------- 273 274Unless otherwise noted, all the fixes since v2.8 in the maintenance 275track are contained in this release (see the maintenance releases' 276notes for details). 277 278 * "git config --get-urlmatch", unlike other variants of the "git 279 config --get" family, did not signal error with its exit status 280 when there was no matching configuration. 281 282 * The "--local-env-vars" and "--resolve-git-dir" options of "git 283 rev-parse" failed to work outside a repository when the command's 284 option parsing was rewritten in 1.8.5 era. 285 286 * "git index-pack --keep[=<msg>] pack-$name.pack" simply did not work. 287 288 * Fetching of history by naming a commit object name directly didn't 289 work across remote-curl transport. 290 291 * A small memory leak in an error codepath has been plugged in xdiff 292 code. 293 294 * strbuf_getwholeline() did not NUL-terminate the buffer on certain 295 corner cases in its error codepath. 296 297 * "git mergetool" did not work well with conflicts that both sides 298 deleted. 299 300 * "git send-email" had trouble parsing alias file in mailrc format 301 when lines in it had trailing whitespaces on them. 302 303 * When "git merge --squash" stopped due to conflict, the concluding 304 "git commit" failed to read in the SQUASH_MSG that shows the log 305 messages from all the squashed commits. 306 307 * "git merge FETCH_HEAD" dereferenced NULL pointer when merging 308 nothing into an unborn history (which is arguably unusual usage, 309 which perhaps was the reason why nobody noticed it). 310 311 * When "git worktree" feature is in use, "git branch -d" allowed 312 deletion of a branch that is checked out in another worktree, 313 which was wrong. 314 315 * When "git worktree" feature is in use, "git branch -m" renamed a 316 branch that is checked out in another worktree without adjusting 317 the HEAD symbolic ref for the worktree. 318 319 * "git diff -M" used to work better when two originally identical 320 files A and B got renamed to X/A and X/B by pairing A to X/A and B 321 to X/B, but this was broken in the 2.0 timeframe. 322 323 * "git send-pack --all <there>" was broken when its command line 324 option parsing was written in the 2.6 timeframe. 325 326 * "git format-patch --help" showed `-s` and `--no-patch` as if these 327 are valid options to the command. We already hide `--patch` option 328 from the documentation, because format-patch is about showing the 329 diff, and the documentation now hides these options as well. 330 331 * When running "git blame $path" with unnormalized data in the index 332 for the path, the data in the working tree was blamed, even though 333 "git add" would not have changed what is already in the index, due 334 to "safe crlf" that disables the line-end conversion. It has been 335 corrected. 336 337 * A change back in version 2.7 to "git branch" broke display of a 338 symbolic ref in a non-standard place in the refs/ hierarchy (we 339 expect symbolic refs to appear in refs/remotes/*/HEAD to point at 340 the primary branch the remote has, and as .git/HEAD to point at the 341 branch we locally checked out). 342 343 * A partial rewrite of "git submodule" in the 2.7 timeframe changed 344 the way the gitdir: pointer in the submodules point at the real 345 repository location to use absolute paths by accident. This has 346 been corrected. 347 348 * "git commit" misbehaved in a few minor ways when an empty message 349 is given via -m '', all of which has been corrected. 350 351 * Support for CRAM-MD5 authentication method in "git imap-send" did 352 not work well. 353 354 * Upcoming OpenSSL 1.1.0 will break compilation by updating a few API 355 elements we use in imap-send, which has been adjusted for the change. 356 357 * The socks5:// proxy support added back in 2.6.4 days was not aware 358 that socks5h:// proxies behave differently from socks5:// proxies. 359 360 * "git config" had a codepath that tried to pass a NULL to 361 printf("%s"), which nobody seems to have noticed. 362 363 * On Cygwin, object creation uses the "create a temporary and then 364 rename it to the final name" pattern, not "create a temporary, 365 hardlink it to the final name and then unlink the temporary" 366 pattern. 367 368 This is necessary to use Git on Windows shared directories, and is 369 already enabled for the MinGW and plain Windows builds. It also 370 has been used in Cygwin packaged versions of Git for quite a while. 371 See http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/291853 372 373 * "merge-octopus" strategy did not ensure that the index is clean 374 when merge begins. 375 376 * When "git merge" notices that the merge can be resolved purely at 377 the tree level (without having to merge blobs) and the resulting 378 tree happens to already exist in the object store, it forgot to 379 update the index, which left an inconsistent state that would 380 break later operations. 381 382 * "git submodule" reports the paths of submodules the command 383 recurses into, but these paths were incorrectly reported when 384 the command was not run from the root level of the superproject. 385 386 * The "user.useConfigOnly" configuration variable makes it an error 387 if users do not explicitly set user.name and user.email. However, 388 its check was not done early enough and allowed another error to 389 trigger, reporting that the default value we guessed from the 390 system setting was unusable. This was a suboptimal end-user 391 experience as we want the users to set user.name/user.email without 392 relying on the auto-detection at all. 393 394 * "git mv old new" did not adjust the path for a submodule that lives 395 as a subdirectory inside old/ directory correctly. 396 397 * "git replace -e" did not honour "core.editor" configuration. 398 399 * "git push" from a corrupt repository that attempts to push a large 400 number of refs deadlocked; the thread to relay rejection notices 401 for these ref updates blocked on writing them to the main thread, 402 after the main thread at the receiving end notices that the push 403 failed and decides not to read these notices and return a failure. 404 405 * mmap emulation on Windows has been optimized and work better without 406 consuming paging store when not needed. 407 408 * A question by "git send-email" to ask the identity of the sender 409 has been updated. 410 411 * UI consistency improvements for "git mergetool". 412 413 * "git rebase -m" could be asked to rebase an entire branch starting 414 from the root, but failed by assuming that there always is a parent 415 commit to the first commit on the branch. 416 417 * Fix a broken "p4 lfs" test. 418 419 * Recent update to Git LFS broke "git p4" by changing the output from 420 its "lfs pointer" subcommand. 421 422 * "git fetch" test t5510 was flaky while running a (forced) automagic 423 garbage collection. 424 425 * Documentation updates to help contributors setting up Travis CI 426 test for their patches. 427 428 * Some multi-byte encoding can have a backslash byte as a later part 429 of one letter, which would confuse "highlight" filter used in 430 gitweb. 431 432 * "git commit-tree" plumbing command required the user to always sign 433 its result when the user sets the commit.gpgsign configuration 434 variable, which was an ancient mistake. Rework "git rebase" that 435 relied on this mistake so that it reads commit.gpgsign and pass (or 436 not pass) the -S option to "git commit-tree" to keep the end-user 437 expectation the same, while teaching "git commit-tree" to ignore 438 the configuration variable. This will stop requiring the users to 439 sign commit objects used internally as an implementation detail of 440 "git stash". 441 442 * "http.cookieFile" configuration variable clearly wants a pathname, 443 but we forgot to treat it as such by e.g. applying tilde expansion. 444 445 * Consolidate description of tilde-expansion that is done to 446 configuration variables that take pathname to a single place. 447 448 * Correct faulty recommendation to use "git submodule deinit ." when 449 de-initialising all submodules, which would result in a strange 450 error message in a pathological corner case. 451 452 * Many 'linkgit:<git documentation page>' references were broken, 453 which are all fixed with this. 454 455 * "git rerere" can get confused by conflict markers deliberately left 456 by the inner merge step, because they are indistinguishable from 457 the real conflict markers left by the outermost merge which are 458 what the end user and "rerere" need to look at. This was fixed by 459 making the conflict markers left by the inner merges a bit longer. 460 (merge 0f9fd5c jc/ll-merge-internal later to maint). 461 462 * CI test was taught to build documentation pages. 463 464 * "git fsck" learned to catch NUL byte in a commit object as 465 potential error and warn. 466 467 * Portability enhancement for "rebase -i" to help platforms whose 468 shell does not like "for i in <empty>" (which is not POSIX-kosher). 469 470 * On Windows, .git and optionally any files whose name starts with a 471 dot are now marked as hidden, with a core.hideDotFiles knob to 472 customize this behaviour. 473 474 * Documentation for "git merge --verify-signatures" has been updated 475 to clarify that the signature of only the commit at the tip is 476 verified. Also the phrasing used for signature and key validity is 477 adjusted to align with that used by OpenPGP. 478 479 * A couple of bugs around core.autocrlf have been fixed. 480 481 * Many commands normalize command line arguments from NFD to NFC 482 variant of UTF-8 on OSX, but commands in the "diff" family did 483 not, causing "git diff $path" to complain that no such path is 484 known to Git. They have been taught to do the normalization. 485 486 * "git difftool" learned to handle unmerged paths correctly in 487 dir-diff mode. 488 489 * The "are we talking with TTY, doing an interactive session?" 490 detection has been updated to work better for "Git for Windows". 491 492 * We forgot to add "git log --decorate=auto" to documentation when we 493 added the feature back in v2.1.0 timeframe. 494 (merge 462cbb4 rj/log-decorate-auto later to maint). 495 496 * "git fast-import --export-marks" would overwrite the existing marks 497 file even when it makes a dump from its custom die routine. 498 Prevent it from doing so when we have an import-marks file but 499 haven't finished reading it. 500 (merge f4beed6 fc/fast-import-broken-marks-file later to maint). 501 502 * "git rebase -i", after it fails to auto-resolve the conflict, had 503 an unnecessary call to "git rerere" from its very early days, which 504 was spotted recently; the call has been removed. 505 (merge 7063693 js/rebase-i-dedup-call-to-rerere later to maint). 506 507 * Other minor clean-ups and documentation updates 508 (merge cd82b7a pa/cherry-pick-doc-typo later to maint). 509 (merge 2bb73ae rs/patch-id-use-skip-prefix later to maint). 510 (merge aa20cbc rs/apply-name-terminate later to maint). 511 (merge fe17fc0 jc/t2300-setup later to maint). 512 (merge e256eec jk/shell-portability later to maint).